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Using Data for Decisions
VUE Number 18, Winter 2008
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
How Community Groups Use Data
By Seema Shah
Seema Shah is a research associate and study director at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author's biography
Data provide community organizing groups with powerful tools in their efforts to argue for educational equity and improvement.
In the late 1990s, high school student members of South Central Youth Empowered thru Action (SC-YEA), a youth organizing group in Los Angeles, initiated a campaign to protest the dearth of college preparatory courses in their South Los Angeles high schools, a dynamic they called “penitentiary tracking.” Indeed, when students from SC-YEA investigated the high school curricula, they discovered that many of their South Los Angeles high schools offered more “dead-end classes” in floor covering and cosmetology than courses in core subjects such as math and science.
These early organizing efforts led the Community Coalition, SC-YEA's parent organization, to co-convene a broad citywide coalition of more than twenty community groups. The coalition, Communities for Educational Equity (CEE), represented both African American and Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles and showed that the problems of high school rigor and college access went far beyond the schools in South Los Angeles.1 This was an issue neighborhoods and schools across the city were facing, with far-reaching implications for the social and economic livelihood of the city.
CEE's aim was ambitious — to fight for access to a college preparatory curriculum for all of Los Angeles Unified School District's high school students. Data analyses and research efforts, carried out with partners such as Education Trust West and UCLA, along with sustained community and political mobilization, were at the core of CEE's ultimate victory — a historic six-to-one school board vote in 2005 in favor of the resolution mandating a college preparatory curriculum. Explained Sandy Mendoza, director of community investment at United Way of Los Angeles and a member of CEE's steering committee:
Community Organizing Groups: A Unique Kind of Community-Based Organization
Community organizing groups such as the Community Coalition represent a unique brand of community-based organization. Rather than providing direct services or playing an advocacy role, community organizing groups make use of professional staff organizers who work with community members to build grassroots youth and adult leadership. Community members are helped to build power to alter social, economic, and educational inequities in their communities. Though community organizing groups may vary in their particular methodologies, conducting research, particularly to identify and inform reform campaigns, is an important component of the organizing cycle (Mediratta 2004).
Despite the importance of research, the complexities inherent in obtaining, cleaning, analyzing, and interpreting data often make it difficult for community organizing groups to use research. One organizing group, for instance, was originally interested in developing “report cards” for its district's schools but, ultimately, abandoned the idea. The organizer explained, “It just became too daunting to do the data collection and to figure out exactly what we're trying to do. The more we pushed it, the fuzzier we became ourselves.”
In addition to the limits of their own research capacity and expertise, organizing groups may find it difficult to access data from often-recalcitrant districts, obtain those data in a timely fashion, and get the data in an easy-to-analyze format. Despite these obstacles, community organizing groups across the country are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of data. Groups that have developed strong data analytic capacity use their analyses to illuminate educational problems and disparities, to identify programmatic and policy solutions to the problems they are surfacing, and, when necessary, to monitor implementation of enacted proposals.
How Community Organizing Groups Use Data Differently from Other Groups
While community organizing groups use data for many of the same purposes, described in the previous section, as other key constituencies such as district officials or academic researchers, three features distinguish community organizing groups from other educational stakeholders in their use of data. First, community organizing groups use data to build their credibility and political power. Second, because of their mission, community organizing groups are especially concerned with integrating data analyses with their on-the-ground knowledge of community issues. Third, community organizing groups are interested in data not “for data's sake,” but to think strategically and specifically about the ways in which data can be used as a tool to generate tangible changes in schooling practices and policies.
Building Political Power
Data users such as school districts or educational researchers inherently possess power and credibility within policy and decision-making circles. In contrast, outside constituencies, particularly those representing poor neighborhoods and communities of color, often must fight to be viewed as valued participants in the educational decision-making process. Members of Mothers on the Move in the Bronx, for example, noticed that the education concerns they raised were often construed by educators as particular problems of individual students, teachers, or principals.
