Improving urban education systems

The newspapers are discussing Mayor Fenty's administration and his vow to take over and improve the DC Public School system. From the Washington Post, "On Taking Office, Fenty Urges Better Schools":

Fenty has scheduled a news conference for tomorrow morning to unveil his first major initiative: a mayoral takeover of the struggling public school system.

He told Washington Post radio that failing schools contribute to problems with crime and unemployment in the city and said residents told him during the campaign that improving public education should be his highest priority. "The city's making progress, we're heading in the right direction," he said. "But we're not going to ever fulfill our potential if we don't fix our school system."

Also see the Post editorial, "Welcome, Mr. Mayor."

Professor Clarence Stone at the University of Maryland has led a multi-city study of urban education and reform for a number of years. This comes from the webpage for the book published out of the research, Changing Urban Education:

With critical issues like desegregation and funding facing our schools, dissatisfaction with public education has reached a new high. Teachers decry inadequate resources while critics claim educators are more concerned with job security than effective teaching. Though urban education has reached crisis proportions, contending players have difficulty agreeing on a common program of action. This book tells why.

Changing Urban Education confronts the prevailing naivete in school reform by examining the factors that shape, reinforce, or undermine reform efforts. Edited by one of the nation's leading urban scholars, it examines forces for change and resistance in urban education and proposes that the barrier to reform can only be overcome by understanding how schools fit into the broader political contexts of their cities.

Much of the problem with our schools lies with the reluctance of educators to recognize the profoundly political character of public education. The contributors show how urban political contexts vary widely with factors like racial composition, the role of the teachers' union, and relations between cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. Presenting case studies of original field research in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and six other urban areas, they consider how resistance to desegregation and the concentration of the poor in central urban areas affect education, and they suggest how cities can build support for reform through the involvement of business and other community players.

By demonstrating the complex interrelationship between urban education and politics, this book shows schools to be not just places for educating children, but also major employers and large spenders of tax dollars. It also introduces the concept of civic capacity--the ability of educators and noneducators to work together on common goals--and suggests that this key issue must be addressed before education can be improved.

Changing Urban Education makes it clear to educators that the outcome of reform efforts depends heavily on their political context as it reminds political scientists that education is a major part of the urban mix. While its prognosis is not entirely optimistic, it sets forth important guidelines that cannot be ignored if our schools are to successfully prepare children for the future.

I haven't read the book yet, although it's on my list. The other thing that I don't know if it discusses, but something that really matters, is the focus on rebuilding often dysfunctional and/or dis-socialized families, and building the familial connection and commitment to education, as well as the broader community's commitment to education.

I'm certain that part of the problem of the school system in DC is due to its governing structure--and in part that has to do with a School Board comprised of people with agendas and philosophies that have to do with things other than educating children.

All I can think of here is the Chinese blessing/curse:

"Be Careful What You Wish For, Because You Might Get It!"

From the Civic capacity and urban education research study website:

The central proposition for this study is that efforts to promote educational improvement become more nearly systemic (broad and multifaceted) as the mobilization of civic capacity expands. Civic capacity refers to cross-sector efforts to address community-wide problems. The project's focus is the political context of public education rather than the classroom itself. Its primary goals are to identify the coalitions, problem perceptions, and interactions that provide the framework for education policymaking in large cities. ...

Findings support the central proposition. However, the cities had only varying degrees of civic capacity, and they also fell short of systemic reform to varying degrees. Though the most conspicuous barrier to greater civic capacity is racial and other intergroup tension, the problem of concentrated poverty itself stands as the major obstacle. In addition, elite perceptions of the nature of the urban education problem were fundamentally ambiguous and diffuse, and proposals for reform were primarily incremental even though aspiration levels were high. In the face of a large and resistant problem, but lacking a "well-structured" understanding of the challenge, players in urban education tend to be deflected into piecemeal efforts, some even treating education as an employment regime.

From the abstract, "Civic Capacity and Urban Education," Urban Affairs Review, 36:5, 2001:

In 1993, a team of political scientists launched an 11-city study of school reform, centering on the concept of civic capacity. In the field of urban education, the 11-city study found places ranging from those with low levels of civic capacity in which diffuse and scattered concerns never became focused and synergistic to those with relatively high levels of civic capacity in which key actors came together in concerted action. Community leaders develop civic capacity to respond to major community-wide problems with a high potential for controversy. An ever-present potential for conflict means that a spirit of cooperation can quickly erode, and civic capacity differs from micro versions of social capital. To be lasting, civic capacity needs an institutional foundation for interaction among elites and a "grassroots" base through which ordinary citizens are engaged.

Index Keywords: education