Civic capacity and urban education

Clarence Stone, University of Maryland, Principal Investigator
Jeffrey Henig, George Washington University, Co-Principal Investigator
Bryan Jones, University of Washington, Co-Principal Investigator

Overview

The central proposition for this study is that efforts to promote educational improvement become more nearly systemic (broad and multifaceted) as the mobilization of civic capacity expands. Civic capacity refers to cross-sector efforts to address community-wide problems. The project's focus is the political context of public education rather than the classroom itself. Its primary goals are to identify the coalitions, problem perceptions, and interactions that provide the framework for education policymaking in large cities.

Eleven cities were studied: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. All have substantial minority populations, and large numbers of students from poverty households. The field research for this project began in May 1993, and was largely concluded by December 1994. It consisted of structured interviews with three groups of education decision-makers: general community influentials, community advocates, and education program specialists. Project personnel also collected and assembled of a body of program and finance data from each city.

Click here for the Interview Datasets

Findings support the central proposition. However, the cities had only varying degrees of civic capacity, and they also fell short of systemic reform to varying degrees. Though the most conspicuous barrier to greater civic capacity is racial and other intergroup tension, the problem of concentrated poverty itself stands as the major obstacle. In addition, elite perceptions of the nature of the urban education problem were fundamentally ambiguous and diffuse, and proposals for reform were primarily incremental even though aspiration levels were high. In the face of a large and resistant problem, but lacking a "well-structured" understanding of the challenge, players in urban education tend to be deflected into piecemeal efforts, some even treating education as an employment regime.

Project Publications

Stone, Clarence N., Editor, Changing Urban Education. (University Press of Kansas, 1998).

Henig, Jeffrer R., Richard C. Hula, Marion Orr, & Desiree R. Pedescleaux. The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics and the Challenge of Urban Education. (Princeton University Press, 1999).

Portz, John, Lana Stein, & Robyn R. Jones, City Schools and City Politics: Institutions and Leadership in Pittsburgh, Boston, and St. Louis. (University Press of Kansas, 1999)

Orr, Marion, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore. (University Press of Kansas, 2001).

Stone, Clarence N., Jeffrey R. Henig, Bryan D. Jones, & Carol Pierannunzi. Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools. (University Press of Kansas, 2001).

Clarke, Susan, Rodney Hero, Mara Sidney, Luis Fraga, & Bari Anhalt Erlichson, Multi-Ethnic Moments: The Politics of School Reform in Multi-Ethnic Cities. (Temple University Press, forthcoming 2006).