The group responded with data analyses of schooling outcomes. By showing disparities in schooling outcomes across schools serving low- and high-income neighborhoods, they were able to frame their concerns in systemic terms and, thus, were able to make explicitly political arguments about resource inequities (Mediratta & Karp 2003). As Michelle Renee (2006) notes in her research, community organizing groups' increasingly sophisticated use of data not only informs their campaign strategies and demands for educational change, but also provides groups with the cachet to establish themselves as credible and legitimate stakeholders who have “done their homework.”
In Chicago, for instance, ACORN used an analysis of teacher turnover and teacher quality in their target West Side neighborhoods to garner prominent media attention and to convince senior school district officials to work with the organization to address the problem. This work ultimately positioned ACORN as a lead partner in generating solutions to the crisis in teacher turnover and teacher quality. Chicago ACORN's lead organizer, Madeline Talbott, believes that ACORN's data reports
Community organizing groups' increasingly sophisticated use of data not only informs their campaign strategies and demands for educational change, but also provides groups with the cachet to establish themselves as credible and legitimate stakeholders.
Grounding Data in Community Expertise
Whether working independently or in partnership with an outside research entity to analyze data, the role of community organizing groups is to ensure that research questions and analyses are rooted in the issues that community constituents are raising from their day-to-day experience with schools. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, executive director of the Community Coalition, explains:
An especially potent example of this comes from the recent work of Austin Interfaith (Nichols 2007). Lisa Robertson, the principal of Travis Heights Elementary School, where Austin Interfaith has worked for many years to build parent and community engagement, observed that students from two nearby housing complexes seemed to be performing differently in school. Suspecting that this was due, in part, to the differential conditions of the respective housing developments, Robertson and members of Austin Interfaith examined a series of student success indicators that compared students from the two housing developments.
Community organizing groups are often able to offer a unique perspective on the data they analyze and to present a more nuanced problem analysis.
In the preceding example, Austin Interfaith raised questions drawn from its knowledge of the community that led to new ways of looking at existing data. Yet organizing groups often lack access to key data and, as one organizer indicated, must obtain the data “guerrilla style.” While legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Freedom of Information Act stipulate public access to data and have increased access to data for community-based constituencies, community organizing groups continue to report challenges in obtaining data, particularly if the district believes the data might be used “against them” in some way.
Other times, publicly reported data may be inconsistent with the experience of community members and may not accurately reflect the reality of schooling conditions. There are politically expedient ways of computing and reporting data, evidenced by the numerous controversies around the calculation of graduation rates (Carey 2007; Hall 2005). In other cases, discrepancies between data and reality may exist simply because of a lack of clarity about reporting requirements. For instance, in Oakland, free-lunch data from some of the new small schools developed across the past decade were underreported because principals did not understand the paperwork that needed to be submitted. Other times, publicly available data may not provide enough nuanced information or may not provide the necessary insights to resolve the questions that are of deepest interest to community members.
For these reasons, community organizing groups often collect their own data. Alberto Retana, an organizer in Los Angeles, describes the dilemma:
In addition, groups are likely to arrange research meetings with key stakeholders — teachers, parents, or district officials — to gain their perspective on pressing issues. Oakland Community Organizations (OCO) identified overcrowding and its ripple effects as an issue, not just by looking at data on school utilization rates, but also by interviewing schoolteachers who complained of the difficulty of managing classrooms that were bursting at the seams and by interviewing school janitors who described the difficulty of keeping the school clean. By interviewing key stakeholders, community organizing groups are able to develop deeper and more sophisticated analyses that illuminate the consequences of common problems that might not otherwise be self-evident.
Organizing groups have also demonstrated their sophistication in using data and research to pinpoint solutions to the problems community members surface. Community organizing groups often reach out to experts in the field and conduct site visits to assess the appropriateness or viability of particular solutions for their community. Members of OCO, which pushed for and ultimately helped win a districtwide small-schools policy, visited New York City small schools with parent and school leaders as a part of its research and consulted with experts in the small-schools arena before advancing their model for small schools, which places parent and community engagement and local school autonomy at the center.
