Community Uplift Important in Education Reform

There is an interesting article headlining yesterday's edition of the New York Times. It features a brief analysis of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone and its community based approach to educational reform. The article also features briefs on the charter school place in education and recent presidential movements toward a more symbiotic uplift of depressed areas and schools. It’s an interesting read and I’ve included the link below.

Through practice, class, and observation I’ve come to believe that our educational system is certainly not an institution that functions in a bubble, insulated from larger outside forces. Rather, our schools are neighborhood landmarks and staples of the communities they exist within and serve. This can be wonderful for communities and schools that reflect achievement gap-type benefits, and punitive for those that continually suffer through their environment. The adage of our schools as a microcosm of society is relevant in this discussion, although not on the scale we typically associate it with. For the most part, schools exist as a microcosm of smaller, more community-representative societies – the neighborhoods where they draw their populations, the districts where they draw their support and resources, and the regions where they draw their emphasized place and funding.

I’ve often found myself frustrated in the classroom as I’ve come to associate classroom instruction as only a small piece of larger social issues that actively counter the efforts of teachers working in high poverty communities. A root issue of poverty defines our daily struggle and negatively impacts educational achievement more than what gets discussed. True, education plays a major role in that struggle, but the conditions with which cause our students to suffer on every level imaginable easily trump, counter, or at the very least work to impede the strides that could be made in a classroom every day. No less daunting of a task to overcome is a culture of social frustration and mistrust that often fails to recognize education as a viable option for improvement – perhaps rightly so considering the quality of and experiences associated with local public education.

Enter Geoffrey Canada and his experiment transforming the Harlem neighborhood through a blending of social services and high quality public education. Canada’s goals are lofty but right on. The uplift of our school system requires the transformation of the areas in which our worst-performing schools exist. These are not exclusive endeavors but mutually reinforcing movements – a full assault on poverty is necessary as the issues are so interwoven and complex that to address them in piecemeal fashion will fail through countering forces. Unfortunately, the applicability of such individual attention on a national scale, not to mention the dedicated effort and money required makes the experiment seem doomed to locality. Critiques brought up in the article are interesting: lack of real correlation between social services and student achievement (and therefore undeserving of federal dollars), funding (Canada relies on a significant portion of private support), and limited research supporting overall effectiveness.

Regardless of detractors, it’s my belief that the provision of basic services for families and students are necessary for the rates of success we need to see in the classroom. A solution must exist somewhere in an optimal blend of social service provision and charter school freedom with a dash of private sector support – basically an effort to address all from all. Lofty, naïve, inexperienced, check all the above. Still what we’re working so hard for in the classrooms won’t be fully realized until we are willing to recognize and provide for people in all types of conditions. Obama, Arne, Canada, KIPP, and other organizations realize the importance of community uplift as part of the school reform movement and are putting out grants and reform efforts to that effect (supported in the article). Even so, it gets stickier when trying to develop specific plans, allocate funds, and rally support.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/education/13harlem.html?_r=1&hp