This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Street Blocks to Alphabet Blocks: The Housing-Education Connection
Traditional school districts often reflect the fortunes of the communities they serve. Whether for good or ill, structures of governance, funding, and catchment areas have supported the reproduction of privilege and economic advantage in the local community—or its lack. Wealthy communities and higher-income families have access to the highest quality public schools, while communities struggling with poverty and economic disinvestment very often send their children to schools that struggle to provide high-quality education and lack adequate resources to meet the needs of the families they serve.
School reform rhetoric has often focused on the local school as the problem to be solved—a limitation whose removal would enable the growth and progress of local families and communities. The issue is framed as low-income children having no choice but to attend the struggling schools in their neighborhoods.
And so we have experimented with strategies that free poor families from being consigned to the fate of their local schools. Expanded school choice policies and charter school development—at least in the loftiest forms of their rhetoric—are intended to create alternative options for low-income families. On the other hand, the market pressure of choice policies and the penalties for underperformance in high-stakes testing regimes are supposed to compel performance improvements in struggling schools.
The results of these efforts have been mixed, and the source of contentious and highly politicized debate. Rather than weighing in on that conversation, I would like to lift up a different way to think about the relationship between schools and lower income neighborhoods: What is the potential for local schools to anchor and support community well-being?
In my research on how communities responded to school closures in Philadelphia, I found that neighborhood stakeholders who were protesting school closures talked about the ways schools affected their communities on social, institutional, economic, and physical levels. Parents described relationships with school staff that spanned generations within their families and talked about the ways that closing a school and dispersing children to other schools fractured their social networks.
Parents and teachers also described the important role a trusted school can play in referring families to additional medical or social service supports they might need, particularly in immigrant communities where language barriers and distrust of institutions can hinder access to help. Other stakeholders described the importance of the institutional capacity of schools in disinvested neighborhoods, community anchors alongside churches in places with few other community-based organizations. Still others talked about the effect of the shuttering of large schools on local businesses patronized by staff and students, as well as the impact of vacant school buildings on local real estate values. Lastly, stakeholders also expressed concern about whose interests would shape future school building reuse and redevelopment projects.
The dimensions of community well-being raised in this school closure debate—social, institutional, economic, and physical—align closely with the work of community development, pointing to important potential for community development practitioners to integrate schools into their work. Community development practitioners should start asking how schools can be integrated into the community development work they are already pursuing. For example, how can the family and social networks tied to a school be engaged and leveraged by community organizers and others working to improve the community? How might a school’s history in a neighborhood be used to rally local residents around community concerns and community development objectives? Are there ways that a community land trust, affordable housing development, or community development financial institution could incorporate a local school as a partner in their work, identifying and pursuing objectives that would be beneficial to their respective missions?
In practice, the fact that schools have an effect on local development trajectories doesn’t always work out well for poor communities. Examples are common of schools being leveraged by middle-class families in gentrifying neighborhoods toward changes that better serve their own children or exacerbate housing cost increases, or of cities or developers using school reform or school redevelopment to attract high-income families without protecting the interests of existing residents. For example, in Philadelphia, middle-class residents in gentrifying neighborhoods have in some instances incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations so that they could do independent fundraising to support a specific neighborhood school. Doing so does create channels for supplemental funding in a resource-starved school district, but in a way that is outside of the control of and lacking input from the broader community. It communicates to other middle-class families that their interests are represented and it is safe to invest in the neighborhood, but does not necessarily incorporate any commitments to continuing to serve existing residents or to mitigating potential displacement pressures.
It is not surprising that those with the resources to do so are able to engage and invest in schools in ways that increase demand for the neighborhood, elevate property values, and catalyze gentrification. Schools, like other local assets, are susceptible to being revitalized in the interests of people with economic and political capital. The challenge—central to the project of community development broadly—is to leverage the resources to improve conditions in places that have struggled to access capital, but without destabilizing or displacing the local community.
Given how embedded schools are in the significant domains of community development practice, I believe the work of improving neighborhoods without displacing people will be more effective if we find ways to integrate community development with schools, the communities they support, and the social, institutional, and economic resources they represent.
About the Author
Tags
Comments
One thought on “To Make Schools Better for Everyone, Connect Them to Community Development”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Hello Ryan, We’d love to have a conversation with you about some examples of community development around lower performing schools that have created synergistic opportunity for both. We’re doing Advocacy and housing Justice work, As well as community transformation work here in Pasadena, CA with the school district and feel like a conversation with you could be helpful. Our executive Director is Mennonite. I think you would both have lots of common. And my husband Is Quaker, And he and I cofounded Our organization, Making Housing and Community Happen