Ensuring That Data Analyses Lead to Action
Primary considerations vary for constituencies that use data. Academics may be interested in methodological issues and publishing findings in peer-reviewed journals. Districts might be concerned with demonstrating compliance through reporting frameworks. But community organizing groups use data specifically and strategically to focus attention on the educational issues facing neglected neighborhoods and populations and to demand the necessary changes. Community organizing groups use a variety of ways to ensure that data, in the end, serve as a tool to catalyze change.
By sharing data with constituents, allies, and targets, community organizing groups use data to build political and public will.
With assistance from the Annenberg Institute's Community Involvement Program, CEJ (NYCCEJ 2007) produced the report New York City's Middle-Grade Schools: Platforms for Success or Pathways to Failure? The report established links between resource inequities in New York City's middle schools, resulting in low high school graduation rates and, ultimately, poor economic and social prospects. The report, which drew considerable media attention, set out several recommendations and led New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to convene the Middle Grades Task Force. The Task Force's report, released in August 2007, ultimately resulted in the allocation of new resources to improve education in the middle grades, including a $5 million fund set aside for fifty of the city's lowest-performing middle-schools.3 Additionally, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg agreed to hire a senior administrator to oversee middle school initiatives.
CEJ, like other community organizing groups across the country, uses data as a vehicle to argue more effectively and persuasively for the changes and reforms they are advocating. As illustrated by the CEJ story and the earlier description of Community Coalition's work, community organizing groups that have built the capacity to use data have significant policy victories to show for their efforts. Of course, districts respond in a variety of ways to the data, sometimes challenging the analyses. Notes one community organizer wryly, “We can get on any Web site and we can pull all of this data together, which [the district] tends not to agree with, but guess who posts it? They do — it's their data.”
Other times, data analyses are accepted as evidence of the education problems that groups are raising but, due to political concerns or budget limitations, districts may balk at addressing the problem. In the best-case scenarios, analyses generated by organizing groups allow groups to initiate conversations about community concerns with district offices and other policy-makers that are rooted firmly in data. By grounding conversations in data, stakeholders can work toward a shared understanding of the problems facing urban schools and begin to develop meaningful collaborative relationships to solve those problems.
In Los Angeles, for instance, the passage of the school board's resolution to mandate a college preparatory curriculum for all of LAUSD's high school students led to the formation of a committee composed of community constituents and researchers from CEE, along with district administrators, to ensure the successful implementation of the resolution. Through this committee, CEE researchers and the district's research team began sharing data and discussing research questions with one another.
As both the community-based researchers and district-based researchers conducted analyses to assess what kind of supports would be necessary in each of LAUSD's high schools to implement the full college preparatory curriculum, they found they were getting disparate results because they were using different exclusion criteria in their analyses. In the end, after several weeks of trying to determine the best approach, the community-based and district-based researchers decided to report the data both ways and to discuss the implications of both sets of analyses. One community-based researcher on the committee observed:
Conclusion
The inherently political landscape of education reform requires that both school districts and community groups use data to leverage their respective positions, frequently placing them at odds with one another and making it difficult to share data or to work collaboratively on analyses. However, as the example of collaboration in Los Angeles illustrates, under the right circumstances, the efforts of school districts and community groups to work together can promote a spirit of mutual accountability, ideally leading to better informed education practice and policy.
-----------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES
1 Community Coalition, a South Los Angeles community-based organization, co-convened CEE with Alliance for a Better Community, based in East Los Angeles. Inner City Struggle was also a lead organization in the coalition.
2 The six-year study is being conducted by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, with funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Many of the quotes and examples provided in this article are drawn from the study. Additional details on the study can be found at www.annenberginstitute.org/cip/mott.html.
3 CEJ's organizing efforts resulted in the addition of one more middle school to the pool, bringing the total number of schools benefiting from the fund to fifty-one.
REFERENCES
Carey, K. 2007. The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act. Washington, DC: Education Sector.
Hall, D. 2005. Getting Honest about Grad Rates: How States Play the Numbers and Students Lose. Washington, DC: The Education Trust.
Mediratta, K. 2004. Constituents of Change. New York: New York University, Institute for Education and Social Policy.
