Urban Education

Top-down accountability policies have arguably had very limited impact over the past 20 years. Education stakeholders are now contemplating new forms of bottom-up accountability. In 2013, policymakers in California enacted a community-based approach that creates the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) process for school finance to increase flexibility. The reform also seeks to involve stakeholders at the local level by creating a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP). We conducted a statutory analysis of the state’s new funding formula in comparison to its predecessor. We also analyze the state’s new system of district implementation, support, and intervention. We then discuss the implications of California’s reforms for future K-12 funding and accountability policy.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the multiple political histories that have coalesced to produce support for or resistance to the Oakland Unified School District’s full-service community schools policy. It analyzes oral history interview data from eight stakeholders who represent the district’s major constituencies to explore the reasons why each individual, positioned differently within the larger district system, may or may not support a seemingly democratic, community-based reform. Through their voices, the article explains how different constituencies can interpret an urban district’s policies and form community-based coalitions that either further or obstruct a democratic, equity-minded reform.

For more than three decades, community schools have aimed to improve education and neighborhood outcomes in low-income, urban communities of color. In this article, we position community schools as a place-based reform strategy that pushes back on top-down accountability systems. While most research on urban school reform focuses on improving in-school factors, this study shifts the research lens to out-of-school factors that shape low-income, urban school-community contexts. The purpose of this study is to examine the out-of-school challenges that instigated a neighborhood-driven community school implementation in a racially diverse and low- to working-class community in the urban Midwest. Drawing on interviews and archival data, critical urban theory is used to guide our analysis. This case study details the political and socioeconomic out-of-school forces that preceded a community schools implementation. In doing so, we consider how school leaders can confront out-of-school challenges across similar urban contexts, and conclude with implications for future research.

The purpose of this inquiry is to consider how the U.S. Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhoods (PNs) program can improve persistently low-achieving urban schools by making their “neighborhoods whole again” through community capacity building for education reform. As the “first federal initiative to put education at the center of comprehensive efforts to fight poverty in urban and rural areas,” we frame our inquiry according to PNs’ intent to build capacity in high-needs communities in ways that provide high-quality educational and systematic support for children and families. We begin with an overview of PN, followed by a discussion of community capacity for urban school reform. Next, using descriptive case study methods, we present the case of the Las Vegas Promise Neighborhood Initiative to illustrate the ways in which a low-capacity community in the American West engaged in community capacity building activities to improve selected urban schools, albeit unsuccessful in its ability to secure federal grant funds. We then deliver our analysis of this local initiative according to Chaskin’s framework for building community capacity and consider lessons learned and implications for similarly positioned low-capacity communities interested in community-based school reform.

To understand the long shadow of education policy and reform in the United States, especially in the urban core, requires a full and elaborate understanding of the neighborhoods and communities that have transformed in the last 20 or 30 years. Studying classrooms and educational spaces without concomitant understanding of the dynamics and facets of neighborhood life render educational, political, and policy analyses potentially incomplete. This afterword serves to remind the reader of the key issues in each article and identify the key issues raised from the authors for implications for more robust study of neighborhoods, communities, and education policy.