Urban Education

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Community-Based Education Reform in Urban Contexts: Implications for Leadership, Policy, and Accountability Sonya Douglass Horsford and Julian Vasquez Heilig Urban Education 2014 49: 867 DOI: 10.1177/0042085914557647 The online version of this article can be found at: http://uex.sagepub.com/content/49/8/867.citation

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557647 editorial2014

UEXXXX10.1177/0042085914557647Urban Education

Introduction

Community-Based Education Reform in Urban Contexts: Implications for Leadership, Policy, and Accountability

Urban Education 2014, Vol. 49(8) 867–870 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0042085914557647 uex.sagepub.com

Sonya Douglass Horsford1 and Julian Vasquez Heilig2 The top-down nature of school reform in urban communities has prompted educators, students, parents, and citizens alike to question the ways in which we hold public schools accountable for student learning and performance. Education research representing a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including history, sociology, political science, and public policy and interdisciplinary fields, such as leadership studies and program evaluation, has contributed greatly to our understanding of the role of schools, neighborhoods, and communities in urban education reform. Although research and policy discourses analyzing and comparing the effectiveness and drawbacks of reform, whether top-down or grassroots, are far from new, the knowledge base concerning how such efforts should take place, by whom, and the degree to which they are sustainable remain underdeveloped. This special issue of Urban Education presents a timely exploration of community-based reform efforts designed to improve student achievement and school success within the decades-long era of high-stakes, performance-based accountability. Given increased support for testing and standardization,

1George

Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA State University, Sacramento, USA

2California

Corresponding Author: Sonya Douglass Horsford, Graduate School of Education, College of Education and Human Development, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 4C2, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. Email: [email protected]


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policies incentivizing the expansion of school vouchers and charters, and a federal role in education of historic proportions, the articles in this volume consider the role of community, broadly defined, within the present school reform discourse and education policy landscape. More specifically, they examine the policy contexts, actors, challenges, and possibilities associated with community-based school reform at a time when urban school populations are increasingly “majority–minority” and racialized gaps in student achievement, income, wealth, and thus, opportunity, are on the rise. Together, the articles revisit longheld notions of community schools and community organizing for school improvement alongside newer conceptualizations of community-based school finance, accountability, and capacity building as approaches to improving urban schools. The first article, “Community-Based School Finance and Accountability: A New Era for Local Control in Education Policy?” by Julian Vasquez Heilig, Derrick Ward, Eric Weisman, and Heather Cole, frames this special issue through its statutory analysis of California’s Local Control Funding Formula and Local Control and Accountability Plan, which provides a conceptual understanding of “bottom-up reforms” within the context of top-down accountability. The law, which created a process whereby parents, students, school staff, community members, and the superintendent work together to identify short- and long-term educational goals based on local priorities, grants greater flexibility for local communities to determine both their educational goals and mechanisms for holding schools accountable to achieving those goals. Nevertheless, the degree to which local communities have the capacity to engage meaningfully in the design and implementation of such accountability plans, rather than superficially, is of pronounced concern. In fact, this issue of community voice is central to the article, “Community Schools as Urban District Reform: Analyzing Oakland’s Policy Landscape Through Oral Histories.” Using oral history methods, authors Tina Trujillo, Laura Hernandez, Tonja Jarrell, and René Kissell tell the story of Oakland Unified School District’s full-service community schools policy—the first of its kind in the nation—through a collection of diverse stakeholder perspectives. Framed by the interdisciplinary concepts of structural racialization, urban regime theory, and intra- and inter-race social capital, their analysis sheds important light on how “different local constituencies can interpret an urban district’s priorities, conceive of the appropriate role for a local district, and form community-based coalitions that either further or obstruct” such democratic approaches to education reform. Their narratives underscore the critical nature of local community histories, particularly in urban spaces, where legacies of racial tension, political conflict, and mistrust can undermine even the best-laid plans for school improvement and change.


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In their examination of community schools as a strategy for education reform, Terrance L. Green and Mark Gooden examine the ways in which social, economic, and political forces beyond the schoolhouse doors influence students’ learning experiences and what school and community leaders can do to address their impact. In their article, “Transforming Out-of-School Challenges Into Opportunities: Community Schools Reform in the Urban Midwest,” the authors revisit the literature on community schools and use critical urban theory to highlight the possibilities associated with democratic urbanization as opposed to the market-based reforms that dominate education policy discourse today. Their case study of Mandela High School (pseudonym), a public, urban, low-income, majority–minority high school demonstrating positive student achievement gains, reveals how contextual factors, such as desegregation, deindustrialization, and school closures, led to challenging circumstances for schools, but also provided new opportunities for school leaders to engage in culturally relevant and community-centered leadership practice. In the final article, “Promise Neighborhoods: The Promise and Politics of Community Capacity Building as Urban School Reform,” Sonya Douglass Horsford and Carrie Sampson consider community capacity building within the context of the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods competitive grant program, which aims to improve schools in economically distressed neighborhoods through cross-sector collaboration and the leveraging of existing community assets and resources. Their case study of the Las Vegas Promise Neighborhood Initiative documents how a local community with a limited history of community organizing around education issues and very low capacity for implementing such an initiative engaged in community-building activities to position itself for a Promise Neighborhoods grant. Although unsuccessful in receiving funding, the initiative, which the authors examine according to conceptualizations of community capacity, underscores the challenges associated with community-based education reform in communities where social agency, economic resources, and effective coalitionbuilding is low. As such, the authors conclude, when it comes to competitive grant funding, “communities with the greatest needs are far too often the least able to obtain federal support.” The special issue concludes with a timely essay penned by Professor Rodney Hopson, which asks the question, “Why Are Studies of Neighborhoods and Communities Central to Education Policy and Reform?” Hopson’s reflections of these scholarly contributions, as situated within the larger context of sociopolitical, demographic, and economic change, push us to think beyond the school building and consider the broader “ecological contexts of schools, policies, and educational institutions.”


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Given the interdisciplinary nature of research on schools, neighborhoods, and communities and the multiple constituencies represented by communitybased reform, it is our hope that this special issue not only reflects a growing scholarly interest in this work but also inspires new lines of inquiry in education research and approaches to education leadership and policy within today’s accountability context. We wish to extend our sincere appreciation to H. Richard Milner IV, Editor of Urban Education, for his early support of this special issue, Joshua Childs for his consummate editorial assistance, our expert peer reviewers, and the entire editorial team and staff for making this volume possible.
