Title: Putting Citizens Back at the Center of Education
Purpose: To involve parents and other community members in shaping curriculum and instruction, tap the energies of citizens as educators, connect community institutions more closely to k-12 public schools, and restore the civic mission of schools by involving youth as active citizens.
Rationale:
Schools work best when the public is directly involved in education, contributing their ideas, energy, time, and skills
The purpose of education is not just generating outcomes (such as test scores) that are determined by experts. Education is the process by which a whole community chooses and transmits values, skills, knowledge, and culture to the next generation. Communities must discuss what values they wish to transmit.
However, current federal law generally discourages public participation. The No Child Left Behind Act centralizes decisions about standards, curriculum, and tests at the state or federal level, thereby reducing the scope of community engagement. Parents are given options for withdrawing their own children from schools marked as failing, but there is no support for community problem-solving.
Schools can also enhance the civic skills and commitments of young people. Federal legislation provides modest support for these purposes. The Education for Democracy Act funds programs conducted by the Center for Civic Education (at about $29 million annually), and the Learn & Serve America program funds service-learning in kindergarten through 12th grade (at about $37 million). However, current federal law generally discourages discourages the teaching of civics, especially in interactive ways
How it would work:
The No Child Left Behind Act should be revised to:
1) Allow communities to opt out of the testing requirements if they design their own assessments with broad public participation;
2) Provide opportunities for districts to experiment with community advisory boards;
3) Support charter schools if they represent opportunities for broad public participation and innovation in public education;
4) Support the development of civic assessments that measure the ability to work together and apply knowledge and skills to public problems;
5) Require that when districts opt to use standardized assessments, they place civic knowledge on a par with science as a topic to be tested;
6) Increase support for civic education programs that have demonstrated positive effects;
7) Encourage after-school programs to involve youth in civic work;
8) Develop seed grant and awards programs that highlight and encourage innovation in design and uses of places to further student learning and civic learning.
New Program or Amendment to Existing Program?
Amendments to No Child Left Behind, formerly the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
Organizational Support:
(Potential supporters, not actually signed on yet)
Coalition for Community Schools
Public Education Network
Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools
History and Examples of Similar Work
The first Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965) required annual assessments of students' progress so that parents could use the data to organize and hold schools accountable. The Educational Amendments of 1978 required parents' advisory councils. Charter schools provide opportunities for laypeople to innovate in the public sector by creating or overseeing schools Arnold F. Fege, “Getting Ruby a Quality Public Education: Forty-Two Years of Building the Demand for Quality Public Schools through Parental and Public Involvement,” Harvard Educational Review, Winter 2006.]
In Bridgeport, Connecticut, citizen involvement has become "embedded" and is part of the culture in the community. Public engagement has created an atmosphere that is unusually conducive to innovating and solving education problems. When citizens are given authentic opportunities to come together to discuss the issues facing the schools in the community, new networks of cooperation and collaboration develop among professional educators, community organizations, the business community, citizens and elected officials. Because schools are already stretched to the breaking point and asked to do so much more with fewer resources, they need all the support they can get. In Bridgeport, public input and involvement in education is viewed as standard operating procedure and, as a result, innovative partnerships between businesses, community organizations, parents and other citizens have emerged, solidified and contributed to significant improvements in early-childhood education and appear to play a significant role in the progress made toward closing achievement gaps.
In Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Community Partnerships has created a set of community schools that function as centers of education, services, engagement, and activity for students, their parents, and other community members within a specified geographic area. With its community and school collaborators, the center has developed K-16 service-learning programs that engage students in work designed to advance their civic skills and abilities through service to and advocacy on behalf of their schools, families, and communities. Through the program, Penn students and faculty and public school teachers and students are engaged in service-learning that requires the development and application of knowledge to solve problems, as well as reflection on the experience and its effects. Launched in 1985, this program now involves more than 5,000 children and youth, parents, and community leaders each year at its six most intensive sites in West Philadelphia. Additional school-day, after-school, and family and community programs reach several thousand more individuals annually.
Adolescents in the Saint Paul (MN) West Side Neighborhood Learning Community identified a multitude of “learning opportunities” in their area. Their research has been the basis of practical initiatives that reflect the community's role in education: an institute to help adults “to build bridges between formal and informal learning opportunities,” “a free bus that provides transportation among learning sites and public places in the neighborhood,” and an apprenticeship program that provides youth training in nonprofits and businesses. [Nan Skelton, Nan Kari, Kari Denissen, David Scheie, and Harry Boyte, “A Community Alive with Learning: The Story of the West Side Learning Community, 2001-2005” (St. Paul, MN, 2006) p. 2.]
Teenagers in Sistas and Brothas United (SBU) have documented the need for better school facilities by showing the New York City Schools Chancellor and the local press photographs of “all the things that was messed up—the doors, broken hanging lights, how easily the handrails to the escalators came off, the broken fire alarms, broken steps.” Through Community Law in Action (CLIA), Baltimore high school students have collected evidence in support of class-action lawsuits. They were able to force the removal of alcohol and tobacco billboards from their neighborhood and identified violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act in their own schools, among other achievements.
In Hudson, Massachusetts, the district's high schools are become “democratic communities” that value and encourage young people's active and full participation in all school-related activities, programs, and policies. In addition to core civics curricula, the schools require service-learning across all grades; offer much smaller classes; provide time to engage students in school governance; and create community councils that “represent students, faculty members, and administrators.” S. Berman, “Teaching Civics: A Call to Action,” Principal Leadership (Sept. 2004), pp. 16-20.
Project for Public Spaces ( www.pps.org) uses citizen-centered approaches to help communities create innovative educational uses for parks, playgrounds, libraries and many other public spaces. Since 1999, PPS has been working with the U.S. General Services Administration to revitalize the plaza in front of the newly renovated Department of Education's headquarters in Washington, DC. and to highlight such educational public space design. The vision for the space includes design improvements, public amenities, and education-related activities. It has improved linkages with neighbors like The National Air and Space Museum. Short-term improvements have included new plantings, food kiosks, and a quiet area with tables, chairs and game tables. The medium term sets the stage for ongoing educational programming like innovative educational playgrounds, interactive exhibits, museum events, and student exhibits.
In North Carolina, a civic group, Mecklenburg Citizens for Public Education will join a growing number of local nonprofit groups around the country that are going beyond fundraising and “boosterism” to play significant roles in constructing and driving their districts' improvement agendas. These reform-support organizations (RSOs) have been established in Boston, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Mobile, Alabama, where they engage the public, conduct research on district initiatives, and/or analyze and report district performance data.
In Mobile, public engagement was the catalyst for effective public education reform through the “Yes We Can” initiative, through which more than 1,500 community members convened in nearly 60 discussions “around living rooms, kitchen tables, churches, and community centers about what type of community they wanted and what type of public schools they needed to fulfill those goals.” [ J. Newell, “Placing Students at the Center of Education Reform,” Voices in Urban Education 13 (Fall) , Providence, R.I., Brown University: Annenberg Institute for School Reform, 2006.] From this came the PASSport to Excellence, a strategic plan for the district ad community outlining five priority goals for the system, followed by nineteen benchmarks.
Public Education Network (PEN) recently launched a national campaign to build constituencies of people who will "use their voices and votes to achieve the goal of ensuring quality public education for all students."