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Associate Professor Mark R. Warren is a sociologist concerned with the revitalization of American democratic and community life. Earlier this year, he co-organized a working conference at HGSE on the role of community organizations in school reform that looked at how broad-based alliances between schools, parents, and outside organizations can act to improve standards in low-income schools. Community groups and representatives from local Boston colleges attended the conference.
Q: What were your goals for the conference? A: My goal was to bring scholars, practioners, and policymakers together to foster more useable knowledge and research. Often, there is not a clear link between the kinds of research being done in the university and the practitioners out there. While there’s a real role for distinct academic endeavor, we’re going to need to develop collaborative models—if the research-based ideas, programs, and strategies that we develop don’t have any authentic connection to communities, they won’t succeed. If we can bring people together in various kinds of stages, it creates a platform to generate usable knowledge. Q: What sorts of community groups would you like to see actively involved in education reform? How can the unique qualities or resources of such groups improve the results of low-performing schools?
A: Integrated groups can expand the horizons of people who are very locally focused. From the broader view of how we need to strengthen our community and democracy, it’s vital that we bring different kinds of institutional actors together. One of the reasons why community based organizations didn’t get involved in education before was because they had developed in distinct and separate ways—the world of education over here, the world of community development and social services over there. If communities are going to build stronger civic society for all of us, we need to bring people together. Broadly, I’d like to see all kinds of groups involved in schools in urban communities. Congregations, religious groups of various sorts, the Y, Boys and Girls Clubs are the types of community organizing groups that we’re focusing on. There’s been a move among community groups in working to improve schools and to transform low-performing schools. Twenty years ago, community groups weren’t that involved in education work—maybe they were more involved in developing affordable housing, or working in community development—but in the last two decades it has become very clear to these organizations that the future of their communities depends on how they deal with young people. It’s not enough to just have a high-school degree anymore. They need to support their families and be involved in their civic community, and that’s going to happen through education. These organizations bring a lot of different kinds of resources, with connections to the residents who surround community schools. In turn, they often have ties to families in a lot of ways that schools themselves don’t have, and are a base from which to involve families in school work. In addition, because they are organizing groups, they can help lobby in the political arena—from the need for more schools, to reducing class sizes, or improving the teaching of courses at schools. They can also help to improve the accountability of schools. If families and community members are involved in the process, they will begin to know more what they should be expecting from schools. This can happen in a collaborative and supportive way, but it can also be a way of reform. It’s not to point the finger of blame at a school administrator or teacher, but to say, “This situation can’t exist anymore. What can we do together?” and, then, to hold school systems accountable for some kind of improvement. Q: How can the specific interests and values of community organizations—particularly those of faith-based groups—be incorporated into a public education system that must necessarily be secular, inclusive, and universal? A: Faith communities can bring a certain energy and passion, which aligns with their beliefs: taking care of a community or acting for social justice. So, if your faith calls you to strengthen your community, or to help others, or to work for social justice, then one of the ways to do that is through the public work of schools—not through particular faith work or religious education, which happens through the congregation. Most savvy faith-based groups will make some sort of distinction between what is appropriate in the public arena and what is appropriate within the congregation. I don’t think, surprisingly, that it has been as controversial as most people think. While most people have been thinking about prayer in school or other hot-button topics, the groups with which I mainly work and study have more to do with work in the public arena and, therefore, have been successful in moving their cause forward, versus being part of a debate. Q: What are some specific ways in which time-poor parents can be a resource in low-income schools? A: People are working lots of hours and many parents struggle with involvement in schools. However, parental involvement does not need to be in the brick and mortar of schools. If folks can go out as an organizing group and engage people where they’re at, meet them in their homes and build one-on-one relationships, find out what they care about, get people together and engage them, it’s easier to get involved.
Yet, when most schools send home a leaflet with their child, half of them don’t make it to the house, and the other half of the leaflets make it to the house but a lot of the parents can’t read it because they don’t speak English or feel the subject is distant from what’s on their minds. This isn’t true just in schools; handing out flyers and announcing things in the media is not enough to get lots of people involved. Impactful relationships need to reach out and start where people are at and find out what they care about. Because maybe what’s on the parent's mind is not what the school has decided to do, however valid that activity might be. Organizing groups can generate change and help parents feel involved and engaged, after which parents will start interacting with the teachers and learning what’s happening at the school. Q: How can we best measure the effects of community organizing on high-quality instruction? A: Before I get directly into [the issue of performance measurement], I think there’s a couple of direct ways in which we might think about community groups improving the quality of instruction. Partly it’s by engaging parents and community residents more directly with the work of schools—understanding better what the work is about so they can support their children better at home. Another model is getting parents more actively involved with the school in a direct way—in Chicago, the money has been raised for parent mentors who come into the classroom. Their job is to support children in the classroom and to become parent leaders to get other parents in the classroom, and support the education work there. And they can also become involved with decision-making processes in the schools, strengthening the cooperative efforts between parents and teachers and administrators. Community groups can also support schools in doing different kinds of creative work. At the moment, there is a great deal of emphasis on standardized tests, and I think we all would agree that this is a limited measure of student achievement, however valid. They have been useful in the organizing world because they offer a clear number, and you can point to a school and say, “this school isn’t working well, and we have the numbers to prove it.” But the next question is whether there’s real improvement going on or whether it’s teaching to the test. There’s a sense that a high-stakes testing regime is closing off doors to the kind of experimentation and collaboration that we would want. A lot of the groups involved in the organizing world would be much more comfortable with portfolio-based assessments. As they think about building future leaders and educating people to think more about civil life, it’s not about memorization or rote learning, but, rather, collaborative engagement—something not so easily measured by standardized tests. Alternative criteria that we might want to think about include: do students stay in school longer, do they go on to college, are they less involved with the juvenile justice system. There are a number of things community organization accomplishes in building a foundation for better teaching, which are a couple of steps removed from getting the scores up on the MCAS next year. And a lot of these groups specialize in developing community leaders, so they have a lot of things to offer in terms of developing the capacity to mobilize their own institutions. It’s not education expertise, per se, but know-how and experience in collaboration, collective decision-making, and developing a shared vision. Importantly, it’s also asking school leaders to think of themselves not just as something wider than teachers in a school but also leaders in the community. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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