Impacts of Community & Youth Organizing
on Public School Reform

Overview

This research explores community organizing and its impact on school change. Funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, this six-year study examines the work of eight community organizations to improve education outcomes in eight urban school districts.

Research Questions

Our study is guided by two core questions:

  1. Does the effort to equalize power dynamics - the core of the organizing approach - change the nature of accountability and quality of engagement between schools and communities?

  2. Does the new responsiveness and/or collaboration generated by community-based efforts to equalize power dynamics lead to new priorities and capacities within schools and communities that can facilitate successful learning for all children?

Study Objectives

To address these questions, we:

  1. Explored the goals and theoretical assumptions structuring each group's organizing approaches and tactics in order to define a logic model for how community organizations aim to stimulate school change;

  2. Constructed an indicators framework, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, to measure each group's progress towards meeting its short-term, intermediate and long-term outcomes;

  3. Assessed the contexts in which groups operate to identify both barriers to and supports for effective community organizing;

  4. Examined how involvement in community organizing influences the growth and development of members (parents, community residents, youth);

  5. Analyzed the effects of community organizing on school capacity and student success.

The six-year study has involved four years of extensive fieldwork. We are currently in the process of analyzing and disseminating our data, and will release our findings in early 2008.

Findings

The results of our current analyses can be found in our papers and presentations.