How compatible is urban school reform with neighborhood revitalization?
How compatible is urban school reform with the drive to revitalize neighborhoods, and how can revitalization efforts in urban communities support the work of public schools? Three perspectives frame the movement toward coordinated services for children: a new sense of “ecology” that school, family, and community are vitally interdependent; a recognition of the need to build the “social capital” of families and communities; and a call to end the extensive fragmentation in service provision. The community revitalization approach focuses on family self-sufficiency and independence through employment, a renewed encouragement of private investment in urban communities, and a grassroots or locally driven action strategy.
Outreach to children and families is in no way incompatible with notions of community development through business. However, there are basic ingredients of the approaches that differ. The fundamental strength of coordinated service approaches is that they directly meet the basic needs of low-income families. However, direct service programs also have a history of being “top-down” and practitioner-focused, rather than a focus on community needs and leadership. This history has meant that the call for parental involvement, long recognized as essential to children’s successful learning, has not translated into a comprehensive and equitable partnership of families with schools.
Strengths of urban renewal initiatives include incentives toward self-sufficiency, local work and development, and a broad-based economic focus. Critics of market-driven concepts point out, however, that asking those with less capital and institutional resources to revitalize their own communities is problematic, and that market forces have generally failed to bring together those with and those who do not have. together to serve the needs of the community.
Alone, neither coordinated services nor plans for economic revitalization will significantly improve the learning and healthy development of children and youth in inner cities. The various strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches should lead policymakers toward neighborhood revitalization approaches that emphasize both professionalized service delivery to families and economic development. The following are suggestions for merging the strengths of both approaches:
– Services to families and children should be developed with the full participation of parents and the community. There must be a continued movement toward empowered and equal participation of families with professionals in government and school and neighborhood development. At the same time, schools and children’s learning must remain central issues and not be pushed aside as expected by-products of employed families and better economic conditions.
– The local school must be recognized as a tangible part of the “basic industry” of the city, with economic and community development responsibilities that go far beyond the mere provision of services. It may now be up to the public school to move beyond its traditions of early learning and development, to a larger role as an active actor in the much larger and large-scale development of its community. More than a “service” outreach center, the local school could become a cooperative “investor,” maintaining its emphasis on the 3Rs while working extensively with community development agencies and other centers for family service, such as neighborhood businesses, institutions religious, and civic and government agencies. The school’s role as employer and purchaser of goods/services must also be reassessed. Each school contributes to its community through, for example, the provision of lunches, health screenings and childcare for school-age children. Given the school’s own accumulation of professionally accredited “social capital,” there tends to be only minimal understanding among educators that they, too, are part of a community-based enterprise.
– Powerful neighborhood revitalization strategies are based on the recognition of the interconnections between economic and social well-being, individual and collective, and of adults and children. Market solutions assume that people will respond to incentives and take advantage of opportunities. However, among populations that have long been excluded from the mainstream economy, such assumptions may not be warranted, and the course of reform development must take these factors into account. In contrast, initiatives for full-service schools need to be mindful of incentive structures, that is, children are unlikely to stay in school when they doubt its effectiveness in helping them, since few around them can get a regular work, which vitally affects the very success of schools.
What do these ideas mean for school reform? Schools can address topics such as employment and training options, a neighborhood’s attractiveness for investing capital, and adult education, as well as partnering with family “welfare” forces and economic institutions, including banks, retailers, and insurers. Public schools could be transformed into “business schools”, joining a variety of other neighborhood and city institutions in developing and regenerating the total local ecology of the school and the city itself.
