The Community Link to Quality Public Education: Schools Cannot Do It Alone

By Wendy D. Puriefoy, President and CEO
Public Education Network

For more than 250 years, Americans have shared a vision of democracy that citizens understand, actively engage in and value. This vision requires the public to take responsibility and ownership for building communities, contribute their diverse talents and energies to solve problems, deliberate about public issues, influence public policy and pursue the general common good. Part of what makes our democracy so strong is the recognition that there are public responsibilitites so great that they require collective public social action and involvement in connection with public institutions such as public health, public environment and public welfare. But the very foundation of all of these institutions is public education.

Past ECS guest columnists have focused on the critical need for public schools to transmit democratic values and prepare students to become well-educated, informed and contributing members of our democracy. I would like to focus on what it means to be “public” and how public education really is the glue that links all of a community with public schools.

Often, communities and schools have operated as separate entities. Various members of a community and the general public often do not know how to gain access to their public schools. Many times, individuals and community groups are excluded from participation, especially if they do not have children in the public schools. And the public school may (absent any malice) not know how to include the various groups in a community as equal partners in ensuring that every child has access to a quality public education and a high-achieving school. During this current era of education reform and the implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, much attention is being paid to what changes need to take place in schools, but scant attention is accorded the important role that the community and civic networks play in ensuring quality public schools. An offshoot of the current standards-based reform movement has been the availability of more data, and data disaggregated by various groups. In theory, it has been assumed that if data were publicized, educators, policymakers and political leaders would rally to provide the additional support to transform low-performing schools into high-achieving institutions. However, it is clear that school performance data by itself does not change and improve schools unless community stakeholders including parents, business groups, students, educators and the media demand change. More often, school leaders admit they cannot provide quality public school schools without the whole community’s involvement.

Thus, the challenge is immense. Even though progress has been made in ensuring equitable educational opportunity since the 1965 passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), great gaps remain between the achievement of young, white people from affluent families and communities, and that of young, minority people from very different backgrounds. Currently, 50 % of African American high school students do not graduate. Less than 50 % of Latino students will graduate. There are significant gaps between the academic performance of American students from every background and that of their counterparts in our partner and competitor countries.

As stunning as those statistics are, the statistic that remains absolutely mind-boggling is the relatively small number of college-educated Americans. According to School Matters: A Service of Standard and Poor’s, less than 30 % of American adults hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Given the global economy’s demands, this figure alone focuses squarely upon the need for the nation to forge an intellectual contract and re-commit itself to meaningful public education reform.

It is clear that maintaining America’s global leadership will demand a much higher level of knowledge and skills. Greater levels of community participation also will be required of all citizens. While there is broad public understanding about crucial parent-related factors that lead to success such as parental education levels, home learning involvement and input regarding teaching, student placement and curriculum few Americans fully understand the important role communities can and must play in improving public education. While there is a broad public understanding about the role that schools play, including teaching, learning, curriculum development, assessment, discipline and student development, few individuals in communities understand their critical civic role in contributing to quality public education for all.

Communities provide the social, financial and political capital that is crucial to school success. Citizens vote for leaders, pay taxes that fund schools and participate in powerful social networks that shape how schools and communities address children’s educational and developmental needs. There is an inextricable link between high-achieving schools and the community actions that support these schools. Without public action, there can be no quality public schools. Without quality public schools, the community is weakened. As is our democracy.

For this reason, the Ford Foundation created the intermediary organization concept in 1983 called the local education fund (LEF/s), which this year will mark its 25th anniversary. Founded in response to the A Nation at Risk report, LEFs were to created to fill a void that the report failed to recognize, and that was the need for an independent nonprofit organization to bridge community understanding of education reform issues and build community capacity to improve public schools through dialogue, constituency building, engagement, colaboration, policy analysis and youth engagement. Today, there are 83 LEFs throughout the United States and internationally that are doing cutting edge-work in areas including community mobilization, teacher and administrator professional development, life skillls programs, college access, No Child Left Behind Act re-authorization and high school reform. They advocate for community involvement and they hold schools accountable.

Harvard psychologist Ronald A. Heifitz calls the sort of leadership found in LEFs “adaptive leadership” or “giving the work back to the people without abandoning them.” How often have policymakers or school leaders made arbitrary decisions about school change, school reform or school mergers, and short circuited the community, only to find their well-intentioned strategies fail or be overturned? The intersection where the community and school meet and develop a meaningful partnership, and in the best possible world, before a crisis hits, is the democratic space where both parties are free to learn, discuss conflicting values, analyze issues, build public school ownership and share decision making. Under this paradigm, parents and the community are not described or viewed as “external audiences” by the school district but as integral engines that fuel democratic and public participation.

More than ever, research is suggesting a strong relationship between the instructional components necessary for reform (including high-quality teachers, realistic standards aligned with appropriate assessments, and school leadership and structure) and the civic behaviors necessary to complement the school’s success. For one part of this equation, there is much data that permit academic success measurement. However, there is very little information available regarding measuring a community’s performance in assuming its civic role in supporting quality public education for all.

Recognizing that there are few tools available to communities to measure the civic strength and vitality necessary for strong public schools, Public Education Network (PEN, with the input and advice of ECS’ National Center for Learning and Citizenship) has researched and developed the National Civic Index for Quality Public Education (also known as the Civic Index). The Civic Index is designed for use by community-based organizations. The index provides a snapshot as to how well communities are positioned to help strengthen public education. It also provides tools and processes that communities can use to set goals, develop strategies to strengthen public responsibility and track community performance crucial to ensuring strong public education.

Because there was very little information and research available to inform us about what civic behaviors were critical to a quality public education, PEN asked the public, in a series of five annual national opinion polls, what they thought was important for quality public schools to exist in a community. PEN returned to the public five times to verify what they were telling us was consistent and reliable. The result was 10 discrete “categories” of civic characteristics that determine quality public schools.

As the Civic Index shows, the fates of schools and communities are intertwined. The hardest part of sustainable educational change and improvement does not come from top-down command and control frameworks built on bureaucracy. Sustainable educational change and improvement comes from developing relationships between public schools and their communities that force groups and individuals to think beyond schools and themselves. It is when schools see themselves not only as test result managers, but also as community members, citizens and human beings in collaboration with others that democratic behaviors and civic responsibility will take hold. Without it, there will be children left behind. With such engagement, schools can be become learning and achievement centers, all of which benefits everyone in our democracy.

Wendy D. Puriefoy is the president and CEO of Public Education Network, an organization of 83 local education funds in the U.S. and five foreign countries. PEN’s National Civic Index for Public Education will be publicly launched soon. Check www.PublicEducation.org for details.