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Building a Political Constituency for Urban School Reform
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(Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Warren, Mark. 2011. Building a political constituency for urban
An innovative collective parent engagement model for families and neighborhoods in arrival cities
- Journal of Family Strengths
, 2013
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The Journal of Family Strengths is brought to you for free and open access
Beyond the Bake Sale: A Community- Based Relational Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools
"... Background/Context: Parent involvement in education is widely recognized as important, yet it remains weak in many communities. One important reason for this weakness is that urban schools have grown increasingly isolated from the families and communities they serve. Many of the same neighborhoods w ..."
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Background/Context: Parent involvement in education is widely recognized as important, yet it remains weak in many communities. One important reason for this weakness is that urban schools have grown increasingly isolated from the families and communities they serve. Many of the same neighborhoods with families who are disconnected from public schools, however, often contain strong community-based organizations (CBOs) with deep roots in the lives of families. Many CBOs are beginning to collaborate with public schools, and these collaborations might potentially offer effective strategies to engage families more broadly and deeply in schools. Purpose: This article presents a community-based relational approach to fostering parent engagement in schools. We investigated the efforts of CBOs to engage parents in schools in low-income urban communities. We argue that when CBOs are authentically rooted in com-munity life, they can bring to schools a better understanding of the culture and assets of fam-ilies, as well as resources that schools may lack. As go-betweens, they can build relational bridges between educators and parents and act as catalysts for change. Research Design: Using case study methodology, we studied three notable school-community
Somewhere between a Possibility and a Pipe Dream: District-level Leadership that Promotes Family Inclusion and Engagement in Education
"... ABSTRACT This paper looks at strengthening parent engagement in education, focusing on leadership strategies for reaching and supporting parents. The qualitative case study of a district’s multiple approaches for enhancing parent engagement involved eight individual and focus group interviews, obser ..."
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ABSTRACT This paper looks at strengthening parent engagement in education, focusing on leadership strategies for reaching and supporting parents. The qualitative case study of a district’s multiple approaches for enhancing parent engagement involved eight individual and focus group interviews, observations, and document analyses. The superintendent and principals shared leadership with school councils for developing initiatives. They collaborated with community organizations to provide parenting support, social services, and resources to enable participation. Despite some success, the leaders were challenged in establishing engagement programs widely across the district due to a managed, hierarchical, organizational structure and limited parent input on educational goals. The research contributes to a discussion of enhancing relations among families and schools to promote all students ’ academic achievement and wellbeing. We always engage parents on our terms, and it hasn’t worked. We are less effective as we have a more diverse group. We need to do things differently now. Students have changed, as has the parent body. They’re not less engaged; the school is less accessible to them.
Book Review
"... Norm Fruchter, a leading researcher and advocate of community orga-nizing for school reform, believes that public will is the source of both fail-ure and potential salvation for urban schools. “The nation’s public will has imposed failing schools on students of color and then blamed those students f ..."
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Norm Fruchter, a leading researcher and advocate of community orga-nizing for school reform, believes that public will is the source of both fail-ure and potential salvation for urban schools. “The nation’s public will has imposed failing schools on students of color and then blamed those students for the resulting achievement gap, ” he writes (p. 1); such schools “can be transformed to effectively educate students of color, if sufficient public will can be mobilized ” (p. 2). Rather than pointing to bureaucratic, cultural, or individual roots of the problem, he focuses on ill-conceived or poorly imple-mented social policies and suggests that the key change agents are school districts. He illustrates his case in loosely connected chapters on account-ability, school choice, and districtwide reform, which may be of interest to urban educational leaders. Despite the boldly stated thesis of its opening pages, the book does not break much new ground; it relies heavily on summarizing the research and theorizing of others on educational inequality, urban schooling, and pro-posed remedies. Its main interest lies in Fruchter’s perspective on school politics, derived from his unusual resume. He has worked in multiple roles within and outside the system—from continuation school teacher and school board member to parent organizer, evaluator, foundation grantor, and research center director. Before recently becoming director of the
Building a Political Constituency for Urban
"... In this article, the author argues that urban school reform falters, in part, because of the lack of an organized political constituency among the stakeholders with the most direct interest in school improvement, that is, parents whose children attend urban schools. The author examines community org ..."
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In this article, the author argues that urban school reform falters, in part, because of the lack of an organized political constituency among the stakeholders with the most direct interest in school improvement, that is, parents whose children attend urban schools. The author examines community organizing as a potential strategy to build such a constituency. Drawing primarily on extensive fieldwork research, he constructs a case study of one of the country’s largest community organizing networks, the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). He analyzes the network’s Alliance Schools initiative to promote school reform in 120 public schools in districts across the state. This article finds that organizing efforts like the IAF, despite important limitations, are beginning to create an external force for change in district policy as well as to collaborate internally with educators to produce change in the practice of education within schools. Keywords community organizing, school reform, equity, accountability Despite great attention to reforming schools in urban districts, significant progress has been slow to come (Payne, 2008). Test scores have risen in some categories, but it remains unclear how much of this increase reflects real
Organizing in Urban School Reform
, 1177
"... Purpose: Educational leadership is key to addressing the persistent ineq-uities in low-income urban schools, but most principals struggle to work with parents and communities around those schools to create socially just learning environments. This article describes the conditions and experiences tha ..."
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Purpose: Educational leadership is key to addressing the persistent ineq-uities in low-income urban schools, but most principals struggle to work with parents and communities around those schools to create socially just learning environments. This article describes the conditions and experiences that enabled principals to share leadership with teachers and low-income Latino parents to improve student learning. Methods: This study used interviews, observations, and documents to examine the perceptions and experiences of the principals of three small autonomous schools initiated by a community organizing group in California. Data analysis was conducted in iterative phases using shared leadership, social capital, and role theories as lenses to identify themes, triangulate across data sources, and examine alternative hypotheses. Findings: Findings illuminate how a design team process initiated principals into a model of shared leadership with teachers and empowered parents that focused on deep relationships and capacity building. Principals enacted this model of the “principal as organizer ” in the newly-opened schools, but they struggled to navigate conflicting leadership role expectations from district administration. Implications: Organizing approaches to education reform can cultivate shared leadership in principals
Educational Leadership on the Social Frontier: Developing Promise Neighborhoods in Urban and Tribal Settings
, 2013
"... Abstract We examined how the federal Promise Neighborhoods program shapes leadership networks and objectives in diverse tribal and urban settings. The program calls for diverse stakeholders to provide families with resources such as parenting workshops, childcare, preschool, health clinics, and oth ..."
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Abstract We examined how the federal Promise Neighborhoods program shapes leadership networks and objectives in diverse tribal and urban settings. The program calls for diverse stakeholders to provide families with resources such as parenting workshops, childcare, preschool, health clinics, and other social services that affect learning and development. We focused particularly upon how Promise Neighborhoods planning and development creates new "frontiers of educational leadership." We analyzed Promise Neighborhoods planning grant applications-21 that were funded and 21 from tribal settingsas well as interview data and program and community-specific archival data to learn about applicants' purposes and compositions of partners. These data were analyzed with insights from Burt's notion of structural holes, which suggests that leadership in "social frontier" spaces is often dependent upon negotiation, entrepreneurship, and relationship brokering. While both urban and tribal applicants were found to have highly diverse compositions of partners, tribal partners were more heterogeneous and separated by greater geographic distances. Additionally, tribal applicants' stated purposes and goals were tied more closely to local cultures and customs. We note that the Article
