community participation or control? from new york to chicago

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This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University] On: 22 November 2014, At: 20:36 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Theory Into Practice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/htip20 Community participation or control? From new York to Chicago G. Alfred Hess Jr. a a Director of the Center for Urban School Policy , Northwestern University Published online: 16 Aug 2010. To cite this article: G. Alfred Hess Jr. (1999) Community participation or control? From new York to Chicago, Theory Into Practice, 38:4, 217-224, DOI: 10.1080/00405849909543857 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00405849909543857 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: Community participation or control? From new York to Chicago

This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 22 November 2014, At: 20:36Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Theory Into PracticePublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/htip20

Community participation or control? Fromnew York to ChicagoG. Alfred Hess Jr. aa Director of the Center for Urban School Policy , Northwestern UniversityPublished online: 16 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: G. Alfred Hess Jr. (1999) Community participation or control? From new York to Chicago,Theory Into Practice, 38:4, 217-224, DOI: 10.1080/00405849909543857

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00405849909543857

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication arethe opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out ofthe use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Community participation or control? From new York to Chicago

G. Alfred Hess, Jr.

Community Participation or Control?From New York to Chicago

W E ARE NOW IN THE 1ÓTH YEAR OF A n a t i o n a l

focus on school reform! It is amazing thatpoliticians, practitioners, policymakers, and re-searchers have been able to sustain a national andlocal focus on improving American schools. Thisfocus grew out of the 1983 report of the NationalCommission on Excellence in Education, A NationAt Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.

The first wave of educational reform focusedon accountability and resulted in statewide testingof students (and sometimes, teachers) in manystates across the nation. This emphasis helpedchange the rhetoric of public schooling from a fo-cus on inputs to a focus on performance, first ofstudents, then of schools and their staffs. The sec-ond wave of reform centered on restructuringschools through enhanced professionalism amongprincipals and teachers. Teachers were seen to bemore informed than academics had believed, andone aspect of this reform strategy was to enhanceteacher participation in school decision making. Thethird wave focused on putting the schools' clients,non-professionals, in charge of important educa-tional decision making, either through enrollmentchoice or through community control of schools.

Community control of schools has been tout-ed as a way to make professionals respond to thedesires of parents and community representatives

G. Alfred Hess, Jr., is director of the Center for UrbanSchool Policy at Northwestern University.

for changes in school operations and performance.School-based management had emerged as a prom-ising strategy, especially in large bureaucraticschool systems, during the 1980s. It was fosteredboth by organizational theories from the businesscommunity (Deming, 1982) and by client-centeredreforms in government, particularly public hous-ing, where tenant management was championed byleaders such as Housing and Urban DevelopmentSecretary Jack Kemp (Marx, 1989). Early effortsat school-based decision making had centered onempowering school professionals while looseningthe lockstep bureaucratic control of school systemadministrators (Hanson, Morris, & Collins, 1992;Malen & Ogawa, 1988). The Chicago reforms of1988 emphasized lay control by creating localschool councils with a supermajority of parents andcommunity representatives (Hess, 1991).

Lay control of public education has a longhistory, formally embodied in elected boards ofeducation in communities all across the UnitedStates. However, while lay members dominate theseelected boards of education, the policies and prac-tices adopted by these boards usually reflect theprofessional judgments of local educators or stateeducational bureaucrats. The rhetoric of "commu-nity control" frequently ignores this widespreadelectoral pattern, focusing instead on decentralizedlay control of individual schools or groups ofschools in large city school systems.

THEORY INTO PRACTICE, Volume 38, Number 4, Autumn 1999Copyright © 1999 College of Education, The Ohio State University0040-5841/99$!. 50

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THEORY INTO PRACTICE / Autumn 1999The Politics of Participation in School Reform

The meaning of the word community is quitedifferent in various cities. In the earliest of thesedecentralization efforts, New York City and De-troit, community referred to sub-regions of the city.In New York City, 32 community boards of educa-tion were established to govern the city's elementaryschools, while eight regions were established in De-troit. Thus, the word community in these cities re-fers to areas of a city with somewhere between50,000 and 200,000 residents. In other cities, suchas Salt Lake City, Miami, Memphis, and Chicago,community refers to a single school and its surround-ing neighborhood. In comparison with 32 communi-ties in New York City, Chicago's decentralizationinvolved some 560 communities, with high school ormagnet school communities overlapping neighbor-hood-based elementary school communities.

