An excerpt from
Communities and Schools: A New View of Urban Education Reform 

MARK R. WARREN 
Harvard University 
mark_warren@harvard.edu

In this article, Mark R. Warren argues that if urban school reform in the United States is to be successful, it must be linked to the revitalization of the communities around our schools. Warren identifies a growing field of collaboration between public schools and community-based organizations, developing a typology that identifies three different approaches: the service approach (community schools); the development approach (community sponsorship of new charter schools); and the organizing approach (school-community organizing). The author elaborates a conceptual framework using theories of social capital and relational power, presenting case studies to illustrate each type. He also discusses a fourth case to demonstrate the possibilities for linking individual school change to political strategies that address structures of poverty. Warren identifies shared lessons across these approaches, and compares and contrasts the particular strengths and weaknesses of each. Warren concludes with a call for a new approach to urban education reform that links it theoretically and practically to social change in America’s cities. 

What sense does it make to try to reform urban schools while the communities around them stagnate or collapse?¹ Conversely, can community-building and development efforts succeed in revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods if the public schools within them continue to fail their students? The fates of urban schools and communities are linked, yet school reformers and community-builders typically act as if they are not. 

Twenty years ago, one would have been hard pressed to find a community-based organization that was actively working on education issues. The young community-development and organizing groups that had arisen in the wake of the 1960s typically focused their efforts on housing, safety, and economic development initiatives (Halpern, 1995). In turn, public schools lost the close connections they had to neighborhoods at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Progressive Era reforms centralized control of schooling in professionally run district administrations (Reese, 2002). For the last half of the twentieth century, then, educators and community developers have operated in a separate sphere, both institutionally and professionally. 

More recently, though, a wide range of initiatives has emerged that seeks to forge collaborations between community-based organizations and schools. This new movement has historical roots both in John Dewey’s conception of democratic, community-centered education (Dewey, 1915) and in the community-control movements of the 1960s (Fantini, Gittell, & Magat, 1970). But it has emerged over the past fifteen years with renewed vigor and distinctive strategies in a series of important but little studied experiments. 

In this article, I set forth an argument for a community-oriented approach to urban education reform. I outline a conceptual approach to understanding school-community collaboration and develop a typology of the major approaches linking community organizations to school improvement that have emerged in the United States. I illustrate the different types of school-community collaborations with key examples based on original fieldwork. I conclude the article with a discussion of the possibilities of a community-oriented approach to education reform that is theoretically and practically linked to social change in our nation’s cities. 

Why Link Schools to Communities? 

School districts and leaders have struggled to improve schooling in low-income communities, largely in isolation from community-development initiatives.² In particular cases, gains have been made within the four walls of schools through reform strategies. Attempting school reform in isolation from community development, however, is problematic for a number of reasons.  

First of all, children cannot learn well if they lack adequate housing, health care, nutrition, and safe and secure environments, or if their parents are experiencing stress because of their low wages and insecure employment (Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997). Urban schools must do a better job of educating inner-city children, but it is patently unreasonable to expect that they alone can compensate for the effects of poverty and racism (Rothstein, 2004). Community-development organizations work directly to support the social and economic health of families and communities (Briggs & Mueller, 1997). Working together with such groups, schools can take a more holistic approach to address children’s healthy development.  

Second, schools cannot teach children well if teachers lack an understanding of their students’ cultures and lives, and if they lack meaningful relationships with their families (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1978). Poor communities face problems associated with concentrated poverty and racism, but too often educators see families only as problems to be “fixed.” However, poor communities represent more than a “bundle of pathologies” (Warren, Thompson, & Saegert, 2001). They contain rich cultural traditions and social resources that have much to offer the work of schools (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). Community-based organizations can help bring the cultural and social assets of communities into schools and foster meaningful partnerships between schools and families. 

