School as Community,Community as School: Examining Principal Leadership for Urban School Reform and Community Development

Abstract

For decades, reform has been a persistent issue in urban schools. Research suggests that urban school reforms that are connected to equitable community development efforts are more sustainable, and that principals play a pivot role in leading such efforts. Yet, limited research has explored how urban school principals connect school reform with community improvement. This study examines principal leadership at a high school in the Southeastern United States where school reform was linked to improving community conditions. Using the case study method, this study draws on interviews and document data. Concepts from social capital theory are used to guide the analysis. Findings indicate that the principal’s actions to support urban school reform and community improvement included the following: positioned the school as a social broker in the community, linked school culture to community revitalization projects, and connected instruction to community realities. The study concludes with implications for practice and future research.

Keywords

leadership school–community relations urban school reform community development

Many urban cities are undergoing massive restructuring. The mechanisms for urban restructuring, such as gentrification, deindustrialization, and the privatization of public education, are occurring at unprecedented rates (Lipman, 2011). Further compounded by the cumulative impacts of structural racism and urban disinvestment, these forces in turn shape and have profound impacts on the neighborhoods where urban schools are located. To account for this, policymakers and reformers have shown a renewed interest in place-based education strategies that connect schools and local communities (Horsford & Heilig, 2014; Warren, 2005). In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education allocated $10 million to launch its Promise Neighborhood Initiative (PNI), which is a placed-based education effort to eliminate poverty in urban and rural communities (Horsford & Sampson, 2014). The PNI is significant because it is the first comprehensive federal initiative to center educational outcomes within placed-based efforts to eradicate poverty (Horsford & Sampson, 2014).

In addition, a growing body of scholarship has focused on broadening traditional school reform models to address the social and community-based realities that urban schools experience (Green, 2016a; Horsford & Heilig, 2014; Miller, Brown, & Hopson, 2011; Schutz, 2006; Warren, 2005). Scholars have, thus, examined urban school reforms at the intersection of community development (Green, 2015a; Crowson & Boyd, 2001; Keith, 1996; McKoy, Vincent, & Bierbaum, 2011; Patterson & Silverman, 2013; Warren, 2005) and urban school reform in the context of neighborhood inequality (Anyon, 2005; Berliner, 2006; Miller et al., 2011; Schutz, 2006). These studies highlight the importance of situating urban school reform within a broader community milieu.

At the same time, scholars have advocated to expand notions of educational leadership to reconsider the principalship as a community-wide practice (Green & Gooden, 2014; Ishimaru, 2013; Khalifa, 2012; Miller, Wills, & Scanlan, 2013; Scanlan & Johnson, 2015). This reconsideration is significant because as Warren (2005) notes, “School districts and leaders have struggled to improve schooling in low-communities, largely in isolation from community development initiatives” (p. 134). Thus, to bridge the disconnect between urban school reform and community improvement, this study contributes to the limited research on principal leadership at the intersection of these bodies of literature (Green, 2015a; Crowson & Boyd, 2001; Goldring & Hausman, 2001).

The purpose of this study is to examine principal leadership at an urban high school in the Southeastern United States where school reform was linked to improving community conditions. Accordingly, this study examines the following research question:

Research Question 1: What principal actions support urban high school reform along with community development?

In centering principal leadership for this study, I do not aim to position principals as superheroes (Gooden, 2012; Ishimaru, 2013) to urban schools and communities, but rather as advocates with them. However, in focusing on the principal, I realize that equity-based work in school-communities often starts with one person (Theoharis, 2009). Thus, my aim is to illuminate principal practice to inform school leaders’ work in similar contexts. In what follows, I begin with a discussion about research on urban schools and community development. Then, I describe how social capital is used to theoretically frame this study. I next discuss this study’s methods and findings. I conclude with implications for practice and future research.

Research on School–Community Relations

Over the past 15 years, a new wave of research has documented the significant relationship between urban schools and their local communities (Epstein, 2001; Schutz, 2006; Tate, 2012; Valli, Stefanski, & Jacobson, 2014). Traditionally, research on school–community¹ relationships has focused on ways to engage local communities to improve school-centric outcomes such as academic achievement and parental involvement (Epstein, 2001; Sanders, 2003). For example, Epstein (2001) posits that communities, families, and schools are key institutions that influence student development and achievement. Epstein and colleagues thus offer a six-part framework for school, parent, and family partnerships, which includes parenting, communication, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaboration with community.