Sub-Regional CommunitiesDuring the 1960s a movement for communi-

ty control and community empowerment sweptacross the country, fueled by concerns over deseg-regation and the war on poverty. Daniel PatrickMoynihan (1969) has nicely retold the debates with-in the federal government between advocates ofcitizen inclusion and local political control of fund-ing as the concept of "maximum feasible partici-pation" was being forged. He also showed how itwas inevitable that community control would notsurvive in federal programs. But the movement didhave some specific import for New York City andDetroit, where there was pressure to bring the lo-cus of control closer to city residents.

Community school boards in New York CityIn New York City, the decentralization move-

ment grew out of the unrest surrounding desegre-gation. In language similar to that which could beused about most large urban school systems, Rog-ers (1968) described the situation in the 1960s:

In New York City public schools, one out of threepupils is a year or more retarded in arithmetic, andthe gap between . . . achievement and national stan-dards widens as [a pupil] remains in school. In thepast ten years reading scores have gone down, drop-out rates have gone up, community protest has in-creased, and the middle class has been steadilywithdrawing its children from the public schools. . . .Many [employers] are angry at the school system's

failure to produce an employable black and PuertoRican population, (p. 6)

Parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville sec-tion demanded that a new intermediate school (I.S.201) either be integrated, as the board had plannedoriginally, or grant local parents and communityresidents greater control over hiring the staff andrunning the school. At the same time, the statelegislature requested that the New York City boardprepare a plan for decentralization by Decemberof 1967. Rogers (1968) recounts the complaintsparents and community citizens had about the in-accessibility of officials of the board of education:

Parents and other interested citizens . . . face a large,amorphous, distant bureaucracy that seldom respondsto citizen demands. Many parents with legitimatecomplaints have no place to take them. Their localschool boards are powerless. The principal and thedistrict superintendent often pass the buck to head-quarters. . . . In short. . . many parents feel they aredealing with a faceless bureaucracy which is not ac-countable to the public, (p. 86)

New York City eventually created 32 elemen-tary school districts governed by community schoolboards selected in local popular elections. Howev-er, opinions about the success of decentralizationwere clearly mixed. In 1983, while acknowledgingthe divergent views about the value of decentrali-zation, Rogers and Chung noted that the readingtest scores of New York students were higher atevery grade in 1981 than they had been in 1971(see Table 1).

Table 1New York City Reading Scores

for 1971 and 1981

Grade

TwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNine

1971

2.83.54.35.26.26.57.58.6

1981

2.94.05.06.37.17.89.09.8

Change(+)

0.10.50.71.10.91.31.51.2

The authors concluded, "As the table shows,there was improvement in a l l . . . grades. Thus, thecritics who predicted harmful consequences, at leaston this particular measure of effectiveness, were

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HessParticipation or Control?

wrong, and the proponents appear to be right" (Rog-ers & Chung, 1983, p. 196).

But other problems in New York were evi-dent. The daily media were filled with stories ofcorruption on several community school boards.The record of union domination of many of theschool boards was well known. These were prob-lems to which the critics across the nation con-stantly referred. These problems led to theestablishment of the Marchi Commission to exam-ine decentralization in New York, which called for"decentralization with accountability" (Marchi,1991).

Further decentralization to the school site wassupported by new Chancellor Joseph Fernandez,who had long been associated with school-baseddecision making from his days in Dade County inthe middle and late 1980s. Several nationally no-ticed efforts followed to foster closer school-com-munity linkages (the "beacon schools") and tocreate small schools, some to be located in thefacilities of failing high schools that were closed.But political squabbles led to Fernandez's depar-ture, and his successor, Ramon Cortines, was oust-ed when Rudolph Giuliani became the firstRepublican mayor of New York City in severaldecades. The new chancellor, Rudolph Crew, hasgenerally been seen to be closely allied with themayor. I return to developments under the Crewadministration after reviewing decentralization inthree other cities.

Regional decentralization in DetroitIn the midwest, in response to desegregation

pressures similar to those in New York but signifi-cantly impacted by the resistance of White residents,Detroit also initiated a school decentralization plan,one that divided the city into eight regions. In theinitial elections, in 1970, Whites dominated theregional boards, winning majorities in six of theeight regions and control of the citywide board.Four years later, Blacks gained control, winning26 of the 40 regional seats. In many cases, theseBlacks had been active on local school advisorycouncils and had become well known in the com-munity areas (Glass & Sanders, 1978).

The racial disharmony at the center of theestablishment of decentralization in Detroit wasalso at the heart of its failure. Mirel (1990) cites a

divisive 43-day school strike in 1973, at least inpart focused on the power of community schoolboards to appoint teachers, and thereby introducefaculty racial quotas, as poisoning the atmospherebetween the community and the teacher force, un-dermining any significant improvement in schoolachievement. Mirel spells out the doom of the De-troit decentralization effort succinctly, "By 1976,virtually every major interest group in the city de-clared that decentralization was a failure so far asimproving the quality of education in Detroit. In1981, the city voted by a four-to-one margin torecentralize the system" (Mirel, 1990; see alsoMirel, 1993).

School-Based DecentralizationFor many observers, the term community is

more appropriately reserved for urban populationsgeographically located in neighborhoods or smallgroups of neighborhoods. Schools are frequentlythe most common governmental institution in thesesmaller communities. Creating greater participationof parents and other community residents in thegovernance of schools is one way of empoweringlocal citizen involvement in the affairs of the city.A related issue is to expand the arenas over whichlocal actors have authority, thereby decentralizingcontrol over such decisions from the central bu-reaucracy to the local entity. In Salt Lake City,decentralization focused on expanding teacher andparent participation. In Chicago, decentralizationinvolved both expanded participation and the dev-olution of authority.

Preserving professional privilegein Salt Lake City

Unlike the New York and Detroit cases,shared governance in Salt Lake City was vested atthe school, not community, level. In 1973, the SaltLake City School District and the Salt Lake CityTeachers Association promulgated a ContinuingWritten Agreement Based on the Principles ofShared Governance (Malen & Ogawa, 1988). Thispolicy was reaffirmed by a vote of the Salt LakeCity Board of Education in May of 1978. Underthe policy, two councils were established at everyschool: a school improvement council (SIC) madeup of school staff and a school community council(SCC), which included members of the SIC and

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THEORY INTO PRACTICE / Autumn 1999The Politics of Participation in School Reform

parents. Principals were automatically members ofboth councils; teachers were elected by their peersto the SIC (and thus, to the SCC). Parents wereinvited to participate on the SCC, generally by theprincipal. These councils were given formal au-thority to make decisions about the school budget,personnel, and program. They were designed to be"mini school boards" (McLeese & Malen, 1987).

Under policy statements of the Salt Lake CityBoard of Education, the councils were charged toimprove education at the building level and were"authorized to act as deciders, not advisers" (Malen& Ogawa, 1988, p. 253). Councils were enjoinedto made decisions through consensus, but equalpower was granted to principals, teachers, and par-ents through equal voting provisions. Training hadbeen provided to councils and council members.

However, Malen and Ogawa (1988) foundthat these councils fell far short, in actuality, ofthe hopes articulated for them. They note threemajor discrepancies from the formal organization:

First, although the site councils are authorized poli-cymakers, they functioned as ancillary advisors andpro forma endorsers. Second, teachers and parentsare granted parity, but principals and professionalscontrolled the partnerships. Third, although teachersand parents have access to decisionmaking arenas,their inclusion has maintained, not altered, the deci-sionmaking relationships typically and traditionallyfound in schools, (p. 256)

The authors found that councils had very lowinvolvement in either core domains such as bud-get, personnel, and program, or other salient is-sues. Instead, they dealt with "managerial" matterssuch as building operations, discipline, and carry-ing out district dictates. By controlling the agenda,principals kept important issues out of the publicdebate, despite the mandate of the council to bethe decision makers in these arenas. When divi-sive issues did arise, they were referred from theSCC to the SIC under the guise that things thatrelate to teachers and staffing are not the propersubject of parental discussions but should be re-served for the professionals.