Ignorance and isolation can feed a third and deeper problem. Teachers often operate from within a culture of power (Delpit, 1988), which fosters a curriculum and pedagogy that alienates and discriminates against children of color. Meanwhile, many urban teachers hold “deficit” views of low-income parents of color (Rioux & Berla, 1993); that is, they hold them in disdain (or pity them as victims), seeing them as part of “the problem.” Racial tension simmers under the surface of urban schools and erupts periodically in open conflict (Payne & Kaba, n.d.). Consequently, urban schools require something more than greater financial and social resources: The culture of schooling needs to be transformed (Ladson-Billings, 2001; Noguera, 1996). Community and parent engagement that is meaningful and powerful can play an essential role in making schools more responsive and in holding schools accountable for serving low-income communities of color (Mediratta & Fruchter, 2003). 

Fourth, urban schools suffer from a lack of resources tied to their location in poor communities. Compared to more affluent suburban schools, inner-city schools typically are underfunded. As a result, they often have less-qualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms, older buildings in need of serious repair and upgrading, inadequate textbooks, and outdated facilities (Kozol, 1991; Schrag, 2003). We can ask schools to do a better job with the resources they have. We can engage the social capacities of parents and community organizations. But how can we reasonably expect inner-city children to achieve at a comparable level to suburban students when the resources of their schools are so unequal? Addressing the structural inequality in American education requires building a political constituency for urban public schools. Collaborations with broad-based community organizations whose constituents have their children in urban schools can provide an essential piece of the political effort necessary to address these issues, a piece that civic capacity analysts have noted is critically missing in many major citywide efforts at school reform (Stone, Henig, Jones, & Pierannunzi, 2001). 

A Framework for Understanding School-Community Collaboration 

In sum, community initiatives can make a number of critical contributions to school improvement. They can: 

• Improve the social context of education so that children come to school better able to learn 
• Foster parental and community participation in the education of children and the work of schools 
• Work to transform the culture of schools and the practice of schooling and hold school officials accountable for educational gains 
• Help build a political constituency for public education to support the delivery of greater resources to schools and to address in other ways the profound inequalities in public education 

In spite of this potential, the stark reality of most urban schools is one of isolation and disconnection from the neighborhoods they serve. Most teachers and staff commute to their schools and have little understanding of, or connection with, the lives of their students outside of school, in their families and neighborhoods. School leaders seldom see their school as one of a set of institutions that can anchor poor neighborhoods in partnership with other community organizations. Yet the potential is great, as public schools are the largest and most democratically accessed institutions in the country. They are located in virtually every neighborhood and serve nearly 90 percent of American children (National Center for Education Statistics, 2002). 

In addition to their isolation from external communities, many public schools, especially in our most disadvantaged neighborhoods, reflect an internal isolation — that is, a weak and fragmented social fabric. Constrained by low resources and confined by a stifling set of bureaucratic rules, many teachers feel isolated and alienated within the school itself (Payne & Kaba, n.d.). Parents in low-income communities seldom venture into schools unless the school has problems with their children, or when parents perceive problems in the school.³ A few brave souls do join PTAs, but they can easily become overwhelmed with fundraising and other support work. Few schools achieve broad-based participation and a meaningful role for parents and community members in school decisionmaking (Sarason, 1995). 

Social Capital and Relational Power 

The concept of social capital provides a useful framework to think about overcoming both the external and internal isolation of public schools in order to reweave the social fabric of schools and urban communities. Social capital refers to the set of resources that inhere in relationships of trust and cooperation between and among people.⁴ Given whatever other resources people have, including money and expertise, when people have close ties and trust each other, they are better able to achieve collective ends. In fact, when financial and other resources are in short supply, as they typically are in inner-city schools, mobilizing the social capacities of the school is perhaps even more important to achieve educational goals. Although social capital is not a panacea for the problems of urban schools, schools with higher levels of social capital can make the most of whatever assets they do have and can mobilize these social relationships to lobby for greater resources (Warren et al., 2001). 

Social capital is fundamentally about relationships. Within schools, strong relationships based on trust and cooperation among teachers, principals, parents, and community residents can play an important role in improving schools in several ways. When parents and community members are engaged in the life of the school, they can support teaching and strengthen the environment for learning (Epstein et al., 2002). An intersecting set of relationships among adults (parents, teachers, service providers) can provide social closure (Coleman, 1988), that is, a context in which all the adults that children know also know each other and coordinate their actions. Social closure means that children can be raised with a unified set of expectations and behaviors and their development can be addressed holistically. Finally, when teachers and principals build trust with each other and with parents, they can develop a common vision for school reform and work together to implement necessary changes in the school (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; see also Shirley, 1997).  