Mediratta, K., and J. Karp. 2003. Parent Power and Urban School Reform: The Story of Mothers on the Move. New York: New York University, Institute for Education and Social Policy.
New York City Coalition for Educational Justice. 2007. New York City's Middle-Grade Schools: Platforms for Success or Pathways to Failure? New York: NYCCEJ.
> Available for download
Nichols, L. 2007. “Another Side of Travis Heights: Residents and Austin Interfaith Target Blighted Apartments,” Austin Chronicle (October 19).
> Available online
Renee, M. 2006. “Knowledge, Power, and Education Justice: How Social Movement Organizations Use Research to Influence Education Policy.” Unpublished dissertation, doctor of philosophy in education program, University of California, Los Angeles.
Archives
Using Data for Decisions
VUE Number 18, Winter 2008
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
How Community Groups Use Data
By Seema Shah
Seema Shah is a research associate and study director at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author's biography
Data provide community organizing groups with powerful tools in their efforts to argue for educational equity and improvement.
In the late 1990s, high school student members of South Central Youth Empowered thru Action (SC-YEA), a youth organizing group in Los Angeles, initiated a campaign to protest the dearth of college preparatory courses in their South Los Angeles high schools, a dynamic they called “penitentiary tracking.” Indeed, when students from SC-YEA investigated the high school curricula, they discovered that many of their South Los Angeles high schools offered more “dead-end classes” in floor covering and cosmetology than courses in core subjects such as math and science.
These early organizing efforts led the Community Coalition, SC-YEA's parent organization, to co-convene a broad citywide coalition of more than twenty community groups. The coalition, Communities for Educational Equity (CEE), represented both African American and Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles and showed that the problems of high school rigor and college access went far beyond the schools in South Los Angeles.1 This was an issue neighborhoods and schools across the city were facing, with far-reaching implications for the social and economic livelihood of the city.
CEE's aim was ambitious — to fight for access to a college preparatory curriculum for all of Los Angeles Unified School District's high school students. Data analyses and research efforts, carried out with partners such as Education Trust West and UCLA, along with sustained community and political mobilization, were at the core of CEE's ultimate victory — a historic six-to-one school board vote in 2005 in favor of the resolution mandating a college preparatory curriculum. Explained Sandy Mendoza, director of community investment at United Way of Los Angeles and a member of CEE's steering committee:
You didn't have students or parents just giving anecdotal evidence about why [college preparatory courses were] necessary and why kids aren't graduating. We had data and they couldn't argue against the data.
Community Organizing Groups: A Unique Kind of Community-Based Organization
Community organizing groups such as the Community Coalition represent a unique brand of community-based organization. Rather than providing direct services or playing an advocacy role, community organizing groups make use of professional staff organizers who work with community members to build grassroots youth and adult leadership. Community members are helped to build power to alter social, economic, and educational inequities in their communities. Though community organizing groups may vary in their particular methodologies, conducting research, particularly to identify and inform reform campaigns, is an important component of the organizing cycle (Mediratta 2004).
Despite the importance of research, the complexities inherent in obtaining, cleaning, analyzing, and interpreting data often make it difficult for community organizing groups to use research. One organizing group, for instance, was originally interested in developing “report cards” for its district's schools but, ultimately, abandoned the idea. The organizer explained, “It just became too daunting to do the data collection and to figure out exactly what we're trying to do. The more we pushed it, the fuzzier we became ourselves.”
In addition to the limits of their own research capacity and expertise, organizing groups may find it difficult to access data from often-recalcitrant districts, obtain those data in a timely fashion, and get the data in an easy-to-analyze format. Despite these obstacles, community organizing groups across the country are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of data. Groups that have developed strong data analytic capacity use their analyses to illuminate educational problems and disparities, to identify programmatic and policy solutions to the problems they are surfacing, and, when necessary, to monitor implementation of enacted proposals.