Schools and communities traditionally collaborate in a variety of ways such as through business partnerships, university partnerships, service–learning partnerships, outreach from the school to the community, and full-service community schools (Sanders, 2003). However, Schutz (2006) argues that traditional approaches to school–community relations could be improved because “communities are helpful to schools when they support the school’s mission and harmful when they resist or criticize the mission in some way” (p. 704). In addition, traditional approaches to school-community relations often only focus on individual student success instead of community-wide equity and strengthening local institutions (Green, 2016b; Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009).

As such, scholars have thus given more attention to the social and community context in which urban schooling occurs. Research suggests that schools located in low-income urban communities are often racially and spatially isolated from opportunities that advance educational equality and that neighborhood conditions shape in-school experiences of children who attend urban schools (Green & Gooden, 2014; Berliner, 2006; Milner, 2013). Given these realities, Warren (2005) argues, “What sense does it make to try to reform urban schools while the communities around them stagnate or collapse?” (p. 133). Therefore, some scholars have considered ways to improve neighborhood and school outcomes through community development (Crowson & Boyd, 2001; Green, 2015a; Keith, 1996; Khalifa, 2012; McKoy et al., 2011; Warren, 2005).

Research at the intersection of urban school reform and community development makes critical connections between more equitable community-wide change and student outcomes (Patterson & Silverman, 2013; Taylor, 2005). Education scholars have defined community development in several ways, which often serve as a catchall term that includes a variety of educational, economic, social, and housing programs that are intended to support community rebuilding (Schutz, 2006). Timpane and Reich (1997), therefore, suggest “There is no single framework for community development. Each community must create arrangements that build on its strength and respond to is particular needs” (p. 466). However, for this study, I draw on Gary Green and Anna Haines (2012) who define community development as “involve[ing] structural changes in the community, especially in how resources are used, [and] the functioning of institutions, and the distribution of resources” (pp. 4-5).

The literature suggests several reasons for linking urban school reform with community development. First, community-wide inequities, such as poverty, housing, and health care, present challenges to student learning that require support from neighborhood institutions (Miller, 2012). According to Small (2006), a neighborhood institution is “any organization with a physical establishment, located in a neighborhood, and having a clientele composed primarily of neighborhood residents,” such as places of worship, libraries, recreation centers, child care centers, hair salons/barber shops, and schools (p. 276, see also Green, 2015b; Green, 2016a). Second, research suggests that improving the communities where schools are located is essential for reforms to endure (Warren, 2005). Third, urban schools alone are not equipped to adequately confront the range and complexity of community inequity that shape them (Noguera & Wells, 2011).

Principals in School–Community Relations

Principals play a central role in establishing connections with parents (Auerbach, 2010; Wilson, Riehl and Hasan, 2010; Ishimaru, 2013; Mapp & Hong, 2010) and the local community (Gooden, 2005; Khalifa, 2012; Lomotey, 1989; Tillman, 2004). Sanders and Harvey (2002) analyzed how an urban elementary school principal established strong connections with community businesses and other organizations. The authors found that an elementary school principal established a commitment to learning, the principal cast and supported a vision for school–community involvement, the school was receptive to the community’s involvement, and the school established two-way communication about how the community could support the school.

Goldring and Hausman (2001) similarly argue that principals should exercise civic capacity: building community alliances to improve local neighborhood conditions. They describe civic capacity as an effort that “goes way beyond notions of partnering or collaborating . . . [to] new mental models of schooling” (p. 199). Crowson and Boyd (2001) urge principals to view work with communities through a renewed sense of place that acknowledges the agency of community members and makes investments into the local neighborhood. Other scholars suggest that principals should assume the role of community leader in urban school districts. Khalifa (2012) found that an African American principal who served as a community leader did so through conducting weekly home visits, speaking at community engagements, and spending time working on neighborhood issues with local stakeholders. Although this body of research highlight the importance of considering community development in school reform efforts, less of this research has focused on the role of the principal. I next discuss how social capital theory informs this study.