The relationship between the school and other community institutions can also be understood in terms of social capital and social closure. We can think of social capital as a set of links across institutions, like schools and community-development organizations (Warren et al., 2001; see also Woolcock, 1998). We can ask to what extent institutions in a community collaborate with each other and work together for the development of families and children. Institutions serve as sites for building social capital as they bring networks of people and resources to bear on achieving collective ends. Interpersonal relationships between individuals across institutions provide the glue for these collaborations, so the personal and institutional levels interrelate. We should be interested, therefore, both in the ways schools and community organizations form collaborations, and in how these partnerships strengthen relationships within school communities. 

Theoretical work on social capital has highlighted the benefits of trust, cooperation, and collaboration, but only sometimes has it directly confronted issues of power (Foley & Edwards, 1997; Warren, 1998, 2001). Yet the lack of power, which lies at the core of poverty and racism, plays a key role in community decline and school failure. Powerful elites, for example, redline communities of color and concentrate environmental hazards there (Bullard, 1990; Squires, 1994). Urban schools will continue to fail their students when communities lack the power to demand accountability, when they are “captured populations” (Noguera, 2001, p. 198) without the resources to pursue alternatives. As powerful as building social capital can be for individual school and neighborhood improvement, a broader solution requires creating the political capacity to address issues of structural inequality, like the pernicious underfunding of urban school systems.  

Structural inequality not only sets the context for school-community collaborations; unequal power also structures relationships between school staff and parents within schools (Fine, 1993; Lareau, 1989). On her own, a low-income parent of color typically lacks the status and education to collaborate as an equal with her child’s teacher. Efforts to build trust and to foster meaningful collaboration among principals, teachers, parents, and community members need to confront these power inequalities. If they don’t, reform efforts can be derailed by mistrust and unresolved conflicts (Bryk & Schneider, 2002), or parents can withdraw if they feel they are being treated as pawns rather than respected as change agents (Fine, 1993).  

The concept of relational power offers a useful way to approach issues of power in school-community collaboration. Relational power can be contrasted with unilateral power (Cortes, Jr., 1993; Loomer, 1976), which is the only type of power most people recognize. Unilateral power emphasizes “power over” others, the capacity to get others to do your bidding. Relational power emphasizes a different aspect, the “power to” get things done collectively. Unilateral power is zero-sum, typically with winners and losers. By contrast, relational power should reflect a win-win situation.⁵  

Historically, community-organizing groups have followed a strategy that can best be understood as reflecting unilateral power. They organized the social capital of their community to leverage power into the political arena to force public, and sometimes private, institutions to improve services or to provide funds to build affordable housing or support economic development. Some community organizations have used this strategy in the education arena as well, lobbying for new school construction or policy changes at the district level. However necessary this “outside” strategy may be at times, it ultimately is insufficient for improving urban schools, because such schools lack the capacity to change on their own. Moreover, combative strategies can exacerbate a situation in which school principals and teachers are already wary of outside community organizations, and fear that these organizations will make unreasonable demands and intrusions into the professional sphere of educators (Goldring, 1990). 

Fortunately, some community-organizing groups have developed more complex strategies to build both relational and unilateral power (Cortes, Jr., 1993; Warren, 2001). Their goal is collaboration. These groups are willing to confront powerful institutions, but only when recalcitrant elites refuse to negotiate. They approach schools as partners, but this does not mean ignoring tensions and conflicts. We know that authentic parent engagement flounders when educators are reluctant to address issues of race and power within the school community (Abrams & Gibbs, 2000). Emphasizing relational power can set a framework for working through the inevitable tensions and conflicts that arise in partnerships so that authentic forms of collaboration can be established. 

In sum, community organizations can play a valuable role as an independent force in collaborations with schools and in the political arena. But they require a strategy to build trust and cooperation with school staff in order to build relational power. Collaborative approaches that seek to build both social capital and relational power, therefore, offer the possibility of expanding the capacities of the school community while simultaneously holding promise for building a political constituency for urban school reform.