How Community Organizing Groups Use Data Differently from Other Groups
While community organizing groups use data for many of the same purposes, described in the previous section, as other key constituencies such as district officials or academic researchers, three features distinguish community organizing groups from other educational stakeholders in their use of data. First, community organizing groups use data to build their credibility and political power. Second, because of their mission, community organizing groups are especially concerned with integrating data analyses with their on-the-ground knowledge of community issues. Third, community organizing groups are interested in data not “for data's sake,” but to think strategically and specifically about the ways in which data can be used as a tool to generate tangible changes in schooling practices and policies.
Building Political Power
Data users such as school districts or educational researchers inherently possess power and credibility within policy and decision-making circles. In contrast, outside constituencies, particularly those representing poor neighborhoods and communities of color, often must fight to be viewed as valued participants in the educational decision-making process. Members of Mothers on the Move in the Bronx, for example, noticed that the education concerns they raised were often construed by educators as particular problems of individual students, teachers, or principals.
The group responded with data analyses of schooling outcomes. By showing disparities in schooling outcomes across schools serving low- and high-income neighborhoods, they were able to frame their concerns in systemic terms and, thus, were able to make explicitly political arguments about resource inequities (Mediratta & Karp 2003). As Michelle Renee (2006) notes in her research, community organizing groups' increasingly sophisticated use of data not only informs their campaign strategies and demands for educational change, but also provides groups with the cachet to establish themselves as credible and legitimate stakeholders who have “done their homework.”
In Chicago, for instance, ACORN used an analysis of teacher turnover and teacher quality in their target West Side neighborhoods to garner prominent media attention and to convince senior school district officials to work with the organization to address the problem. This work ultimately positioned ACORN as a lead partner in generating solutions to the crisis in teacher turnover and teacher quality. Chicago ACORN's lead organizer, Madeline Talbott, believes that ACORN's data reports
legitimize[d] our campaign and [got] us in the door. Before we did this research, Chicago Public Schools and education reporters didn't call here. Now the editors of daily papers call us for comment whenever there is a story on teachers.... Our report got us on the inside.
Some organizing groups, including
Chicago ACORN, have hired their own data analysts to carry out the analyses they need. Others partner with universities and established research organizations to conduct analyses collaboratively.
Indeed, in a longitudinal study of eight community organizing groups that have long, successful histories
of school reform organizing,2 all of the groups in the study had worked with research partners to increase their capacity for data use and analyses.
Community organizing groups' increasingly sophisticated use of data not only informs their campaign strategies and demands for educational change, but also provides groups with the cachet to establish themselves as credible and legitimate stakeholders.
When we began moving the policy [on a college preparatory curriculum], it was very, very clear to me that
intellectual framing and research and data and analyses were hugely important
to make this predominant in political and civic conversations, but that in order to be effective and loud with that intellectual framing and data and research, you needed community support behind you.... Community Coalition had the capacity to bring along the community.
In this way, the use of data, in tandem
with other organizing strategies, allows groups to build and sustain their political power.
Grounding Data in Community Expertise
Whether working independently or in partnership with an outside research entity to analyze data, the role of community organizing groups is to ensure that research questions and analyses are rooted in the issues that community constituents are raising from their day-to-day experience with schools. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, executive director of the Community Coalition, explains:
So, the youth are the ones who recognize,
“Oh, there are always a lot less seniors than there are freshmen.”...
So, how does that happen? We would go get that data and figure it out.
This intimate knowledge of community
conditions and dynamics positions organizing groups to ask qualitatively
different questions that reflect the concerns of community members. Consequently, community organizing groups are often able to offer a unique
perspective on the data they analyze and to present a more nuanced problem
analysis.
An especially potent example of this comes from the recent work of Austin Interfaith (Nichols 2007). Lisa Robertson, the principal of Travis Heights Elementary School, where Austin Interfaith has worked for many years to build parent and community engagement, observed that students from two nearby housing complexes seemed to be performing differently in school. Suspecting that this was due, in part, to the differential conditions of the respective housing developments, Robertson and members of Austin Interfaith examined a series of student success indicators that compared students from the two housing developments.
Community organizing groups are often able to offer a unique perspective on the data they analyze and to present a more nuanced problem analysis.
