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Building Smart Education Systems: VUE Number 26, Winter 2010
NOTE: This article was originally published in The Evolving Federal Role: VUE 24, Summer 2009.
Federal policies should address community engagement and equity in order to build “smart education systems” that improve outcomes for urban children and youths.
TThe brief economic boom of the 1990s brought an infusion of hope and energy to urban communities. The well-being of children and families in urban America were buoyed by an expanding, though increasingly stratified, labor market, housing redevelopment, and the entrepreneurial spirit brought by a new immigrants from Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and the remnants of the former Soviet Union. During the 1990s, federal and state policies also began to treat cities more like catalysts for social and economic development, as opposed to indigent kin. As a result, urban communities experienced a brief renaissance marked by declining rates of teenage pregnancy, infant mortality, crime, and violence and rising incomes and population growth.
Public policy during that period was marked by an alliance between the public, on the one hand, and the political, financial, and business establishments, on the other. Together, these groups pushed an agenda that 
emphasized the wisdom and effectiveness of the private sector while dismissing the benefit of government and the public sector. The pursuit of excellence was extolled over the pursuit of equity in every sector, including education. Moreover, individual (private) accomplishment was privileged over community (public), with the latter perceived as an impediment to innovation and growth.
The recent economic bust has effectively destroyed the public’s trust in the establishment and called into question these public policy assumptions. The nation has now experienced, if not completely learned, the harsh lessons of individual gain untethered from community well-being, as we witness home foreclosures, job losses, withered pensions, and an uncertain future that once seemed filled with promise, even if it was only attainable for a few.
The recent economic recession – for the poor, it’s a depression – threatens to slow the pace of improvement in central cities that were beginning to reestablish themselves as founts for economic, cultural, and community renewal, where families seeking opportunity and inspiration joined with others to transform their lives and to forge a new society (Annenberg Institute for School Reform 2001). As this recession has painfully revealed, the transformative power of urban life is tapped more deeply by some and remains beyond the grasp of far too many. High proportions of low-income African American and Latino youth in urban areas continue to have their progress impeded by high rates of incarceration, displacement created by gentrification, and the lost opportunity caused by being on the wrong side of the achievement gap, the new “track” demarcating the fate of privileged and disadvantaged communities. These forces weaken and obscure the pathways to success available for disadvantaged youth as they seek to become more productive and engaged members of society, a task made more daunting in urban school systems, whose halting progress in closing the achievement gap is threatened by the loss of tax revenue caused by the downturn.
The Standards Movement: Reshaping the Federal Role
A Nation At Risk engendered a significant shift in the federal role in education in a manner unseen since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. The Brown decision, while groundbreaking in significance for African Americans, followed a historical path of asserting federal involvement to address equity by eliminating legal barriers to access and/or by allocating resources to support specific groups. Traditionally, the federal government has left decisions about educational quality for all students, such as academic standards, assessment, curriculum and instruction, and school design, largely up to states and school districts (Ogletree 2005;Fuhrman & Lazerson 2005). The Brown decision, after all, mandated integration with the expectation that greater access to schools would ensure greater quality. But the decision stopped well short of requiring the government to ensure that equity fostered quality, as the intervening years demonstrated so strikingly.
A Nation At Risk changed that dynamic. It inspired the standards movement, and the federal legislation it spawned (e.g., Goals 2000, the Improving America’s School Act, No Child Left Behind) used federal Title 1 funds and other resources as leverage explicitly to improve quality by encouraging states to adopt voluntary national standards; embed these standards in accountability systems; and intervene in failing schools so that all students would receive the supports they need to meet national goals and standards.
While the deadline for meeting these goals and standards has shifted from the year 2000 to NCLB’s 2014 deadline, the emphasis on all has remained constant, while acceptance of an increased federal role has gained wider acceptance. The debate instead has turned to how the federal government should exert its influence, not whether or not it should. Moreover, with the recent passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the federal government has taken unprecedented steps to increase funding for states and districts as it reshapes its approach to how the funds should be used.
Gaps in the National Agenda: Community Engagement and Equity
ARRA’s incentive grants focus on key levers for change – educator quality, data systems, innovation, technology, more rigorous core standards and assessments, and improvement of low-performing schools. Yet, this comprehensive technical agenda has two troubling oversights – a lack of attention to the need for community engagement, coupled with an implied, rather than explicit, emphasis on equity.
