Transforming Out-of-School Challenges Into Opportunities: Community Schools Reform in the Urban...

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2014 49: 930Urban EducationTerrance L. Green and Mark A. Gooden

Community Schools Reform in the Urban MidwestTransforming Out-of-School Challenges Into Opportunities:

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Article

Transforming Out-of-School Challenges Into Opportunities: Community Schools Reform in the Urban Midwest

Terrance L. Green1 and Mark A. Gooden1

AbstractFor more than three decades, community schools have aimed to improve education and neighborhood outcomes in low-income, urban communities of color. In this article, we position community schools as a place-based reform strategy that pushes back on top-down accountability systems. While most research on urban school reform focuses on improving in-school factors, this study shifts the research lens to out-of-school factors that shape low-income, urban school-community contexts. The purpose of this study is to examine the out-of-school challenges that instigated a neighborhood-driven community school implementation in a racially diverse and low- to working-class community in the urban Midwest. Drawing on interviews and archival data, critical urban theory is used to guide our analysis. This case study details the political and socioeconomic out-of-school forces that preceded a community schools implementation. In doing so, we consider how school leaders can confront out-of-school challenges across similar urban contexts, and conclude with implications for future research.

1The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Corresponding Author:Terrance L. Green, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Administration, The University of Texas at Austin, 1912 Speedway D5400, Austin, TX 78712-1604, USA. Email: [email protected]

557643 UEXXXX10.1177/0042085914557643Urban EducationGreen and Goodenresearch-article2014

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Green and Gooden 931

Keywordsurban school reform, community schools, school-community relations

Introduction

Across the United States, top-down accountability reforms and policies have failed to transform urban schools of color and the neighborhoods in which they are located (Anyon, 2005a; Payne, 2008). Research suggests that this occurs for two reasons. First, urban school-communities are yet to be trans-formed because, as Noguera and Wells (2011) assert, “federal education pol-icy has not adequately addressed the ways in which poverty and inequality influence student learning and school performance” (p. 6). Second, most urban school reforms centrally focus on improving in-school factors, like instruction and student achievement, but disregard larger, out-of-school influences that shape urban schooling, such as structural racism, poverty, and inequitable resources (Berliner, 2009; Horsford, 2010b; Miller, Brown, & Hopson, 2011; Milner, 2013). The shift to include out-of-school challenges is part of a research tradition that recognizes the interplay between urban schools and community development, social inequality, and social justice (Anyon, 1997; Patterson & Silverman, 2013; Taylor, 2005; Warren, 2005).

To account for the critical link between urban school reform, place-based initiatives, and federal–local partnerships, President Obama established the Office of Urban Affairs (OUA) in 2009 (Taylor, McGlynn, & Luter, 2013). The OUA, along with the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has launched sev-eral holistic and place-based initiatives that aim to address urban education, housing, and their community-based context. Some of these initiatives include Promise Neighborhoods, Choice Neighborhoods, and the Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative (NRI). This move by the Obama administration recognizes that sustainable urban school reform has to “start in and with the community” (Matthews, 1996, p. 11).

At the state and local levels, community schools (defined below) have been making strong connections between education and place for the past three decades (Dryfoos & Maguire, 2002; Warren, 2005). Community schools aim to build neighborhood-wide social capital and position productive part-nerships as an integral component to school and neighborhood improvements (Blank, Jacobson, & Melaville, 2012; Warren, 2005). Still, despite the long-standing implementation of community schools across the United States, relatively few empirical studies in peer-reviewed journals focus on leader-ship in community schools (Ruffin & Brooks, 2010).1 Most empirical research on community schools leadership has focused on the principal’s role



932 Urban Education 49(8)

(Ruffin & Brooks, 2010), boundary-spanning leaders (Adams & Jean-Marie, 2011; Blank, Berg, & Melaville, 2006; Jean-Marie & Curry, 2012; Jean-Marie, Ruffin, & Burr, 2010), and democratic leadership models (Ruffin & Brooks, 2010)—which is defined by its inclusive practices, boundary-span-ning networks, and shared responsibility to improve schools and communi-ties. Research, however, has given even less attention to the ways that school leaders—especially administrators and teacher leaders—can confront larger, out-of-school challenges that provoke place-based reforms like community schools. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the out-of-school challenges that sparked a neighborhood-driven community school implementation in a racially diverse and low- to working-class community in the urban Midwest. In doing so, we explore how out-of-school challenges can be confronted by local actors, particularly school leaders. To define out-of-school challenges, we draw on Berliner’s (2009) and Milner’s (2013) research and operational-ize the term to mean community factors that significantly affect the health, learning opportunities, in-school experiences, and outcomes of children. The central research question for this study is, what out-of-school challenges pre-ceded the implementation of a full-service, university-assisted community school reform in a racially diverse and low- to working-class community? In turn, we assert that investigating ways that school leaders can address out-of-school factors can foster accountability within the local school-community context.