Further, principals, and to a lesser extent,teachers benefited from having a greater control ofinformation about the school, leaving parents say-ing they didn't know enough about the school tomake important decisions. An emphasis on civility

in parent-professional relationships, along with thesuspicion that parents who create difficulties wouldbe removed from the councils, prevented seriousquestioning of the privileging of the professionalsand the principal in the way shared governancewas implemented in Salt Lake City. The authorsconclude that shared governance in Utah did notalter the basic relationships between principals (theboss), teachers (the professionals), and parents (thesupporters).1

The authors identified weaknesses in the SaltLake City plan such as the need for additional train-ing (perhaps as a way to demonstrate district com-mitment to the roles embedded in the formalpolicy), the absence of lump-sum budgeting by theSCC, the inability of the SCC to select and dis-miss principals, the need for independent sourcesof information about the school, and the option towaive district-wide policies (Malen & Ogawa,1988, p. 267). All of these capacities are embod-ied in the more radical form of school-based man-agement adopted in Chicago.

Local school councils in ChicagoIn response to the experiences of sub-regional

community control in New York and Detroit andineffective participatory councils in Salt Lake City,reform advocates in Chicago focused decision mak-ing at the school, not the sub-district level. School-based management there entailed both decentralizingdecisions to the school level and giving parentsand community representatives greater say in howthose decisions would be made. But the 1988 leg-islation2 did not specify exclusive control of theschools by parents and community members. Itenvisioned a shared responsibility at the school lev-el between professionals and lay actors.

The local school council (LSC) containedboth professional and lay members, with numeri-cal superiority given to the lay members to offsetthe greater influence professionals had been seento exercise in other settings such as New York andSalt Lake City (Malen & Ogawa, 1988; Rogers &Chung, 1983). But the vision was one of collabo-ration, with professionals making recommendationsto the LSC on budget, school improvement plan-ning, and educational programming. The LSC couldadopt or amend those recommendations.

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Teacher and lay LSC members together wereresponsible for the hiring and firing of the princi-pal. Other key decisions were reserved to the pro-fessionals: day to day management of the school,the hiring of teachers, and textbook selection.School-based management in Chicago was not in-tended to be exclusively "community control."

As school reform was implemented in Chica-go, it looked less like community control and morelike local decision making. In some schools, LSCsplayed a critically important role in shaping the di-rection of reform; in others, LSCs were little morethan "rubber stamps" for decisions made by princi-pals acting alone or by coordinated decisions madeby principals and groups of teachers (Hess, 1996).

As the implementation of school-based man-agement has unfolded in Chicago, several keythemes have emerged. First, for school reform tobe effective in improving student achievement inurban schools, principals, teachers, and parentsmust have high expectations for students. Thesehigher expectations were incorporated in the goalssection of the reform legislation. Second, schoolsand their staffs were given the opportunity tochange their current practices by being providedwith significant discretionary resources (up to$500,000 for the average elementary school,$800,000 for the average high school) and the free-dom from intrusive sanctions from the central of-fice. Third, the capacity of school personnel neededto be enhanced, giving rise to a significant empha-sis on professional development at many of thenewly autonomous schools. But with all of the op-portunity and support provided under the 1988 re-forms, it also became evident that there had to bea way to address the "will" of teachers, principals,parents, and students to change.

Student achievement did improve in a num-ber of schools under the 1988 school reforms. Butthe improvement was not systemwide, and it waslargely confined to the elementary schools. The com-plex organization of high schools made improvementplanning less effective. Changes in student achieve-ment showed declines in reading and some gains inmath test scores. The picture was much more posi-tive at the elementary level. The percentage of thirdthrough eighth graders at or above the national normin reading rose three points between the spring of

1990 and spring 1995, and then rose another 9.5 points(to 36.0%) by 1999. Math scores rose 2.7 percentagepoints by 1995 and then gained 13.8 points to 43.6percent at/above national norms in 1999 (ChicagoPublic Schools, 1999). These results are importantbecause previous research on school-based manage-ment has reported no significant student achievementgains associated with school-based management ef-forts (e.g., Malen, Ogawa, & Kranz, 1990; Wohlstet-ter & Odden, 1992). Still, 118 of the city's 460elementary schools had fewer students at or abovenational norms in reading in 1996 than they had atthe beginning of the reform period. Some means ofaddressing the will or capacity to change had to befound for these schools.

Balancing "Bottom-up" and "Top-Down"In 1995, a series of amendments to the 1988

school reform act were adopted by the Illinois leg-islature. In these amendments, the organization ofthe central administration and the management ofthe system's finances were streamlined, the mayorwas given control of both appointments to the boardand selection of top administrators in the schoolsystem, and new accountability provisions wereinstalled that allowed the central administration tointervene directly in poorly performing schools.Some reformers claim this is a recentralization ofpower in the school system; other observers sug-gest it was a needed balancing of power to keepthe focus clearly on student achievement (Wong,Dreeben, Lynn, & Sunderman, 1997).

Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed his retir-ing chief of staff, Gerry Chico, as the president ofthe new, smaller Reform Board of Trustees andhis budget director, Paul Vallas, as the chief exec-utive officer. Other top managers migrated fromcity hall, giving the school administration the ap-pearance of being a cabinet office under the mayor.Vallas and his team quickly resolved a long-runningfiscal crisis, using new management tools granted inthe 1995 legislation, and then turned their attentionto raising student achievement scores.

They utilized new accountability provisions inthe law to place 38 high schools and 71 elementaryschools on probation early in the 1996-97 schoolyear. Schools were placed on probation if fewerthan 15 percent of their students were reading at

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THEORY INTO PRACTICE I Autumn 1999The Politics of Participation in School Reform

the national norm. Schools placed on probationwere assigned a probation manager to mentor theschool's principal and provided resources to hirean external partner (usually a university-basedteam) to help change the nature of instruction.

At the end of that school year, seven of thehigh schools were "reconstituted," meaning thatall staff positions were declared vacant, thoughformer employees could reapply for their previousjobs. Five of the seven principals were replacedand about 30 percent of the teachers were not re-hired at their former school (with as many as 60percent not rehired at one of the schools). Shortlyafterward, promotion gates were put in place at thethird, sixth, eighth, and ninth grades, with studentsnot reaching prescribed levels on standardized read-ing and math tests required to attend summer schooland not promoted if they did not reach the prescribedlevels at the end of summer school.

More than 10,000 students were not promot-ed to the next grade and new enrollments in highschool first-year classes dropped by 10 percent.Thus, consequences were put in place for low per-formance by both teachers and students. Whilesome reformers have protested the ability of thecentral administration to override the autonomy oflocal school councils, Wong et al. (1997) suggestthat the ability to intervene in poorly performingschools creates a necessary balance in the gover-nance structure of the school system.

New York also experienced a revision in theform of its school decentralization. In 1995 andearly 1996, Chancellor Crew began to focus on thepersistent corruption in the decentralized commu-nity boards of education. He first attempted to oustthree community boards of education on chargesof corruption, but his actions were overturned bystate courts and opposed by the U.S. Office of CivilRights. In response, in December of 1996, the statelegislature restructured the district's governance toexpand school-based management but also to givethe chancellor the right to oversee the actions ofthe community school boards, community superin-tendents, and school principals, on the basis ofclearly articulated performance standards that hewas charged to promulgate. This legislation, withobvious similarities to the 1995 Chicago amend-ments, ushered in a new set of performance-basedgovernance relationships that two close observers

have called "strategic management" (Bloomfield& Cooper, 1998, p. 8).

Under this 1996 legislation, new powers weregiven to actors at various levels of the school system,all designed to shift the focus from "proceduralnorms" to "performance-based" action, monitoring,and intervention. Bloomfield and Cooper (1998)argue that this shift is not properly perceived as a"recentralization" of power but is a shift to a newkind of governance that focuses on the relation-ships of actors at different levels of the system.

Bloomfield and Cooper (1998) list the powersreserved to schools, including designing the budget,recommending staff for selection, developing curric-ula, enhancing staff development, coordinating withpublic support services, arranging minor building re-pairs, and purchasing supplies. Thus, New York Cityhas both extended the decentralization of decisionmaking downward to the school level and enhancedthe power of the chancellor to intervene in poorlyperforming districts and schools, even to the extentof creating a chancellor's district of low performingelementary schools.

Bloomfield and Cooper claim this new modelof "strategic management" constitutes "a sea changein urban school governance" (p. 3), echoing the sim-ilar assessment of changes in the governance struc-ture of the Chicago Public Schools (Wong et al.,1997) detailed above. The authors describe "strategicmanagement" as

setting . . . goals clearly for all divisions, schools,programs, and locations, which must then be evalu-ated The [New York City School Reform Act of1996] makes possible mutual, highly interactive ac-tivities, multiple levels of accountability, sanctionsfor poor school performance, and the identificationof responsible, accountable parties. This synergy isa clear departure from traditional top-down publicadministration. (Bloomfield & Cooper, 1998, p. 7)

Observers in both cities have been more skepticalabout the ultimate effects of the recent legislation,pointing out its susceptibility, in the hands of lesscapable leaders, for accumulation of power, a pointconceded by Bloomfield & Cooper (p. 9).