Community Engagement
Despite President Obama’s background as a community organizer, the strategies outlined in ARRA proceed as though education reform occurs in a political, social, and cultural vacuum, as if communities take up reforms based on clear and objective results alone. This belief that success sells itself represents what Paul Hill and his colleagues would call a “zone of wishful thinking” – an implied assumption that is usually held despite abundant evidence to the contrary (Hill, Campbell & Harvey 2000).
This belief that successful results compel widespread adoption has undermined the efficacy of too many research-based designs/strategies/programs and What Works clearinghouses to name here. Coburn’s (2003) seminal article on scale emphasized the importance of building ownership both inside and outside the system as a key ingredient for taking reform to scale – a point underscored in Paul Hill and colleagues’ case studies of districts whose reforms were weakened or undone by leadership instability and/or opposition from forces threatened by change (Hill, Campbell & Harvey 2000). If states and districts pursue the agenda outlined in ARRA but ignore the need to garner community ownership, they will find themselves vulnerable to resistance or skepticism sparked by poor communication and a failure to obtain prior involvement. Predictably, this resistance often comes from groups that the reform is intended to help the most – communities whose students’ performance lies on the wrong side of the achievement gap. Their concerns, however, are often left out of early planning and decision-making tables where the agenda is set, as opposed to announced.
Undoubtedly, ARRA’s priorities were guided by research and informed by extensive meetings with elected officials, commissioners and superintendents, researchers, union leaders, the philanthropic community, and leaders of Washington-based think tanks and advocacy groups. And, given the constricted timeline for moving from planning to action, little effort was devoted to garnering knowledge and ownership beyond civic and political elites to involve those most dependent on urban systems for their children’s and community’s well-being: low-income families, African Americans, Latinos, and recent immigrants.
As a result, as usual, these critical constituencies will be asked to support reforms designed by “others” rather than participate in their development (Stone et al. 2001; Hirota and Jacobs 2003). The frustration, lack of knowledge, and distrust produced by this ngagement gap positions poor parents and communities of color as an untapped and vulnerable resource that can be mobilized to oppose promising innovation based on poor political execution and unintended consequences overlooked by elites lacking in-depth knowledge and experience of the challenges and assets that exist in these communities.
Equity – Where Art Thou?
In addition to diminishing political support and overlooking valuable assets, shortchanging the engagement of low-income families and communities of color in the reform of school systems their children attend, ARRA also repeats the reform movement’s mistake of pursuing solutions intended to work for all students. This approach, while admirable, obscures the fact that urban districts, in particular, need help in delineating and developing supports that work for particular groups of students that are present in large numbers – English language learners, students with disabilities, recent immigrants, over-age and under-credited students, and students challenged by early parenthood, childcare and work responsibilities, previous incarceration, violence,health concerns, and other factors that contribute to the achievement gap and a lack of engagement.
While some of the Obama administration’s agenda reflects an understanding of the particularly needs of urban communities – especially the “Promise Neighborhoods” initiative, modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone – the need for differentiated supports should be a priority rather than an afterthought in efforts to redefine standards, design new assessments, and turn around failing schools. Rather than 
lying on the periphery, equity as well as excellence should be a design principle that guides work both on what Richard Elmore calls the technical core of education – curriculum, instruction, and assessment – and on the supports students need to develop the social, cultural, and other forms of capital they need to become active participants in their own learning (Gordon & Bridglall 2005).
Unfortunately, the failure to address both the engagement and equity gaps has been a recurring theme in recent accounts of reforms in districts such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New Orleans – communities whose districts are operating a mix or portfolio of schools, with some being operated and supported by the district (and/or state, in the case of New Orleans), and some operated by organizations with charters or agreements waiving some district policies and practices (Aspen Institute and Annenberg Institute
2006; Gold et al. 2007; Cowen Institute 2008). Grassroots and civic leaders in these communities, as well as many educators in the schools, often lament the lack of attention paid to local values and traditions in the design of new schools and programs. They also express concerns that the new approaches replicate previous patterns of privilege due to a failure to consider basic issues such as transportation, access to information, and differentials in power, status, and fiscal resource that, if left unaddressed, reinforce old inequities.
Each of these reports underscores the importance of dealing with equity and community engagement as a top priority to ensure that system improvements or reinventions have the capacity to provide supports that can be differentiated – for example, more time for greater outreach to inform planning and decision making; targeted interventions for students with disabilities, English language learners, and over-age/under-credited students; supports for struggling, as well as highly effective educators; and curricula that embrace local aspirations as well as national ones. For instance, the absence of resources and strategies to support arts, culture, and community service are a prominent critique of existing reforms, a fault that ARRA seems to share rather than ameliorate.