To begin, we review the literature on community schools. Then, we describe how critical urban theory guided our analysis and discuss our meth-ods for this research. Next, we analyze the political and socioeconomic out-of-school forces that sparked a community schools reform, and explore ways that school leaders can confront out-of-school challenges that arise in similar urban contexts. Finally, we conclude with implications for future research.

Community Schools in the United States

Situating schools within a community-based context has a long history in the United States that is interwoven throughout three particular periods: African American schools during the post-emancipation era (Anderson, 1988), pre-Brown v. Board of Education (1954) African American schools (Horsford, 2011; Khalifa, 2012; Rodgers, 1975; Savage, 2001; Siddle Walker, 1996), and the democratic, community-education movement in the early 20th century (Dewey, 1915). More centrally positioned within a Deweyan (1915) tradition, community schools epitomize reform efforts that link education and place. For Dewey (1915), education was essential




to social change, and schools were primary institutions to buttress democ-racy and strong communities.

In the 1990s, the Children’s Aid Society, in collaboration with the New York City Public Schools, established one of the pioneering and most well-known community schools in the United States (Dryfoos & Maguire, 2002; Warren, 2005). Since then, the number of community schools has grown rap-idly, and today there are approximately 4,000 to 5,000 community schools in the United States (R. Jacobson, personal communication, December 6, 2013), but they are still underrepresented compared with the number of public (non-community schools), private, and charter schools, on a national level.

Moreover, community schools aim to transform local education institu-tions into neighborhood hubs and provide a range of services for students, parents, and community members, such as social, health, adult education, and financial support (Dryfoos & Maguire, 2002; Melaville, 2004). Researchers from the Coalition for Community Schools define these schools as follows:

. . . A place and set of partnerships connecting a school, the families of students, and the surrounding community. A community school is distinguished by an integrated focus on academics, youth development, family support, health and social services, and community development. Community schools extend the days and week, reaching students, their families, and community residents in unique ways. Community schools are thus uniquely equipped to develop their students into educated citizens who are ready and able to give back to their communities. (Blank et al., 2012, p. 1)

Ultimately, the goal of community schools is to improve education outcomes, in addition to developing stronger communities.

The data on community schools show promise across academic and neigh-borhood indicators (Blank et al., 2006; Blank et al., 2012; Blank, Jacobson, & Shah, 2003; Dryfoos & Maguire, 2002; Officer, Grim, Medina, Bringle, & Foreman, 2013; Ruffin & Brooks, 2010; Warren, 2005). Academically, for example, community schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma, have outperformed their non-community schools counterparts on state exams in math and reading by 32 and 19 points, respectively (Blank et al., 2012). In an evaluation of 20 community schools, Blank et al. (2003) found that community schools dem-onstrated improvements across several in-school metrics like student grades, student behavior, teacher attitudes, and homework completion percentages.

In Cincinnati, Ohio, after implementing a community schools reform, a high school significantly transformed an 84% drop-out rate at the 10th-grade level into a 100% school graduation rate in three years (Melaville, Jacobson, & Blank, 2011). Furthermore, the positive impacts of community schools




have spread beyond the schoolhouse and into local communities. Warren (2005) argues that community schools have demonstrated “some broader revitalizations to neighborhoods” (p. 145) and built productive connections with parents, community members, and community-based organizations.

Community schools, however, have been critiqued for several shortcom-ings despite the aim to strengthen the relationship between local schools and communities. Some scholars contend that earlier research on community schools took on deficit notions about local communities, particularly ones of color, neighborhood stakeholders, and fell short of igniting large-scale com-munity transformations (Naverez-La Torre & Hidalgo, 1997; Schutz, 2006). Research has also shown that in some community schools, parents are viewed as recipients of services rather than as transformative agents who are able to name and change their realities (Keith, 1996).

In addition, Schutz (2006) argues that community schools myopically focus on “interagency [collaborations] rather than broader community coop-eration” (p. 709), which has the potential to stimulate neighborhood-wide changes. Pushing back on these and other critiques, however, Blank et al. (2003) contend that community schools are anchored in a strength-based approach that celebrates community support. Like most reforms, after three decades of implementation, community schools continue to wrestle with ten-sions around strengths and limitations. To this end, when considering place and community-based school reforms that extend beyond the schoolhouse, community schools could present a viable option.

Conceptual Framework: Critical Urban Theory

In theoretically framing and guiding this study, we draw on critical urban theory (Brenner, 2009; Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2011; Castells, 1977; Harvey, 2003). Critical urban theory first emerged as a counter perspective to “mainstream” urban theory in the field of urban sociology (Brenner, 2009, p. 198). Establishing clear lines of demarcation, critical urban theory is an out-growth and break from the traditional Chicago School of urban sociology that is anchored in notions of neoliberalism and technocratic policy science (Brenner, 2009). Traditional urban theorists interrogate how cities change over time, urban life, and the way that cities are constructed.