Theoretical Framework: Social Capital Theory

I draw on social capital theory to understand how a principal supported urban school reform that is linked with community improvement. Many scholars commonly define social capital as resources embedded within social relationships that can be employed when a person desires to increase the likeliness of success for a particular action (Bourdieu, 1986; Lin, 2001; Putnam, 2000). However, according to Coleman (1988), social capital can be exchanged through networks that provide information channels, social norms, and common expectations. Individual and organizational brokers often connect these networks (Small, 2006). According to Burt (1992), a broker is an individual who builds bridges between two discrete networks. Chaskin, Brown, Venkatesh, and Vidal (2001) define organizational brokers as community-building organizations that tie separate organizations to one another to accomplish local neighborhood tasks and build community capacity. Through such brokered relationships (both individually and organizationally), social capital can yield support, trust, collaboration, and shared support (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 2000).

For this study, I draw mainly on Putnam’s (2000) notion of bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding social capital characterizes social networks that are “inward looking that tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogenous groups” (Putnam, 2000, p. 22). Bridging social capital, however, represents “outward networks looking and encompassing people across diverse social cleavages” (Putnam, 2000, p. 22). An important form of bridging social capital is linking social capital: social connections to institutions of fiscal or political “power” that have expansive spheres of influence (Ling & Dale, 2013). Through these forms of social capital, organizations in low-income urban communities can become resource brokers: “organizations possessing ties to businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies rich in resources, which then provide neighborhood institutions’ patrons with access to these resources” (Small, 2006, p. 274). Hence, urban residents may access information and resources through organizational connections that their personal social ties cannot produce.

Together, bonding, bridging, and linking social capital are useful for this study because they provide a lens to understand how school principals can work collaboratively, as brokers, with various stakeholders toward a common purpose (Putnam, 2000). Second, bridging social capital illustrates how principals can develop connections with and between community organizations. Through these connections, an under-resourced school can gain access to local organizations’ networks, resources, and power to improve school as well as neighborhood conditions (Shirley, 1997; Warren, Hong, Leung, & Sychitokhong, 2009). Third, social capital offers a lens to understand how a principal can develop common expectations and obligations with diverse organizations and groups. With this understanding of social capital theory, I next discuss this study’s methods.

Research Design and Method

This analysis draws on data from a larger study that examined two urban high schools, where reform occurred along with community development (Green, 2015a). To identify sites for this study, I used purposeful sampling (Creswell, 2012). The school in this study met the following criteria: (a) public, urban high school; (b) located in an “urban or inner city” community mainly populated with people of color; and (c) the school was intentionally working on school reform along with community initiatives (e.g., engagement, partnerships, development). Per my selection criteria, a person in mid-level management at the Coalition for Community Schools recommended Carter G. Woodson High School (WHS)² because it had received a national award for its school–community work.

Data collection for this project included interviews, document data, and field notes. I collected data at the high school, in the community, and at the school district’s central office.

Interviews

Semi-structured interviews served as the primary data source for this study. I conducted 11 interviews with two high school principals (former principal who started the reform and the current principal), two assistant principals, two parent and community engagement specialists (former and current), three teachers, one (former) academy coach, and one community partner from a local business that works with the school. Four were of color (three African American and one Latina) and eight were White, seven were female and four were males. In addition, I digitally recorded each interview, and asked questions that focused on topics such as the condition of the school and community prior to the reform, the impetus for the school–community reform work, the ways in which the school reform impacted the community and vice versa, and the principals actions that support this work. The interviews lasted between 60 and 90 min. I conducted one to two interviews, per participant. Given the purpose of this study, I center the high school principal’s perspective, Oscar Hamilton, because he initiated and led the reform efforts. I, however, use the other 10 interviews to further flesh out the findings.

Documents

In addition, document data provided key information for this study. These data sources included, but were not limited to, State Department of Education (SDOE) data, the schools’ internal data reports (i.e., academic benchmarks and school improvement evaluation reports), newspaper articles, national, external reports about the schools. I used these documents to triangulate interview data and field notes.