In the preceding example, Austin Interfaith raised questions drawn from its knowledge of the community that led to new ways of looking at existing data. Yet organizing groups often lack access to key data and, as one organizer indicated, must obtain the data “guerrilla style.” While legislation such as No Child Left Behind and the Freedom of Information Act stipulate public access to data and have increased access to data for community-based constituencies, community organizing groups continue to report challenges in obtaining data, particularly if the district believes the data might be used “against them” in some way.
Other times, publicly reported data may be inconsistent with the experience of community members and may not accurately reflect the reality of schooling conditions. There are politically expedient ways of computing and reporting data, evidenced by the numerous controversies around the calculation of graduation rates (Carey 2007; Hall 2005). In other cases, discrepancies between data and reality may exist simply because of a lack of clarity about reporting requirements. For instance, in Oakland, free-lunch data from some of the new small schools developed across the past decade were underreported because principals did not understand the paperwork that needed to be submitted. Other times, publicly available data may not provide enough nuanced information or may not provide the necessary insights to resolve the questions that are of deepest interest to community members.
For these reasons, community organizing groups often collect their own data. Alberto Retana, an organizer in Los Angeles, describes the dilemma:
We could never find information in the format that we wanted — so somebody
could dump a bunch of attendance
statistics on you, and the only people who were really reading it and interpreting it were the people who had a direct interest... the school because they want to get money... and the teachers union because
they want to use it for propaganda.
So neither one of those really met our needs, or were driven by our interests...
so we needed to do it ourselves.
When groups collect their own data, they use a variety of approaches to tap into the experiences of community constituents. Many groups — particularly youth organizations — conduct surveys. When high school students who were members of Youth United for Change in Philadelphia expressed concerns about testing-preparation practices at their high school, they conducted a survey
of their fellow students to find out specific experiences around testing. Similarly, youth leaders in SC-YEA surveyed
their fellow high school students about the issues that were most pressing
to them, which ultimately led to their college access campaign.
In addition, groups are likely to arrange research meetings with key stakeholders — teachers, parents, or district officials — to gain their perspective on pressing issues. Oakland Community Organizations (OCO) identified overcrowding and its ripple effects as an issue, not just by looking at data on school utilization rates, but also by interviewing schoolteachers who complained of the difficulty of managing classrooms that were bursting at the seams and by interviewing school janitors who described the difficulty of keeping the school clean. By interviewing key stakeholders, community organizing groups are able to develop deeper and more sophisticated analyses that illuminate the consequences of common problems that might not otherwise be self-evident.
Organizing groups have also demonstrated their sophistication in using data and research to pinpoint solutions to the problems community members surface. Community organizing groups often reach out to experts in the field and conduct site visits to assess the appropriateness or viability of particular solutions for their community. Members of OCO, which pushed for and ultimately helped win a districtwide small-schools policy, visited New York City small schools with parent and school leaders as a part of its research and consulted with experts in the small-schools arena before advancing their model for small schools, which places parent and community engagement and local school autonomy at the center.
Ensuring That Data Analyses Lead to Action
Primary considerations vary for constituencies that use data. Academics may be interested in methodological issues and publishing findings in peer-reviewed journals. Districts might be concerned with demonstrating compliance through reporting frameworks. But community organizing groups use data specifically and strategically to focus attention on the educational issues facing neglected neighborhoods and populations and to demand the necessary changes. Community organizing groups use a variety of ways to ensure that data, in the end, serve as a tool to catalyze change.
By sharing data with constituents, allies, and targets, community organizing groups use data to build political and public will.
With assistance from the Annenberg Institute's Community Involvement Program, CEJ (NYCCEJ 2007) produced the report New York City's Middle-Grade Schools: Platforms for Success or Pathways to Failure? The report established links between resource inequities in New York City's middle schools, resulting in low high school graduation rates and, ultimately, poor economic and social prospects. The report, which drew considerable media attention, set out several recommendations and led New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to convene the Middle Grades Task Force. The Task Force's report, released in August 2007, ultimately resulted in the allocation of new resources to improve education in the middle grades, including a $5 million fund set aside for fifty of the city's lowest-performing middle-schools.3 Additionally, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg agreed to hire a senior administrator to oversee middle school initiatives.
