Something mysterious happens when community involvement contributes to improvements in student achievement. How, exactly, could the efforts of community members to create a health clinic at the Zavala Elementary School in Austin, Texas, play a role in raising students' test scores over a two-year period? How could attempts to reach out to parents at the Morningside Middle School in Fort Worth contribute to an increase in the school's average test scores, from 20th (and last) to 3rd among all middle schools? How could a community-wide campaign to improve traffic safety outside the Ysleta Elementary School in El Paso help to increase the percentage of 4th graders who passed state-mandated tests from 27 to 61 percent in reading and 21 to 51 percent in math (Shirley 1997)?
The developments at Zavala, Morningside, Ysleta, and other Alliance Schools demonstrate that the power of community involvement for improving learning may come from a number of different sources. Beyond changes in curriculum or improvements in self-esteem, meaningful community involvement sets in motion a chain of events that transforms the culture of the school and, often, the community that school serves.
The Alliance Schools
The seeds of the Alliance were planted in 1986 with a collaboration between a community group in Fort Worth (the Allied Communities of Tarrant County) and the Morningside Middle School. That collaboration served as a model for a network of 32 Alliance Schools in 1992–93. Currently, more than 100 schools—many located in the most disadvantaged communities in Texas—are part of the network. The Alliance Schools are dedicated to developing a constituency of parents, community leaders, and educators, working together to improve student achievement in low-income communities. With support from the Texas Education Agency and state funds, schools in the Alliance bring together members of community-based organizations (local affiliates of the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation), parents, and school staff to improve their schools and neighborhoods.
What Makes the Difference?
- The physical conditions, resources, and constituencies that support learning;
- The attitudes and expectations of parents, teachers, and students; and
- The depth and quality of the learning experiences in which parents, teachers, and students participate.
Improving Conditions and Establishing Constituency
When Odessa Ravin became principal, Morningside Middle School was having serious difficulties. The school was in a high crime area (the previous principal had his jaw broken while trying to stop a fight), with liquor and drugs sold openly to students only a few yards away. On her first day of school, Ravin was greeted by smoke and burning embers. Her office had been firebombed the previous night.
In response to such challenges, Ravin reached out to members of the Allied Communities of Tarrant—the local affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation—and together they went door-to-door, church-to-church, and office-to-office to develop support for the school. As a part of those efforts, over a period of several years, members of the school and the surrounding community have forced the closing of a store near the school that often sold alcohol to minors. They garnered additional resources for the library and established an after-school program so that students had a safe place to go at the end of the day.
Though perhaps not as dramatically, other Alliance schools also contend with safety issues. At the Ysleta Elementary School, danger came from another source: traffic around the school and the chronic failure of the city to install crosswalks or traffic lights. To address the problem, members of the community, the school, and the Foundation affiliate—EPISO—obtained a public commitment from city officials and monitored its follow-through. At still other Alliance Schools, community efforts help to build and clean up playgrounds, raise funds for the repair of school buildings and the construction of libraries and gyms, establish health clinics and other social services, and create numerous after-school activities. But beyond single accomplishments, these efforts help to establish a core constituency of advocates who initiate and support improvements. This constituency not only provides teachers and principals with powerful allies when they seek support for new initiatives, but also ensures the maintenance of critical programs and funding.
For example, the community organizing efforts among the Alliance Schools in El Paso helped to establish the constituency that took decisive action to stop administrators from firing a principal and closing a school that the community considered particularly successful. When almost 500 parents, community members, and teachers filed into a board meeting, board members quickly reinstated the principal and shelved the plans to close the school.
These community efforts reduce danger and stress, improve students' health, provide more and better facilities and resources for learning, and protect improvements. They make a difference in student achievement because they help to establish and maintain the basic physical conditions in which to learn.
Improving Attitudes and Expectations
Physical improvements are not the only benefits of community organization. At Ysleta, in addition to removing a major source of danger from children's lives, the campaign for traffic safety gave rise to a new sense of power. Suddenly, parents, teachers, and children had visible evidence that they could make a difference, and they began to take ownership of their school.
At Zavala Elementary, efforts to establish a health clinic served as the catalyst for dramatic improvement in the attitudes and expectations of community members. Through extensive meetings among parents, teachers, leaders, and organizers from Austin Interfaith, the community determined that inadequate health care contributed to students' academic struggles. These concerns fueled efforts to improve local health care options, which led to a commitment from the mayor to work with Austin Interfaith to raise the immunization rates of children in the community.
When the community attempted to follow up on the mayor's promise, however, the local health department announced that it could not meet the goals for immunization because the only clinic in the area had to be closed for repairs and asbestos removal. Rather than wait for the clinic to reopen, parents, community members, and teachers came together to establish a new clinic at Zavala. Despite considerable opposition and numerous complications, community members won the final clearances and were able to offer health services at Zavala the very next day (Murnane and Levy 1996).
For many, this kind of success seemed incomprehensible. As one parent said, “We're not used to getting anything.” But this victory gave them the confidence and motivation to participate in other activities, such as a workshop focusing on improving test scores. Their success also led to higher expectations, not only for children's performance but also for the performance of their school. “The parents felt emboldened to make other demands on us and on their city,” Alejandro Mindiz Melton, the Zavala principal, reported. “Their level of expectation increased. Now they started asking, 'Why aren't our children in honors programs in secondary schools? What are you doing to prepare our kids for college preparatory courses? Why can't our kids participate in the kind of after-school programs that they have at other schools?'” (Shirley 1997).