Data Analysis and Trustworthiness

To analyze the data, I utilized Marshall and Rossman’s (1999) six phases of analytic procedures: organizing the data, generating categories, coding the data, testing the emergent understandings, searching for alternative explanations, and writing the report. I first transcribed interviews and field notes, and noted all principal actions that supported urban school reform and community development to organize the data and generate categories. I then assigned each action a descriptive code and organized codes into similar categories to create axial codes. The axial codes were anchored in the reviewed literature and served as a means to identify relationships between the codes (Creswell, 2012). For example, descriptive codes included categories such as “developing connections with the community,” “offering social services at the school,” and then I created broad axial codes such as “making the school a central community institution.” I then arranged the leader actions (now in axial codes) into larger conceptual themes and used the constant comparative method to test the emerging categories throughout the data analysis process (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Next, I analyzed the emerging findings and themes (i.e., leader actions) in relation to concepts from the theoretical framework. In addition, three faculty colleagues served as cross-readers to check whether my writing of the findings was clear and made sense. In the next section, I describe the school and community context of this study.

The Context of WHS and Its Community

WHS opened in 1957 with 350 students. During the school’s inception, White, middle-class students were the majority demographic. However, over the next 40 years, the school and community experienced significant racial demographic shifts as the neighborhood became home to various immigrant families. As demographics shifted, so did local resources. By the late 1990s, WHS had garnered a bad reputation. As one teacher stated, “There had been some rough years at Woodson in the 90s and early 2000s. It just had a bad reputation as a rough school.” By the early 2000s, WHS was known as a racially diverse high school and had students from more than 50 countries. Over time and for several reasons, the community began to experience an increase in gang activity, which often manifested inside WHS. Describing the gang activity, an educator explained, “We probably had more gangs than any other school at that time . . . We had helicopters at dismissal. We literally had City Police helicopters at dismissal for security.” By the mid-2000s, WHS had a laundry list of issues that made school reform an urgent priority. The school had some of the lowest student achievement scores in the district, low graduation rates, weak school–community connections, and prevalent student and neighborhood health problems because of a lack of access to health care. According to data, WHS’s race and class demographics were 40% Latino/a, 25% African American, 25% White, and 10% are Asian, with a growing Kurdish and Egyptian student populations. Eighty percent of students were eligible for free and/or reduced lunch.

Community context and principal description

WHS is located in one of the most racially diverse communities in the state: 60% of the residents are White and 40% are of color. According to participants, most of the White residents have lived in the community for decades and continued to live there because their homes are paid for. On a disaggregated level, the community is comprised of 20% African American, 15% Latino/a and Asian American, and 5% multiracial residents. In addition, the community has the largest concentration of first- and second-generation immigrant populations in the city, such as Kurdish, Egyptians, Somalis, and Sudanese because of the settlement houses in the neighborhood. Although the broader community is racially diverse, the community is still residentially segregated by race. One educator noted,

The community and school are similar in racial diversity; except for when you walk into the school the racial diversity is all meshed together . . . In the community you have to go a lot of places to get that diversity.

Moreover, educational attainment across the community is low. Approximately, 15% of community residents have an associate degree or greater. High school graduation rates in the community are higher, but still are not stellar: approximately, 60% of residents have a high school diploma.

Oscar Hamilton, the principal, is an African American male whom participants consistently described as a visionary leader. According to Oscar, his passion centers on transforming urban schools and communities. As a proud graduate of the city’s public school system and a local Historically Black College and University (HBCU), Oscar later earned his master’s degrees from local universities. In 2007, Oscar was named principal at WHS. When Oscar became the principal, he brought 17 years of experience as a teacher and administrator, including 1 year as an assistant principal (AP) at WHS. After leading the efforts at WHS for five years, Oscar was promoted to an assistant superintendent position to expand his school–community practices across the district.

Findings

In this section, I discuss the principal’s actions that supported urban school reform along with community development (as defined in this study) at WHS. Findings suggest that the principal, Oscar, positioned the school as a social broker in the community, linked school culture to community revitalization projects, and connected instruction to community realities. These findings enhance our understanding about how principals practically bridge the worlds of school reform and community development.

