How REAL Community Schools Differ from Charters Who Adopt that Label
By Mark Naison
Community Schools are public schools with wrap around services that become places where all residents of low income communities can find spaces where they can learn, organize and find a voice. The concept was once at the forefront of social justice organizing in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but was pushed aside for a vision of test based accountability from the top down in which all schools must promote mastery of a common curriculum. Bringing back the original ideal of Community schools, along with curricula which incorporate community traditions and cultures, is one of the best responses public school advocates can make to the Corporate sponsored charter school offensive.
What complicates this effort is that those promoting charter schools, now that charters have lost their luster due to fiscal improprieties and academic abuses, are starting to call corporate charters “Community schools” This is taking place in Memphis, and is also occurring in Youngstown, where state education officials propose to charterize the entire district.
The only way to challenge this effort and prevent Corporate reformers from hijacking and derailing the Community schools movement, is to spell out the differences between public community schools and charters which take some elements of the community school concept and reject others.
Here are some of the key features of Community schools as developed over the last fifty years.
Democratic participation and control. The school is a place where all community members are welcome and access services, take classes and hold meetings, not just families of children at the school.. Charters almost NEVER do that. They separate families in the school community from those in the larger community.
Culturally appropriate curricula and school culture. Community schools draw on the cultural traditions of the people in the communities where they are How REAL Community Schools Differ from Charters Who Adopt that Label: