Collaborating Across the Table: How Organizations and a School District Work Together for Community Schools

• In Event: Taking Collective Action and Responsibility to Address Inequity: The Case of Partnerships for Community Schools

Abstract

Progressive approaches to education reform, such as community schools, that seek to address educational inequities through both engaging marginalized stakeholders and resourcing and supporting schools in low-income communities have come increasingly into focus as solutions to persistent gaps. How school districts can do this at a scale, however, remains an outstanding question. This research explores how community organizers, staff of Community Based Organizations (CBOs) that provide services in schools, and district officials collaboratively approach the implementation of a community school initiative. Using the Zone of Mediation framework (Welner, 2001), I consider the ways the normative and political forces enable and constrain collaboration in the initiative.

Using participatory qualitative methods over the course of three years of working with these participants, I shaped my research to help answer questions driven by the field concerning these collaborations. I participated in meetings of the organizers and CBO staff where they developed their strategies for how to collaborate with the district. I also observed the meetings the organizers and CBO staff held with the district as well as public meetings about the community school initiative. I interviewed leaders who participated in these meetings from both the community and the district side to understand their experiences on a deeper level and analyzed public facing reports and information from the district and the CBOs about the initiative.

The dynamics between various participants were enabled and constrained by funding patterns, organizational practices and structures, and prevailing political-economic and normative forces that affected the initiative as a whole. Because of the intense pressure on both the district and the CBOs to demonstrate the efficacy of the community school strategy—largely driven by market reformers who wanted to disprove the model—and the push for collaborative practices with the model itself, the CBOs and the districts increasingly worked together. There were notable differences in the concerns between non-district participants. While community organizers often felt frustrated at things like the lack of deep family and community engagement or culturally relevant education in the schools, CBOs tended to be more concerned about the longevity and timing of funding streams- both important yet often unrelated concerns. CBOs tended to be less likely to take political stands around issues of racial equity, seeing their advocacy for increased service provision as the means to address inequities. Additionally, the district functioned as a funder for the CBOs, further complicating the ways that they interacted. The nature of this collaboration between the CBOs and the district was often overly agreeable, such that the CBOs did not challenge the district as a powerful countervailing force. The relations between the district and community organizers were at times more contentious.

This research helps us better understand the challenges and opportunities to collaboratively implementing community school initiatives at a large scale. Further, it demonstrates the critical need for challenging normative deficit-based ideas about communities of color; rebuilding trust between communities, schools, and districts; and creating new patterns of participation in order to engage marginalized communities for effective equity-oriented reforms.

Author

• Julia A. Daniel, University of Colorado - Boulder