Positioned the School as a Social Broker in the Community

Given the school’s reputation, Oscar wanted to transform the entire school when he became principal. To transform the school, his strategy was to create robust connections between WHS and the local community. Oscar put forth a vision for WHS to be a key community institution and an integral part of the neighborhood. His vision was rooted in the belief that urban communities need strong public schools. He declared, “You cannot privatize or charter school it enough, we need strong public schools . . . The perception is all of our schools are failing and our kids are not capable . . . that is absolutely not true.” Tracey, a formal academy coach at WHS described the vision, “The reform all started with Oscar’s vision for the school to be the central focus in the community.” Mrs. Williams, a teacher at WHS, similarly explained, “Oscar’s vision was to make this high school a community school, not just a high school building in the middle of a community.” Nearly all participants shared this sentiment and suggested that Oscar’s vision was a major catalyst in the school–community work. Accordingly, Oscar described, “The first things we changed were some of the things that people don’t recognize. We changed our vision statement from the very beginning. We wanted to be the central focus of the community, point blank!” He continued, “The school is more than you, the school is more than the building, it is that whole community.” In essence, Oscar wanted WHS to strengthen its ties with community-based organizations (CBOs; Small, 2006). To operationalize this vision, Oscar took two main actions: He made the school a community-wide health care provider and established strategic partnerships with neighborhood organizations.

Made the school a community-wide health care provider

As community demographics began to change, so did the amount of resources that local residents had access to. Students and community members had limited access to various resources in the neighborhood. Juanita, an assistant principal at WHS explained,

. . . There was no access to anything. There was no access to jobs, no access to resources, and no access to health care. All of that was limited to the student body, but especially evident in the immigrant population at WHS, which was huge.

Oscar agreed as he described how many opportunities that students and families in WHS’s local community needed access to were on the other side of town:

One of the biggest barriers for students is access and equity. Most often the programs that are going to perpetuate students futures the greatest are not offered in their community. And there is no equity and access for them because they can’t afford it [and] they can’t go across town.

Most saliently, however, was the limited access to health care resources, which become evident in school data that showed dropout rates and absenteeism were related to lack of health care access. Oscar explained,

We had a high percentage of pregnancies in our school. And from the indicators that I was seeing students get pregnant and they rarely come to school . . . Or they come back with very limited options because they do not have childcare. Then, along the way there was a high rate of illness while going through their pregnancy and a greater need afterward not only because of their illness, but because of their newborn child’s illness . . . I wanted to find a way to address the issue of teen pregnancy as it relates to attendance, dropouts, and illness.

To address this concern, Oscar wanted WHS to literally become an institution (i.e., social broker) that provided not only education but also a place where new mothers (who were students at the school) and their children could access health care services along with other students and local residents who needed it.

As such, Oscar established relationships with several CBOs, particularly the United Neighborhood Health Organization that focuses on community health issues through establishing community-based health clinics. Oscar explained the origins of the partnership:

It was just the administration of the school and about four or five community partners . . . and we had conversations about what can we do to address these issues [of teen pregnancies and lack of access to health care].

After several months of conversations, the group formed the Woodson Community Coalition (WCC)—that consisted of WHS, the United Neighborhood Health Organization, the school district, and a network of other CBOs. The WCC sought to establish a school-based community health care clinic. To fund the project, the United Neighborhood Health Organization shared resources to financially assist in this endeavor. Oscar explained,

Then United Neighborhood Health Organization received the funding to expand their community-based clinics. So, then we entered into a development phase of how I could give up space in the building and how our district could absorb some of the renovation and construction costs and they would put in a full functioning clinic [in the school] . . . One of the requirements that I had was if you are going to put in a clinic then you had to put in an exterior door entry and signage to make it look like a community-based clinic. So they put in the exterior door and sign.

WHS thus became a haven for neighborhood health care for students, families, and community members with little to no insurance. The clinic was serving large numbers of students and families every day. Oscar commented, “Today (at the time of this study), it is still the highest visited school-based clinic in the city, and that made a difference.” In addition, creating the WCC is an example of bridging and linking social capital because it illustrates not only how Oscar connected to an organization with fiscal resources to fund the school-based clinic but also how various neighborhood organizations aggregated their resources, networks, information, and expertise to provide health care services (Putnam, 2000). Hence, sharing resources was critical to positioning the school as a social broker in the community and for providing access to health care resources for students and families that they could not contact them through their own networks (Burt, 1992; Small, 2006).

