Honoring Dr. King through Community Organizing for Education Reform to Eliminate the Achievement Gap

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Every January, we commemorate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by noting the nation’s significant progress in achieving the slain civil rights leader’s dream of racial equality, while acknowledging how much farther we have to travel. In education, we focus on the deeply troubling, persistent disparity in academic performance between African American and Latino students and their White peers.

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, closing this achievement gap became a focal point of federal education accountability, generating greater awareness of racial disparities as well as a rising concern for gaps based on gender, English-language proficiency and learning disabilities. However, while National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores demonstrate that Black and Latino students have made strides in reading and math performance over the past decade, it’s sadly quite clear that they have not caught up to their White counterparts.

Education- and school-funding policies worsen these gaps. Studies have confirmed that students living in poverty and members of racial minorities are overwhelmingly concentrated in the lowest-achieving schools.

Schools have employed a variety of tactics in an attempt to close the achievement gap, ranging from creating smaller schools to reducing class sizes to expanding early-childhood programs. But decades of school reform have failed to narrow the severe racial and class achievement breaches. Too often, school reforms focus on technical changes, without considering local context or building the trust that’s necessary to sustain improvement. Rarely acknowledged are the massive inequities in resources and power. The recent, market-based approach to education has reduced parents’ role to that of individual consumers, leaving little room for community input or participation. If there’s truly a commitment to the elimination of the achievement gap, this must change.

Often overlooked and frequently ignored in the school reform discussion is the role of community organizing. Drawing heavily on the lessons of community organizing around housing, neighborhood safety, jobs, and economic development, this approach offers a methodology for parents and community members to effect meaningful change for students poorly served by the public school system.

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform’s series of research reports Organized Communities, Better Schools on the impact of community organizing on school improvement showed that education organizing has:

• Led to new policies that more equitably distribute resources and learning opportunities
  
  
• Improved school climate and teachers’ working conditions
  
  
• Built stronger relationships between schools and families
  
  
• Improved achievement and graduation rates
  
  
• Developed innovative solutions to perennial problems

Community organizing offers an alternate vision for school reform. To that end, the Annenberg Institute (AISR) has prepared Getting Started in Education Organizing , a 22-page guide that outlines strategies and resources for community groups considering education organizing. Based on AISR staff’s experience assisting community efforts to improve neighborhood schools in New York City for the last 15 years, and AISR’s other work supporting community education organizing, including AISR’s Center for Education Organizing, this publication outlines how to engage local parents, work with educators and other allies, and gather data and research on local schools and schooling issues.

Instead of focusing on competition, organizing groups mobilize the collective capacity and power of low-income and working-class communities of color to demand that all students have access to good schools. Organizing groups view school failure in a larger context of disinvestment in and privatization of public education that intensifies economic inequality. Organized parents hold schools accountable as public institutions that are crucial to equal opportunity.

At its core, organizing is about relationships, and the methodology provides strategies for developing mutually accountable personal relationships. Furthermore, education organizing is an outstanding vehicle for building authentic partnerships between schools’ two central constituencies: families and teachers. Community organizing emphasizes shared, democratic decision making and provides a model for parent relationships in schools on an equal footing with educators.

The promise of public education is at the core of our democracy. A free, public education has long been considered the great equalizer and as the pathway out of poverty for immigrants and children growing up in low-income neighborhoods. Yet, the U.S. is conspicuous among developed countries for its vast disparities in educational opportunities by race and income. Closing the achievement gap will surely be a central focus in the next reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But in searching for new ways to accomplish this goal, policymakers and educators should look to education organizing as an effective way to reduce that academic divide.

PREPARED BY
Warren Simmons
Executive Director
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Warren_Simmons@brown.edu