Decades of Academic Research Support Community Schools Strategy in New York City’s Renewal Schools
So-called “corporate” school reform has been defined by setting standards and testing students to see if they have met the standards. Rewards and punishments follow for the teachers and schools said to have produced these results. The assumption has been that a school is a closed box that can turn around the lives of the enrolled students—all apart from the fact that students spend only six or seven hours of the day at school. Corporate school reformers said they would disrupt the stasis they thought defined bureaucratic public schools by offering rewards and punishments to motivate teachers to work harder and smarter. Many of these so-called education reformers came from the business schools and employed competition as their primary motivator. And the politicians who followed their advice brought us test score targets to be met and a promise quickly to make every child a winner.
We were warned in advance that this wouldn’t work as we planned. Dr. James Comer at the Yale School Development Program created a multifaceted program to help schools support the most vulnerable children and to engage educators, parents and the community in this process of building trust and strong relationships. In 1997, in his book Waiting for a Miracle, Comer described the results. While his staff and outside evaluators believed that the Comer schools had made important progress in improving the children’s education, Comer wrote: “Our best approximation suggests that after three years about a third of the schools make significant social and academic improvement, a third show a modest improvement which is often difficult to sustain, and a third show no gain.” (Waiting for a Miracle, p. 72) The Comer program suggested that seven years was a more realistic timeline to look for real school improvement.
One of the most artificial aspects of corporate school reform was the setting of achievement test targets and short timelines as a motivator. No Child Left Behind established that all American children in public schools would be proficient by 2014 or their schools and teachers would be punished. As we moved closer to 2014, everybody began to realize that making all CONTINUE READING: Decades of Academic Research Support Community Schools Strategy in New York City’s Renewal Schools | janresseger
