Urban Education Reform: Recalibrating the Federal Role

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To meet these aims, we believe the resources furnished by ARRA should be leveraged to convert districts into organizations that function in concert with municipal agencies, cultural organizations, businesses, higher-education institutions, community-based organizations, and advocacy groups, rather than in isolation from or in opposition to this broad network of potential partners and resources. ARRA could encourage state and local education agencies to become part of what we call a smart education system by emphasizing the need for state education agencies and local education agencies to:

• maintain multiple and substantial cross-sector partnerships that provide a broad range of supports to young people and their families;

• achieve a broad set of positive outcomes – including, but not limited to academic achievement – for students, families, and communities and gather evidence of progress;

• develop indicators, measures, and processes that foster shared accountability across partner organizations and groups;

• create a systematic approach for bringing the work to scale;

• develop strategies for managing power differentials, for example by creating meaningful roles for all stakeholders and shifting partner relations away from the standard grassroots–grasstops conventions.

While ARRA is supportive of New Day for Learning and smart education system principles, they tend to be implicit rather than explicit themes in the priorities outlined in ARRA, with the exception of the call for Promise Neighborhoods. However, Promise Neighborhoods are treated more like a demonstration project than an overarching strategy for rebuilding the nation’s education system in urban areas. Elevating the conceptual underpinnings of Promise Neighborhoods from a project to a major strategy would enhance the coherence of an array of initiatives and make their whole greater than the sum of their parts. To further this aim, the Department of Education itself must also examine how to integrate and align the fragmented bevy of programs, offices, and funding streams that reinforce the programmatic divides between equity and excellence, school and after-school, school and community, pre-K and K–12, and lower– and higher–adult education. Simply saying “pre-K to 16” doesn’t create a system that makes it happen without concerted effort across the layers of institutions and agencies that support the learning and development of our nation’s children and youth.

The recent economic crisis and the pain it has brought have created a brief unity of focus. As we consider new ways to transform the nation’s economic, housing, health, transportation, and fiscal infrastructure, we must not forget the need to create a new education infrastructure as well.

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References

Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 2001. The Promise of Urban Schools: In Search of Excellence. Providence, RI: Brown University, Annenberg Institute for School Reform.