Conversely, critical urban theory, according to Brenner (2009), is used to identify radical urban literature during the post-1968 epoch by scholars like David Harvey, Manuel Castells, and Henri Lefebvre, to name a few. Brenner further asserts that critical urban theory “insists that another, more demo-cratic, socially just and sustainable form of urbanization is possible, even if such possibilities are currently being suppressed through dominant




institutions arrangements, practices, and ideologies” (p. 198). These scholars investigate the interplay between political economy, space, and cultural poli-tics (Lipman, 2011). Anchored in the Frankfurt School’s notion of critical theory and urban sociology, critical urban theory rejects market-based forms of (urban) knowledge and focuses on socio-politically contested urban space (Brenner, 2009; Gotham, 2010).

Critical urban theorists also celebrate notions of social justice, equity, and aim for “urban praxis—a fusion of urban knowledge and practice” (Gotham, 2010, p. 939). Critical urban theorists examine the social, political, economic, and racial injustices within urban communities and cities (Lipman, 2011). Marcuse (2009) argues that critical urban theory has utility and resistance in exposing, proposing, and politicizing. That is, those working from a critical urban theory perspective seek to expose roots of problems, propose strategies to address them, and politicize and implement an organized action plan (Marcuse, 2009).

In the field of education, strands of critical urban theory can be seen in the work of several scholars (Anyon, 2005b; Apple, 2001; Lipman, 2003, 2011) who take a critical theoretical perspective to research and acknowledge that urban schooling occurs in socially, economically, and politically constrained urban spaces. Some scholars illustrate the connections between critical urban theory and critical race theories to show the salience of racism across educa-tion and community settings (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Lipman, 2011). Further, education researchers working from a critical urban lens cri-tique neoliberal and market-based urban school reforms and call attention to the larger, community-based, out-of-school factors that affect urban commu-nities, and in turn urban schools (Anyon, 2005a; Berliner, 2006, 2009; Lipman, 2011; Milner, 2013).

To this end, we use critical urban theory to guide our analysis with a par-ticular focus on its aim to address political and socioeconomic injustices within urban communities. Critical urban theory illuminates the interplay of detrimental education policies and the sociopolitical, structural, and eco-nomic inequities in play at the state, city, and urban neighborhood levels. This theoretical framing, therefore, provides a community-relevant contex-tual lens for urban school reform—which acknowledges out-of-school fac-tors—that are missing from the recent education policy debate that narrowly focuses on test scores and sanctions-driven accountability (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009). We additionally draw on this study’s data and critical urban theory’s praxis of exposing, proposing, and politicizing to structure our suggestions about ways that school leaders can confront out-of-school chal-lenges. Next, we describe our methods, the study’s context, and our findings.




Method

This study is drawn from a larger cross-case study that examined two second-ary community school reform efforts that worked on improving education and community outcomes. To identify schools, we used purposeful and net-work sampling (Creswell, 2012; Glesne, 1999) and contacted the Coalition for Community Schools. The Coalition for Community Schools helped us identify schools that met our sampling criteria. The school in this case study—which we refer to as Mandela High School (MHS, pseudonym)2—met the following criteria: (a) public, urban high school located in an inner city (not rural or suburban); (b) high school and local community predomi-nantly populated with students of color from low-income backgrounds; and (c) showing positive improvements according to graduation rates, student achievement, and school-community partnerships indicators.

Data Collection

Semi-structured interviews were the primary data source for this study. We also reviewed document and archival data about the high school, its closing between 1995 and 2000, and the local community over a 6-month period. Interviews were conducted with 32 school and community stakeholders in total, including principals (the previous three principals), assistant principals, teachers, community members, leaders of local neighborhood centers, and leaders from a local partnering university (i.e., State University). However, we mainly draw on interviews with 10 school and community leaders (e.g., principals, community center directors, leaders from a local university, and school-community directors) and use the other 22 interviews to flesh out the findings. These 10 participants’ voices were intentionally centered because they were identified as the most actively involved in the work (see Table 1).

Every interview was digitally recorded. Our interview questions focused on (a) what were the school and community like before the reform; (b) what were the in-school and larger, out-of-school challenges of implementing the community school reform strategy; (c) how and who addressed these chal-lenges; and (d) what actions did principals and community leaders take to implement the community schools reform strategy? Each interview lasted between 30 min and 2 hours.

Data Analysis

To analyze the data, we took several steps. First, we transcribed the inter-views and field notes. Second, we listed every out-of-school challenge that




preceded the community school implementation. Third, we gave each chal-lenge a descriptive code. Then, we organized the codes into the most similar categories to create axial codes, which identified emerging relationships between the codes (Creswell, 2012).

In places where discrepancies emerged, we re-read interviews and field notes, and contacted participants to ensure that our interpretations were con-sistent with their experiences (Merriam, 1998). Fourth, we organized the challenges into larger themes and used the constant comparative method to test the emerging categories throughout the data analysis process (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Fifth, we analyzed the emerging findings in relation to critical urban theory’s acknowledgement that urban schooling occurs in political and socioeconomically constrained spaces.

