Saviorism or Equity? How Community Schools and Service Providers Navigate Questions of Racial Inequity

• In Event: Can Community Schools Be a Source of Democracy and Liberation? Critical Perspectives From Four Cities

Abstract

The increased attention and resourcing of community school initiatives represents a turn towards redistributing resources in a more equitable way towards schools that have historically been denied such resources. Community organizations led largely by Black parents campaigned for such initiatives as one way to both claim control of local institutions and to create a more equitable distribution of high quality learning opportunities (Carter & Welner, 2013). How the rubber meets the road, however, can teach us a lot about both normative and political forces that need to be attended to when implementing any equity-oriented reform. This paper explores how some of those forces enable and constrain the implementation of the initiative at the district and school levels in New York City.
Theoretical perspectives
Using Welner’s (2001) Zone of Mediation framework, I consider the ways in which normative and political forces that exist prior to the community schools initiative shaped how community organizers, service providers, and school officials collaborated in the initiative. I considered the multiple ways that power and identity have shaped who has been included and excluded from such efforts in the past, and how the engagement of organizers and service providers was shaped and in turn shaped the context in which the community school initiative was run..
Methods and Data Sources
Using critical qualitative methods (Carspecken, 1996; Georgiou & Carspecken, 2002), I spent four years conducting observations and interviews with participants from Community Based Organizations (CBOs), the school district, and community organizers. I attended meetings of these groups as they strategized together and also attended public meetings hosted be these organizations and conducted open-ended interviews with participants. I also reviewed artifacts including newspaper articles, propaganda, and reports about the initiative. I triangulated these various data sources to better understand the patterns I found.
Findings and Significance
The ways that CBOs and community organizers collaborated with the school district were enabled and constrained by funding patterns, organizational practices and structures. Prevailing political and normative forces shaped these phenomena. The dominant normative ideas about students and communities in low-income areas as lacking desire or discipline to learn-- driven in large part by school reformers with an interest in privatizing and profiteering-- meant that the initiative often perpetuated deficit ideas about those communities. Additionally, profit motivated reformers also had interest in disproving the community school strategy, creating a context in which district and school leaders fell under pressure to demonstrate rapid improvements in measures like student test scores. Finally, the orientation of many CBOs tended to be towards seeing service provision rather than political agitation or discussions of inequity as the exclusive focus of their work. Community organizers in the collaborative spaces worked to place the blame for inequalities on structural and political factors, challenging the complacency of other CBOs. While these differences and challenges at times generated tensions among the various constituencies, they at times produced generative dialogue that influenced implementation as well as the political and normative orientation of the partners.

Author

• Julia A. Daniel, University of Colorado - Boulder