CEJ, like other community organizing groups across the country, uses data as a vehicle to argue more effectively and persuasively for the changes and reforms they are advocating. As illustrated by the CEJ story and the earlier description of Community Coalition's work, community organizing groups that have built the capacity to use data have significant policy victories to show for their efforts. Of course, districts respond in a variety of ways to the data, sometimes challenging the analyses. Notes one community organizer wryly, “We can get on any Web site and we can pull all of this data together, which [the district] tends not to agree with, but guess who posts it? They do — it's their data.”
Other times, data analyses are accepted as evidence of the education problems that groups are raising but, due to political concerns or budget limitations, districts may balk at addressing the problem. In the best-case scenarios, analyses generated by organizing groups allow groups to initiate conversations about community concerns with district offices and other policy-makers that are rooted firmly in data. By grounding conversations in data, stakeholders can work toward a shared understanding of the problems facing urban schools and begin to develop meaningful collaborative relationships to solve those problems.
In Los Angeles, for instance, the passage of the school board's resolution to mandate a college preparatory curriculum for all of LAUSD's high school students led to the formation of a committee composed of community constituents and researchers from CEE, along with district administrators, to ensure the successful implementation of the resolution. Through this committee, CEE researchers and the district's research team began sharing data and discussing research questions with one another.
As both the community-based researchers and district-based researchers conducted analyses to assess what kind of supports would be necessary in each of LAUSD's high schools to implement the full college preparatory curriculum, they found they were getting disparate results because they were using different exclusion criteria in their analyses. In the end, after several weeks of trying to determine the best approach, the community-based and district-based researchers decided to report the data both ways and to discuss the implications of both sets of analyses. One community-based researcher on the committee observed:
So that's an example of having both insiders and outsiders doing [the analysis]. The goal is to get [the district] to adopt a reasonable policy and strategy. Because one of the big worries in this is that there is no way the community groups can do the work of the district.
Conclusion
The inherently political landscape of education reform requires that both school districts and community groups use data to leverage their respective positions, frequently placing them at odds with one another and making it difficult to share data or to work collaboratively on analyses. However, as the example of collaboration in Los Angeles illustrates, under the right circumstances, the efforts of school districts and community groups to work together can promote a spirit of mutual accountability, ideally leading to better informed education practice and policy.
-----------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES
1 Community Coalition, a South Los Angeles community-based organization, co-convened CEE with Alliance for a Better Community, based in East Los Angeles. Inner City Struggle was also a lead organization in the coalition.
2 The six-year study is being conducted by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, with funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Many of the quotes and examples provided in this article are drawn from the study. Additional details on the study can be found at www.annenberginstitute.org/cip/mott.html.
3 CEJ's organizing efforts resulted in the addition of one more middle school to the pool, bringing the total number of schools benefiting from the fund to fifty-one.
REFERENCES
Carey, K. 2007. The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act. Washington, DC: Education Sector.
Hall, D. 2005. Getting Honest about Grad Rates: How States Play the Numbers and Students Lose. Washington, DC: The Education Trust.
Mediratta, K. 2004. Constituents of Change. New York: New York University, Institute for Education and Social Policy.
Mediratta, K., and J. Karp. 2003. Parent Power and Urban School Reform: The Story of Mothers on the Move. New York: New York University, Institute for Education and Social Policy.
New York City Coalition for Educational Justice. 2007. New York City's Middle-Grade Schools: Platforms for Success or Pathways to Failure? New York: NYCCEJ.
> Available for download
Nichols, L. 2007. “Another Side of Travis Heights: Residents and Austin Interfaith Target Blighted Apartments,” Austin Chronicle (October 19).
> Available online
Renee, M. 2006. “Knowledge, Power, and Education Justice: How Social Movement Organizations Use Research to Influence Education Policy.” Unpublished dissertation, doctor of philosophy in education program, University of California, Los Angeles.
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AISR_info@brown.edu
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