Limitations and Trustworthiness

Like all research projects, this study has limitations. First, this study centers on school and community leader viewpoints. Though these perspectives are important, parent and student voices were absent from this study. Second, due to the sample size, we do not presume to generalize the findings of this study to larger populations. Instead, we aimed to develop an understanding of why out-of-school factors are important and how they could be addressed to inform those in similar contexts.

Therefore, to enhance the trustworthiness of the findings, we used debrief-ings at the end of each interview and conducted member checks with

Table 1. Participants’ Profiles.

Name Leadership position Organization

Morgan Former principal Mandela High SchoolLeslie Former principal Mandela High SchoolTracey Former principal Mandela High SchoolCarol Community leader Local UniversityVinnie School-community director Mandela High SchoolRachael Director Greenland Community CenterDr. Charles Director Northgate Community CenterLois Community partner Local University and Community

Edu. TaskforceIsabella Community partner Local University and Community

Edu. TaskforceRayford Community partner Local University




participants (Creswell, 2012). We also triangulated interviews and document sources. Also, we sent the manuscript to participants for feedback, and to confirm that our paper was a trustworthy representation of their viewpoints.

Community Context

MHS is located in a close-knit, racially diverse and lower to working-class community comprised of three neighborhoods. The Jackson, Greenland, and Northgate neighborhoods (pseudonyms) are adjoined and predominantly have African American, Latino/a, and White residents. MHS draws students from all three neighborhoods. Together, the neighborhoods (i.e., community) have almost 14,000 residents and nearly 4,000 of them are school-aged chil-dren. Each neighborhood has a community center that has been rooted in the respective neighborhoods for over 100 years. Dr. Charles, the director of the Northgate Community Center, described the community centers as, “ . . . grassroots entities that represent the will of the people.”

Community Centers as Anchor Institutions

During the 19th century, the community was home to several immigrant groups, and at that time, the three community centers were originally settle-ment houses for immigrant families moving into the area. By the turn of the 20th century, the three neighborhoods became home to Irish Catholics, Germans, and Slovenes, and by World War II (WWII), the area had also become a residence for African Americans and low-income Whites from Appalachia. More recently, the community centers have transformed into organizations that provide social, education, health, financial, and a host of other services to neighborhood residents. Throughout the years, the commu-nity centers have worked within and across neighborhoods and have pro-vided a sense of stability for the community. According to Rachael, the director of the Greenland Community Center:

We were very fortunate to have three community centers almost within a stone’s throw of Mandela [High School] and those give a lot of stability to the school. And I am ready for the 4th generation of families that I serve here. This agency has been open for more than 90 years and I have two senior citizens that have been coming here for more than 66 years.

Given their long history in the neighborhoods, the community centers serve as a durable connection between school, community, and the people within them.




Race and class inequities have historically been prominent community issues. In 2012, the community was one of the most racially and socioeco-nomically diverse communities in the state with 32% African American, 31% Latino/a, 31% White, and 6% mix-raced. However, only 7.4% of neighbor-hood members have any type of college degree and only 66% of neighbor-hood residents 18 and older have obtained a high school diploma. Morgan, a former principal stated, “Typically [this] has been an area of the community with [few] people with college degrees. We still tend to graduate 1/4 to 1/3 of our students who are first generation [high school] graduates.”

Economically, the community has a long-standing history of being known as a low-income part of the city. Not taking a deficit perspective, but explain-ing external perceptions about the community, an educator said, “The color of the faces have changed over the years [but] . . . It’s always, always, always, been one of the poorest areas of the city. Who that lowest of the lower class changes, but they’re always here.” Wrestling with tension about how the community is viewed, a community leader pushed back on the pervasive poverty narrative about the area. Isabella contended, “Hold on, let’s go back to this poverty thing . . . When you talk to some of the kids they will tell you [that] they don’t see themselves as poor or [living in poverty].” Despite the community’s low educational attainment rate and other neighborhood chal-lenges, school and community leaders intentionally focused on community assets. A former principal, Tracey, said, “This is a very poor area of the city, but there are some incredible assets here.”

School Context

MHS opened in 1927, and over the years the school became known for hav-ing a strong athletic program and for being a hub of the community. In fact, several athletes from Mandela went on to play professional sports. Despite this reputation, the school produced standard to substandard academic results for decades. By the 1990s, MHS and other schools in the community were significantly affected by several social forces (which we discuss below) that impacted test scores, school-community connections, and the resources at the school. In 1995, MHS was closed and it remained so until 2000. After being closed for 5 years, MHS reopened with strong neighborhood support as a full-service, university-assisted community school. With support from com-munity leaders and members, a local university, and other community-based organizations, the new MHS graduated its first class in 2006. Since then, the school has increased graduation rates by 30% (47% to 77%) between 2009 and 2011, galvanized over 70 community partners, and strengthened school-community relations.




By 2012, the school’s demographics were reflective of the community’s racial makeup. As Tracey, a former principal, noted:

We have this real diverse mixture . . . So, it’s been real important for us as a school that everyone feels that their ethnicity and their racial heritage is valued, regardless of who they are and what their background [is].

