Contexts and Consequences of Partnership Development in a Diverse Urban Elementary School: Organizational Narratives of Community Engagement

• In Event: Community Engagement in an Accountability Era: North American Cases

Abstract

Schools leaders are increasingly encouraged to develop partnerships in their reform efforts. This paper examines the partnership strategies in a diverse urban elementary school. Drawing from a constructivist theory of organizing (Czarniawska, 2008), researchers examine how a principal engages other organizations in partnerships and the threats and risks to which these partnerships are intended to respond. This perspective allows researches to tease apart purposes, contexts and consequences of partnership strategies.

The study is situated in a large, diverse elementary school in a large Midwestern city. Over her nine-year tenure, the principal has brought significant resources to the school via partnerships with businesses, community-based organizations, and health/human service agencies. Data were collected over 18 months. The researchers interviewed the principal, teachers, staff and parents; shadowed the principal; and observed faculty and community meetings. The data were analyzed by identifying themes and patterns related to the content, purpose, and consequences of community partnerships.

Our findings suggest that community participation as enacted by the school principal was largely focused on one aspect of participation. That is, one grounded in a principle of “staying as dynamic as the needs of the community.” However, our observations suggest the definition and operationalization of “needs” in this context were often limited to human, financial, and material resources. Thus, development and responsiveness to corporate and institutional partnerships appear to undergird Cynthia’s conceptions of community engagement.

Resources garnered through such partnerships included afterschool programming, facilities for the school’s growing student body, a corporate and community funded mental health counselor, an on-site clinic with a full time nurse in residence, to name a few. This is particularly impressive in a state context of retrenchment, intensified accountability measures, and a surge of competitive pressures as a result of state supported charters and vouchers.

While successfully building capacity to serve a diverse student population and “marketing” her school to corporate sponsors and affluent school patrons, we also note an important absence. Writing of parent and community involvement, Lee, Bryk, and Smith (1993) propose three major forms of participation in schools: (a) parent/community education programs; (b) outreach; and (c) community control. Our dataset reflects the first two forms of participation such as courses on personal financial management for parents and food and clothing drives. This framing of “needs” positions the community as deficient. Along with Rah, Choi, and Nguyen (2009), we caution, “deficit notions embedded in a common discourse of ‘helping’”—while deployed with the best of intentions—can be damaging and often result in the type of “subtractive schooling” that Valenzuela (1999) documents. Moreover, it often closes off spaces for community control grounded in community desires and strengths.

The findings illumine the consequences of developing partnerships in the interest of institutional legitimacy in a threatening and competitive educational policy environment, for the school as well as for the more vulnerable members of its community, to whom partnership resources are ostensibly directed.

Authors

• Samantha Paredes Scribner, Indiana University - Indianapolis

• Thu Suong Thi Nguyen, Indiana University - IUPUI

• Gary M. Crow, Indiana University