Is Community Control Sufficient?Community control is a label given to move-

ments in large urban districts to decentralize anddeprofessionalize authority over individual schoolsor groups of schools. Using the term in this way

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ignores the far more extensive community controlthat is broadly vested in democratically-electedschool district boards of education across the coun-try. Few question either the appropriateness or theeffectiveness of this pervasive, democratic form ofcommunity control, though some business leadersquestion the efficiency of having many small schooldistricts in a state.

But in large urban centers, when the formal-ly constituted board of education is socially andgeographically far distant from most of the city'scommunities, the notion of community control isfrequently vested with connotations of being "rev-olutionary" or "suspicious." While it is understand-able why political and bureaucratic leaders whoseauthority is constrained by community controlmight oppose it, one wonders why others in themedia or in academe invest it with such negativeconnotations, as compared to the more widespreadsuburban and rural community control. One won-ders if it is the nature of the communities in theseurban settings, composed as they are of low in-come, minority families, that is the source of thecritics' distrust of urban democracy.

In practice, the efforts at community controlof schools have played themselves out in distinc-tive ways. Community school districts continue tooperate in New York, and school-site governancehas been added, though new safeguards have beenput in place to combat fraud and patronage, andcentral authority over low performing schools hasbeen expanded. Community school districts in De-troit never escaped their involvement in the city'sracial conflict, and survived for only a decade. In-terestingly, Detroit is one of the cities in whichcharter schools have emerged as a widely avail-able alternative to centrally controlled neighbor-hood schools.

Voluntary community participation at theschool level through advisory councils, such asthose installed in Salt Lake City in the 1980s, con-tinues to be present in many communities but areonly infrequently linked to a concept such as con-trol. In Chicago, local control of schools has beenbalanced with centralized authority to monitor theperformance of individual schools and to intervenewhen performance standards are not being met. Thecombination of decentralized autonomy and central-ized monitoring has been interpreted as an effort to

integrate "bottom-up" and "top down" structuresin "integrated governance" (Wong et al., 1997) or"strategic management" (Bloomfield & Cooper,1998).

While some have argued vigorously for thevalue of democratic control of the school in urbanareas (cf. Bastian, Fruchter, Gittell, Gréer, &Haskins, 1985; Bryk, Kerbow, & Rollow, 1997), itis not clear that simply creating an opportunity forlocal actors to change their schools is a sufficientstrategy for improving the vast majority of urbanschools. High schools, in particular, have showngreat resistance to change under opportunity-en-hancing strategies of local control. In Chicago, ithas become clear that raising expectations, provid-ing opportunity to change, and finding resourcesto enhance the capacity of faculties are all neces-sary elements of improvement in urban schools.But alone, they are not sufficient for more than aminority of the city's schools. Some means of ac-countability—of holding principals, teachers, par-ents, and students responsible for the level of theirperformance—is also necessary to induce schoolimprovement if student learning is to be the mea-sure of success.

Notes1. For an account of other professional-dominatedshared governance schemes in Dade County, Florida,and Memphis, see Hanson, Morris, and Collins, 1992,and Etheridge and Collins, 1992.2. See Hess (1991) for details of the 1988 school re-form act and for a historical account of the events lead-ing up to the enactment of the legislation and its earlyimplementation. Hess (1995) presents evidence on theimplementation of the reforms during their first 5 years.

ReferencesBastian, A., Fruchter, N., Gittell, M., Greer, C., &

Haskins, K. (1985). Choosing equality: The casefor democratic schooling. San Francisco: PublicMedia Center.

Bloomfield, D.C., & Cooper, B.S. (1998). Recentral-ization or strategic management? A new gover-nance model of the New York City Public Schools.New York: The Center for Educational Outreachand Innovation of Columbia University.

Bryk, A.S., Kerbow, D., & Rollow, S. (1997). Chicagoschool reform. In D. Ravitch & J.P. Viteritti (Eds.),New schools for a new century: The redesign ofurban education (pp. 164-200). New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.

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