Specifically, the school’s racial demographics were 34% White, 31% Latino/a, 30% African American, and 5% multi-racial, which also mirrors the administrative team’s racial composition.

Community schools reform strategy. Given the purpose of this study, we do not focus on the community school reform strategy that reopened the school. In addition, the specific community school reform strategy is discussed else-where (Bringle, Officer, Grim, & Hatcher, 2009; Officer et al., 2013). How-ever, we do provide some context about the community school reform implementation in broad-brush strokes.

In implementing the community school reform strategy, actors from a local university, community center directors, and neighborhood residents organized and worked to reopen the high school. Together, these stakeholders took three overarching actions to implement the community schools reform strategy. First, leaders from the community centers and neighborhood residents partnered with a local university to assist with their grassroots efforts to reopen MHS. Although the community centers had a form of grassroots social capital, they needed the social capital of a university to add research expertise, resources, and a larger institutional backing. Second, the leaders established a community-driven edu-cation taskforce, which focused on organizing support from neighborhood resi-dents to reopen and sustain the school once it was opened. Third, the stakeholders developed critical relationships with over 70 community-based organizations like the local university, churches, community centers, local parks, and the city that facilitate a mutual sharing of assets to improve school and community con-ditions. In the next section, we describe our findings about the out-of-school challenges that instigated the community school reform.

Findings: Out-of-School Challenges That Instigated the Reform

Participants in this study indicated that several out-of-school challenges sparked the community school implementation. Using critical urban theory as a conceptual framework, these out-of-school challenges can be understood as intersecting political and socioeconomic forces. Importantly, these findings




are not intended to be causal, but rather present participant perspectives. These findings further contribute to our understanding about the affects of out-of-school forces on urban school-community context, and elucidate that contem-porary urban school-community conditions must be examined historically. We next present and discuss each challenge.

Political Force: The Corrosive Impacts of School Desegregation Policies

School desegregation policy has a long history in this city. In 1949, the state passed an anti-school desegregation statute that was intended to repeal school segregation laws. As such, decades before the community schools reform was implemented, the political force of school desegregation policies had been shaping the out-of-school community context in the city, like in many other school districts in the urban Midwest. In turn, school desegregation policies had adverse impacts on local schooling. In our interviews, we heard about how school desegregation policies served a major blow to school-com-munity relations, and was a lingering challenge to urban education across the district and especially in the MHS community.

More specifically, in 1973, a district court judge ordered one-way busing, which meant only Black students were bused from the inner-city school dis-trict to six surrounding township school districts, while White students were not bused at all. The busing order was implemented because the district was found guilty of de jure segregation two years earlier. The one-way busing decree was highly contested by Black and White parents, but it remained in place for the next 20 years despite its adverse effects.

Extracting resources from the district. We learned from participants that the busing order was primarily responsible for declining student enrollments in the district. Only busing Black students from the city to predominantly White suburban school districts proved to be detrimental to the school district, local schools, and the Mandela school-community. Specifically, participants told us that the one-way busing order had corrosive impacts on the district’s fiscal resources. A community leader, Carol, explained,

The money to support the student follows the student . . . So when the district lost all of these students, because with desegregation, the money went to the township districts. But here is the trick, but most of the time when the revenue goes with the child the expense should go as well . . . [But] what the judge did was required that the district pays the cost of the students who were being bused out of their district.




Put simply, Tracey concluded, “It is [during the one-way busing order] when you started to see the district struggling financially.” While the judge’s theory may have been palatable to some, the implementation process was destructive to MHS’ community relationship. In addition, Carol explained how the busing order impacted the school district on student enrollment:

You’ve got to understand the busing order. School closings across the district were the direct result of the busing order . . . At the time the desegregation order started, the school district’s population was somewhere in the 70,000 to 80,000 students. It was a very large school system . . . the judge said the schools in were far too segregated and he wanted to see the schools desegregated.

The school desegregation busing order foreshadows how the school district’s enrollment shrunk, which had a profound impact on MHS.

Shattering school-community connections. The school desegregation busing policy came at no small cost to the neighborhoods as it shattered school-community connections. Tracey explained the impacts on the Mandela school-community dynamic:

It [the school desegregation busing order] was a community killer. We went from community neighborhood schools to [it being] completely changed. I don’t even know how you describe what it was changed into . . . It broke up neighborhoods. They were busing kids from the east side of town in the name of [racial] balancing. It really changed a lot of the feelings about the district and things in the city.

Sharing these sentiments, an educator further described the school-com-munity impacts of the busing order as follows:

Families got separated; kids were going to schools all over the city, and the community network and the schools, completely shattered! . . . The end result of that was kind of a breakdown of the communities and the schools, and a lack of connection.

