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Voices in Urban Education

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Communities and Schools
VUE Number 23, Spring 2009

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EXCERPT:
City Schools and Civic Capacity: Another Look at Pittsburgh, Boston, and St. Louis

 By John Portz, Lana Stein, and Sabina Deitrick
John Portz is chair and professor of the political science at Northeastern University. Lana Stein is chair and professor of political science and professor of public policy administration at the University of Missouri — St. Louis. Sabina Deitrick is associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and co-director of the Urban and Regional Analysis Program of the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh.
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The variations in community involvement in Boston, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis have affected the course of education reforms in those cities.

Urban school systems face immense resource and academic challenges. One prominent approach to analyzing these challenges is the concept of “civic capacity.” As Clarence Stone (1998) writes, civic capacity “refers to the mobilization of varied stakeholders in support of a communitywide cause” (p. 15). It calls for participation and involvement of key civic players, as well as a common understanding or agreement that a particular issue is, indeed, a community problem.

Building civic capacity to improve urban education is a formidable challenge. Stakeholders from both inside and outside the school system are needed. Paul Hill and colleagues (1989) refer to a “double helix of educational reform” in which an “outer strand” of business groups, foundations, nonprofits, and elected officials is joined by an “inner strand” of administrators, teachers, and parents (p. 11).

Analyzing civic capacity became the focus of an eleven-city study in the 1990s led by Clarence Stone, Jeff Henig, and Bryan Jones. One product of that study was a book titled City Schools and City Politics: Institutions and Leadership in Pittsburgh, Boston, and St. Louis (Portz, Stein & Jones 1999). Looking over the previous decade, from the late 1980s to 1997, the book explored how each city developed – or failed to develop – civic support for public education.

Pittsburgh showed the greatest promise in terms of developing and activating civic capacity and Boston ranked as the second most successful of the three cities, while St. Louis offered the weakest case for the development of civic capacity for school reform. Where do these school systems stand today in their development of civic capacity for public education?


Three School Districts

The school systems in Boston, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis have some important similarities. As noted in Figure 1, in all three school systems, two-thirds or more of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. In addition, students of color constitute a majority in all three districts. Importantly, all three districts have experienced a decline in student enrollments in recent years.

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