High School Redesign
VUE Number 8, Summer 2005
An interview Constancia Warren 
Audio Clip 3
Former senior program officer and director of urban high school initiatives at Carnegie Corporation of New York.
What are the challenges involved in creating and maintaining a portfolio?
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TRANSCRIPT:
Given the extent to which schools, and particularly high schools, reflect the political pressures of parents to get the best education for their children and that some parents bring to bear not only more knowledge but more power, one of the main challenges is guarding against the reassertion of privilege and inequality.
A second real challenge is political pressure about moving away from neighborhood-based schools, both because there's a common wisdom that the neighborhood school is the best school but also because the neighborhood school has also been a mechanism for advantaged parents passing on the advantages to children in the schools.
A third real challenge is the issue of how to get adequate buy-in and traction from the stakeholders. From not only students and parents, but also teachers, from teacher unions, from administrators, from community partners, to make all of this work.
Finally, there's a complicated issue around parental and social capital involved with choice. Many parents already make choices about their children's education. In some cases, they choose out of the system into private and parochial schools. But in other cases, affluent parents choose what neighborhoods to live in by the schools that are there or choose to use a phony address to go to a school in a neighborhood they can't afford to live in. But even within the existing array of choices–vocational schools, magnet programs, and charter schools–there's a fair amount of choice behavior going on. And that raises interesting questions for us to confront about the parents who are not choosing: why they are not choosing and what it will take to help them choose. I think, for many parents, more information and more support and guidance will help them make appropriate choices. But I think there also is probably a group of parents who not only lack information but lack a sense of entitlement to good education. I think we're going to need to do a lot more work and have a lot stronger community partnerships if we're going to reach those parents.
What it also means for us then is that all of the schools in the portfolio have to be excellent schools. You can't depend on parents' sending their kids to schools out of their neighborhood to get an excellent education.
Those are some of the complicated challenges of having this emerging diversity within our urban school systems. It's not something we're going to start anew–we actually already have emerging portfolios. The question right now is how we look at that emerging phenomenon and make it an intentional one and one that is guided by a set of core values.