Although the school desegregation policies were intended to assuage racially segregated housing and school patterns, it was more instrumental in eroding school-community connections. Carol continued and explained the quandary that the busing order put the school district and Mandela in:

The school district is stuck then with a shrinking student enrollment, and they obviously had to release teachers because they did not have the




enrollment to support having those students. They still had money leaving their budget to pay for these kids who now were not coming to their schools. That meant they had empty buildings. And they had buildings that then could not be maintained because the funding was not there. And so as a result buildings all over the city closed. And the Mandela High School neighborhood got hit really hard!

By the 1990s, the busing order was still in motion and its impacts were still felt, as it operated under the pretext of school choice. The school district established that parents could choose the schools that they wanted their chil-dren to attend. Even with school choice, the policy was still key in splintering the connection between schools and their local communities, especially MHS. The busing order extracted resources from the school district, ostensi-bly in the name of desegregation. Perhaps the judge’s policy was premised on a flawed theory, or implemented with poor intentions. Regardless of inten-tions, in the end, the school desegregation busing policy fostered a context for neighborhood school closures that in turn became an unfavorable school and community consequence, which would be experienced for the next three decades.

Socioeconomic Forces: Neighborhood School Closures and Deindustrialization

We learned from participants that school closures across the district were a direct result of the court-ordered busing mandate. The Mandela school-community was one of the hardest hit areas in terms of school closings. Due to declining student enrollment and resources as well as achievement scores, in the early 1990s, the district threatened to close several schools in the community, including MHS. To resist school closure, MHS school-community stakeholders protested, attended board meetings to speak against the closing, and even chained themselves to the school. Morgan, a former principal, recalled, “The alumni and community came out like crazy [and were] upset about the district closing the school down.” Despite this outpouring of community support manifested in palpable resistance, the school district moved forward and closed MHS in 1995, and it remained closed for 5 years.

Closing the high school and its feeder schools left the community with zero public schools, which according to all participants was damaging and created formidable educational challenges to students across the entire com-munity on multiple levels. A community center director, Rachael, described the impacts on high school attendance rates:




. . . they destroyed our kids from going to high school. I think only like 30% were going to high school from our neighborhood . . . We just did not have anybody going [to high school] . . . We could see that our neighborhood was going down.

Sharing similar sentiments, Dr. Charles, the director of the Northgate Community Center, noted, “I think the drop-out rate went up to 70% and 80%.” Given the racial diversity across the community, MHS’ closure had adverse impacts on African Americans, Latino/as, and low-income Whites who lived in the neighborhoods. It is important to note that drop-out/push-out rates increased because schools were systematically closed throughout the community and not because students no longer wanted to attend school.

The impact of school closures on the local economy. In particular, the school closure negatively impacted the local economy and spurred residential flight for those who could afford to move. Rachael explained:

. . . The businesses on Adams Street that had supported Mandela because students would come there and teachers would come there were all boarded up and closed. And you know how that is. People, who could move, moved, and if they couldn’t sell their house they rented their house [or] sold it on contract. It was that continual downward spiral of what happens when education is absent from your community.

While MHS was closed, we learned from participants that economic development decreased and crime qualitatively increased. A former princi-pal, Morgan, stated, “So, you’ve got crime rate going up because you got kids not being in school. You got drop-out rate increasing and graduation rates decreasing, which then the impact is going to be in economic development.” The school closures in turn magnified local poverty that was exacerbated by deindustrialization and a waning local economy. As Leslie, a former principal noted,

When the school was closed it was devastating to the neighborhood. At the same time there were a lot of economic downturn in the country, so closing the school meant that a lot of businesses failed around the school; there were empty businesses that were gone . . . everything was boarded up . . . [and there were] largely boarded up store fronts, vacant lots.

We next discuss the impacts of the declining economy on the community context.




The impacts of deindustrialization on the community. To further compound the declining local economy, deindustrialization caused several manufacturing plants to close during the 1990s and early 2000s. Deindustrialization is a significant reduction of manufacturing jobs in a region that contributes to economic and social changes. As the economic conditions began to change across the United States, the Mandela school-community was caught in the thick of things. Leslie, a former principal, noted:

The community has always been a community of industrial workers [and] low paying jobs. So as the economy has changed in the U.S. and the economy has gone flat, so has the local economy. We are not too far from where the GM (General Motors) bus and truck plant was; it’s closed down. A lot of those jobs that were here are no longer here.

The mass exodus of manufacturing jobs was another crucial blow to the community’s stability. Deindustrialization was not an issue unique to this community, but other cities in the urban Midwest experienced similar prob-lems. Further explaining the effect of closing Mandela and the other schools on the community, a former principal, Leslie, stated:

The economic backbone of the community was decreasing and that was the small business community . . . With the absence of schools, decrease in small businesses, you then had an abandoning of houses and you also had houses that were not being kept up very well.

Collectively, the busing order had a profound impact on the district’s resources, school closings, and in turn the local economy. Given these politi-cal and socioeconomic out-of-school challenges, in the next section, we dis-cuss how school and community stakeholders could confront such out-of-school challenges.

