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Joanna Miller

Fostering Collaboration between Schools and Urban Communities - 4 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...school-reform_b_1026075.html

urban school reform huffington post school reform

shared by Joanna Miller on 17 May 12 - No Cached
  • Joanna Miller on 17 May 12
     
    I got ahead of myself and posted before I highlighted or captured...i'll have to experiment more closely with Diigo on my next post! I thought this article was interesting because it adds the community component to urban school reform. "Community-based organizations that deal with issues such as housing, health, and regeneration would profit from partnering with schools and working together to improve the lot and the education of children living in these areas as a means of benefiting both schools and the community." This intrigued me as it is a reminder if a child's basic needs are not being met (shelter, health, etc) then school is going to be on the back burner. This collaboration between school and community seems to be a piece to the reform puzzle.
  • ...2 more comments...
  • Craig Willey on 17 May 12
     
    Glad you brought this up, Joanna. Related to this, I have been trying to track down former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington's plan for school reform in the early 80's. His planned notably elevated the role (and power) of Local School Councils (LSCs), formal committee that are constituted of mostly parents, but also community members and 1-2 teachers, and formally charged with overseeing the direction and administration of the school. It's definitely an under-employed model that challenges traditional top-down styles of management (e.g. Daley and now, Rahm Emanuel) that insinuate that parents and communities don't actually have valuable insights into how to make schools work for them. Remember, Chicago schools are run by the Mayor via a mayoral-appointed school board. This is what is being proposed in the Mind Trust proposal overhaul of IPS (but that I have heard David Harris, the architect of the plan, regrets including). Importantly, turning over control of Milwaukee Public Schools to the Mayor's office was recently voted down.
  • Leah Burton on 18 May 12
     
    I think this article brings up some great ideas and points about urban school reform. Joanna, I think you are absolutely right that the collaboration between school and community seems to be a piece of the reform puzzle. It feels like a lot of the reform attempts are decided at the top and then simply pressed upon the bottom; there is no communication between parties about what would work and be best for the students. Getting the community involved could be a great step towards improving the education in these schools--the more people, groups, organizations, etc. that are on the same page, the better! Craig, the plan you are attempting to find from the 80s sounds quite interesting as well; was the plan actually implemented? If so, I wonder how it affected the schools.
  • Craig Willey on 18 May 12
     
    Yes, it was implemented, but I am not sure how fully. Mayor Washington died while in office, and the plan was quite a radical departure from the way urban schools historically were - and still are - run. So, as you can imagine, it was maintained without fidelity (LSCs still exist, but to varying widely in their effectiveness and with much of their power stripped) and other critical parts of the plan were dismantled.
  • Randy Ebright on 18 May 12
     
    As a teacher in a Title I school, I often find it difficult to contact students' homes since so many students move around during the school year and some parents/guardians tend not to be very receptive. Nonetheless, some of the greatest successes I feel I have had during my two years of teaching have come from parent-teacher conferences that I have called and/or those informal phone calls I do when a student misses five days, begins to fail my class, or is disruptive. The article says "Engaging community groups with schools has the added benefit of helping teachers and other educators to better understand the communities and lifestyles of the children they teach, and thus to better adapt their style to meet their needs." I have formed positive working relationships with many of my students' families, which not only led to an improvement in the students' behavior, but also their academic performance. That old saying "It takes a village to raise a child" also applies to educating them as well.
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