Often, these developments inspire school staff, who begin to see parents as allies. In many cases, teachers also feel more accountable, knowing that they may be asked to justify their educational approaches.
For some teachers, changes may seem threatening, but for others, such accountability opens up a whole new world of possibility. After the establishment of the health clinic, an after-school program, and other joint initiatives with parents, Claudia Santamaria, a teacher at Zavala, explained, “Suddenly, we had a sense of purpose.” For her, and for many teachers, this sense of purpose comes with renewed hope that their students can get the support and encouragement they need to succeed. In turn, renewed hopes increase teachers' motivation and raise their expectations for what their students can accomplish in the classroom and later in life.
Children notice changes in adults' attitudes and expectations. Like their teachers, students may be inspired to work harder after witnessing their parents' efforts, and they may feel more accountable for themselves and their school as a whole. Greater motivation, accountability, sense of purpose, or confidence alone could contribute to increases in student achievement. But increases are even more likely when they occur simultaneously to transform the attitudes and expectations of an entire community in fundamental ways.
Improving Learning Experiences
In the Alliance Schools, the growing sense of pride and possibility motivates teachers to try new instructional approaches and to pursue resources, training, and other opportunities to improve instruction. When the community found that only one graduate from Zavala had ever gone to a highly successful magnet middle school that focused on science, they fought for funds to create the Zavala Young Scientists Program. That initiative provides hands-on learning experiences in science to prepare students for entrance into the magnet program. Now several students go on to attend the magnet school as a matter of course.
Increased learning opportunities are not limited to students. Through grants from the Texas Education Agency, Alliance Schools have been able to pay for additional professional development for their teachers, and to create more time for teachers to work and plan together. Alliance Schools have also used funds to help establish a wide range of classes for parents. These include English-as-a-second-language classes, citizenship preparatory classes, and training sessions that enable parents to help their children with reading and homework.
Just as successful organizing efforts can help to improve attitudes and expectations, new and improved learning opportunities—particularly those that contribute to visible or measurable improvements in the performance of children and adults—can inspire new initiatives and raise expectations even higher. The fact that average test scores have increased in a number of Alliance Schools has attracted both local and national attention. Schools become a source of pride in communities that the media has previously either neglected or cast in a negative light. Further, communities may use the improvements in test scores as leverage to argue for better funding or more programs.
Higher test scores, however, are not the only sign of academic improvement. Ysleta successfully raised funds for an after-school program, which helped to create a sense of hope and excitement. But when a group of students from Ysleta who had been learning to play chess in the after-school program went to a state tournament and came home with a first-place trophy, the entire community took notice. As Myrna Castrejon, a former parent educator, explained, “Such achievements really change the way the community thinks.” Their chess victory has been an enormous source of pride for a neighborhood that had previously believed chess was reserved for children from wealthier communities. With trophy in hand, the Ysleta program has helped to stimulate after-school initiatives throughout the city.
In short, community organizing efforts can inspire improvements in many learning activities for both children and adults. Many of those activities contribute directly to improvements in student achievement. But those activities and the visible accomplishments that go along with them—such as victories in chess tournaments, increases in parent citizenship, and improvements in test scores—may also play a role in transforming the attitudes and expectations of the community.
Lifting the Constraints on Learning
Community organization sets in motion a constellation of activities and improvements that contribute to student achievement. In this view, no single activity leads to improvements in student performance. Teaching parents to help their children with homework, involving community members in decision making, or increasing the number of parents who attend meetings, are insufficient on their own. Instead, community involvement is most effective when it serves as a catalyst for improving the physical conditions and resources available, the attitudes and expectations within the school and the community, and the formal and informal learning opportunities for both children and adults.
By showing that students who live in difficult circumstances and attend “low-performing” schools can make rapid gains in achievement, the Alliance Schools also demonstrate that students from any community are fully capable of learning. The transformation of schools like Zavala, Morningside, and Ysleta suggests that community involvement breaks down barriers that have prevented student achievement. Children have been unable to accomplish their goals because they have been denied basic conditions—decent physical surroundings, adequate resources, reasonable expectations, positive attitudes, and challenging learning opportunities.
But meeting basic conditions is not enough. High test scores and improvements in students' performances are difficult to maintain. Even schools like Morningside and Yselta have found that their initial increases in test scores have been hard to sustain. At Zavala, while students are performing better on standardized tests and some are gaining entry to the magnet school, some struggle once they reach the next level of schooling. At the same time, members of the school and the community have to spend time and effort maintaining funding for valued reading programs and keeping open a nearby recreation center. Even with increased community involvement, improved conditions, and higher expectations, schools and communities continue to face new challenges and fight to sustain initial achievements.
These difficulties remind us that once communities establish basic conditions for learning, they may need to look to new strategies to preserve improvements. As a consequence, the Alliance Schools have developed new initiatives, many of which are designed to influence the whole system of education, not simply the activities of individual schools. In particular, they have set out to engage feeder patterns in their reform efforts. Thus, in places like Austin and El Paso, students may soon have a chance to move from Alliance elementary schools to middle and high schools that are also a part of the Alliance. Whether these new efforts are sufficient to sustain and expand initial successes remains to be seen. Ultimately, success will be measured not by higher test scores, but by the extent to which communities transform the conditions, expectations, and learning opportunities for their students.