Confronting Out-of-School Challenges Through School Leadership

In consequence of the political and socioeconomic forces that shaped this community’s out-of-school context, we use critical urban theory as a frame-work to explore ways that school leaders can confront out-of-school chal-lenges that significantly affect learning opportunities for students in urban contexts. We specifically situate our discussion within critical urban theory’s exposing, proposing, and politicizing conceptual precepts to make implica-tions for school leaders. Importantly, due to the complex challenges that




urban contexts encounter, transformation will require a broader policy inter-vention in addition to school-community stakeholder support. While we agree that more resources should be directed toward urban school-communi-ties using place and community-based strategies, we focus on how current school leaders, particularly administrators and teachers, in these contexts can start to confront out-of-school challenges.3

For current school leaders in urban contexts where out-of-school forces constrain urban schooling, these leaders should consider critical urban theo-ry’s premise that another more democratic and socially just urban community is possible (Brenner, 2009). Therefore, at the core, school leaders should gain a deeper and asset-based understanding about the communities in which their schools are situated (Horsford, 2010a; Khalifa, 2012). In doing this, school leaders could work collaboratively with a range of community-based stake-holders, including students, families, community and business leaders, clergy, and community members to broaden their collective, community understand-ing and raise consciousness about the political and socioeconomic forces that shape their local context. To practically do so, we offer several actions that are not intended to be a step-by-step process, but rather guiding action-based principles.

Exposing, Proposing, and Politicizing Out-of-School Challenges

First, we agree with Horsford’s (2010a) assertion that school leaders should conduct, “ . . . informal interviews that capture the experiential knowledge of people who have been marginalized, underserved, or silenced in a particular community” (p. 311). An ongoing project such as this would require school leaders to spend considerable amounts of time in the local community to hear the voices of the community. A significant portion of the interview questions should focus on the history of desegregation in the district and how it has impacted the school-community. Next, as these interviews, oral histories, and even videos are collected, school leaders could organize community dia-logues (e.g., meeting, event) to respectfully share and discuss these commu-nity “artifacts” and what they mean to the school. These community dialogues could be held at local churches, community centers, barbershops, hair salons, Laundromats, and even the school.

During these community dialogues, stakeholders should candidly discuss their experiences while school leaders listen intently with their heads and hearts to more deeply understand the out-of-school challenges that have, and continue to, perpetuate people’s marginalization and underservice. The school leaders should also share what they have learned about the community from their interviews. Through this ongoing dialogue, learning about




out-of-school challenges becomes a community-wide struggle where all stakeholders can expose and understand the intersecting dynamics of margin-alization—across racial, economic, political, and social lines—and how it manifests in and outside of the schoolhouse.

In addition, these ongoing community dialogues offer a framework to col-lectively expose the root causes of out-of-school challenges as well as help school leaders become more empathetic to the inequities in their school-com-munity context. As Khalifa (2012) notes, this work is especially important for school leaders who serve in urban communities of color because if they “ . . . ignore the historical cultural relationships with, and behaviors of, local com-munity leaders [they] may have difficulty building trust—an essential com-ponent of effective community leadership” (Khalifa, 2012, p. 428). Thus, such a collective project will help all stakeholders understand how historical inequities have shaped contemporary school-community conditions so they can begin to think about proposing culturally, politically, and economically centered strategies.

Second, school leaders can expose how out-of-school challenges affect students’ learning experiences through conducting equity audits with families and community members (Frattura & Capper, 2007; Skrla, McKenzie, & Scheurich, 2009). Conducting equity audits can help school and community actors such as teachers, students, parents, community leaders, and adminis-trators understand how larger societal and institutional forces track students into lower-level classes, because of socially constructed differences. Equity audit information can help these stakeholders understand data around student achievement, graduation rates, suspensions, and teacher assignments, to name a few.

All data should be disaggregated and examined by race, class, gender, ability, language, and sexuality. As data trends emerge, an essential question that school leaders should be asking is, “does our school disrupt or perpetuate out-of-school inequities” like stratifying students’ educational experiences by race and gender, for example. School leaders should share equity audit data with the community in neighborhood-based spaces. In turn, while sharing these data, school leaders should solicit and implement community input and advocacy about solutions. Then, school and community leaders could estab-lish an organic accountability system to ensure that equity audit goals and solutions are being implemented with fidelity. That is, stakeholders from the school-community should be assigned to monitor the progress of the goals, and these data should be shared with the neighborhood on a monthly basis.

Third, school and community stakeholders could regularly conduct cultur-ally centered community walks (McKenzie & Scheurich, 2004). The purpose of the community walks is not to gather deficit-based evidence for




why students may be underperforming. Instead, the goal is to gain a richer understanding of the community and to identify areas where the school leader can advocate on behalf of community issues. The culturally centered com-munity walk provides an opportunity for the leader to start to propose strate-gies to support the school-community challenges.

Benefits notwithstanding, for some school stakeholders, the community walk is frankly an unsettling experience because they typically drive through or drive by these neighborhoods to get to work. But conducting a culturally centered community walk is necessary because it enables school leaders to better understand community members’ perspectives about school-commu-nity changes (Khalifa, 2012). An advantage to completing the culturally cen-tered community walk is that participants can become more proficient at asking questions that expand their thinking beyond the school’s four walls and start to view schools as part of a larger social context. Prior to conducting the culturally centered community walk, school leaders should research the history of the community through local newspapers, websites, oral histories, and other local databases. An added benefit of this research is that it can be integrated into the school’s curriculum in a manner that is culturally relevant. In this way, participants often find out how the fabric of the school-commu-nity relationship has been strained, stretched, and sometimes torn by out-of-school challenges.

The community walks can create opportunities for school leaders to engage and work in solidarity with parents and community-based organiza-tions around out-of-school challenges. In putting action to the community walk (and the other suggestions) and making it more meaningful, efforts to equitably improve both school and community outcomes must remain cen-tral. Meaningful undertakings should be discussed such as anti-violence cam-paigns, supporting neighborhood residents in foreclosure, strategies for equitable economic development, and reduction of illegal substance use and distribution, to name a few. Siddle Walker (1993, 2009) chronicles the incred-ible influence gained during the segregation period by school leaders who committed to supporting the community through actions like speaking with college recruiters at parents’ request, attending and participating in key com-munity meetings, and advocating for parents before the school board. In much the same way, leaders must have an understanding of contemporary issues facing the community and be prepared to take action in support of community members.

Finally, school closings in urban communities represent a highly politi-cized solution that often excludes the perspectives of people that live in these communities. Promoting school closures as a solution to “underperforming” schools, though filled with much fanfare, minimizes the value of a school to




a community and bases a school’s worth or success on limited, myopic met-rics and definitions. Any strategy in response to school closures carries politi-cal ramifications for leaders. Hence, after exposing roots of problems using the project and the equity audit, school leaders and community stakeholders together must propose strategies to address the issues. This involves politiciz-ing and implementing an organized action plan (Marcuse, 2009). Below we briefly describe how that can play out.

School leaders, then, could create allies with community stakeholders across heterogeneous groups who can support them and their school. Indeed, our findings revealed that community members led the charge to reopen the school. School leaders are in the best position to galvanize the community to gain support prior to a school closing. While forging community-based allies, principals could document, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how these coalitions support the work of learning in the school and community. After getting this support, leaders are uniquely positioned to speak against the com-munity-based damages of school closure because they can then do so with a collective school-community voice, which provides some social insulation for school leaders.

While closures may be an appropriate response for businesses, it is highly politicized strategy in the urban context. Hence, the urban school principal is most suitably situated to make the argument of how closure is not good for students and the community, as it only contributes to the historical forces that brought about so much instability in these communities, as we noted above. In proposing viable strategies for the school, school leaders should draw upon the data collected during their culturally centered community walks, equity audits, and school-community coalitions.

Future Research

Finally, this study offers several implications for future research. First, given the escalating crisis of urban school closures (Deeds & Pattillo, 2014), future research could explore how and to what extent communities respond to urban school closings. Gaining a better understanding of how urban communities respond to school closings would be useful in the current context where school closures is becoming a more common response to underperforming schools.

Future research could explore urban school takeovers by for-profit organi-zations with corporate-driven agendas. Research as such could examine how school-communities respond to such challenges. Second, further research is needed to better understand how school leaders and students work collabora-tively with community stakeholders to implement school reform and




equitable community development efforts that push back on out-of-school challenges. Such a study could make a needed contribution to the literature at the intersection of school reform and community development. In sum, we attempted to illustrate how school and community stakeholders can become accountable to local school-community context through transforming out-of-school challenges into opportunities to implement reform in urban school-communities.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors of Urban Education as well as the anony-mous reviewers for their helpful feedback on the article. The authors would also like to deeply thank the participants in this study for their time and willingness to share their practice with us.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Advanced Opportunity Fellowship (AOF) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison funded a portion of this research.

Notes

1. Several evaluation reports have been written on community schools, which is important. However, this study focused on and primarily reviewed empirical research in peer-reviewed journals.

2. Pseudonyms are used to describe all people and places.3. Horsford’s (2010b) text New Perspectives in Educational Leadership: Exploring

Social, Political, and Community Contexts and Meaning is one of the few studies that explores school leadership and out-of-school urban contexts.

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Author Biographies

Terrance L. Green, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Educational Administration. His research focuses on the intersection of urban school reform and equitable community development, with a particular focus on school and community leadership. His research has appeared in The Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Diversity and Equity, and he has forthcoming works in Teachers College Record and Journal of School Leadership.

Mark A. Gooden, PhD, serves as an Associate Professor in the Educational Administration Department. He is also Director of The University of Texas at Austin Principalship Program (UTAPP) and current President of University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). His research interests include the principalship, anti-racist leadership, urban educational leadership and legal issues in education. His research has appeared in Educational Administration Quarterly, The Journal of Negro Education, Journal of School Leadership, Education and Urban Society, Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal, and The Sage Handbook of African American Education.



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