Established strategic partnerships with neighborhood organizations

After the school-based community clinic was in place, Oscar aimed to develop more bridging social capital and strategic partnerships with a variety of CBOs that could support WHS in other ways (Putnam, 2000). Oscar used what he called the “Rule of Three” to assess strategic partnerships. His metric assessed whether a CBO could make tangible connections to students in at least three different ways to ensure that WHS’ partners could support students comprehensively. This also guarded WHS against disingenuous CBOs. Moreover, as Mrs. Williams, a teacher at WHS commented, “Oscar sought CBOs out and said, ‘we need you’” because the reform efforts were beyond what the school could accomplish alone (Miller, 2012; Noguera & Wells, 2011). In establishing partnerships, Oscar was very intentional about leveraging the assets that WHS had to address students’ needs. He explained,

If you don’t leverage your assets, you cannot be successful because the needs and demands facing kids and education today extend beyond the local funding of your local school board. Your [local] funding supports staffing your building. Your federal funding supports extending programming. But that [local and federal funding] does not get to all of the core needs of your kids. So, when you start talking about leverage points, you leverage everything. And it’s not just money. You leverage partnerships, you leverage student engagement, and you leverage policy and compliance. You have to find ways to leverage what you have against what you need.

Oscar’s strategy for partnerships considered specific leverage points that could integrate WHS’ and the community’s assets to address school–neighborhood needs (Green, 2016a).

Specifically, Oscar was purposeful about establishing partnerships with CBOs that could help parents develop social capital, especially immigrant parents who lived in the community. For example, WHS established partnerships with several CBOs that worked with parents. According to Kim, the parent and community engagement specialist, “What we have been very good at is doing some capacity building with parents.” This collaboration with several CBOs offers a variety of adult education classes and provides child care for parents while they are taking classes. For example, Kim described,

We do a series of 6-week orientation seminars for 9th grade parents that include how to advocate for your child in the school system. [Also] one of our community partners offers a 9-week seminar for Spanish speaking parents where every week there is a different topic about the school system, talking to your kids, graduation, credits, [and] it’s all in Spanish. Parents run the workshops for other parents. Every semester we graduate about 30 parents out of that.

Other classes for parents, families, and neighborhood residents included courses on the General Education Diploma (GED), computers, welding, carpentry, photography, language, and other pertinent issues to residents such as the DREAM Act, which is a legistative proposal for undocumented immigrants. Moreover, over the years, the relationship with the school and community became mutually beneficial. As one educator stated, “Once we got our feet firm, we had to start going back to the community.” WHS thus became a community facility where groups could hold meetings (e.g., church), and as the educator asserted, “It [the relationship with the community] is now going both ways.” As a social broker, the school also became a spatial community asset. I next discuss Oscar’s actions to link school culture with community revitalization projects.

Linked School Culture to Community Revitalization Projects

As noted in the literature, Oscar understood that what happened in the community often manifested inside of the school (Milner, 2013; Warren, 2005). Therefore, connecting the school’s culture to community revitalization projects was a critical component to this work. When Oscar took over as principal, the school’s culture required immediate changes, as gang fights and violence were typical. He described,

Truthfully, it was the perfect example of a low-performing school. We had very poor attendance rates, very high rates of discipline infractions. We were known as a high gang concentration school. There was a lot of student and teacher apathy, little to no parental support and engagement. [There was] a disconnect between the community, community agencies and the school. [There were] issues with teacher and student performance; it was the poster child. It did not look or feel like a high functioning school.

All other participants shared the sentiment that WHS’s school culture needed to change.

However, the agenda to link and transform school culture through community revitalization projects emerged when gang members came inside the school and severely beat a student, which made the six o’clock news. Oscar said, “That [gang fight] really started our community revitalization projects for school culture changes.” Oscar purposefully used the language “community revitalization projects for school culture changes” because he drew on the community to help transform WHS’s culture. He explained,

I used that terminology because our efforts to address gang activity and violence were not restricted to the school or school day. I conducted gang awareness presentations with the gang task force, conducted community meetings and spoke at churches to get everyone on board or at least to let them know that we were addressing this issue.

Oscar actively pursued neighborhood organizations that could support WHS. Jody, the former parent and community engagement specialist noted, “Oscar’s thing was to try to bring in resources from the community to support issues affecting students at Woodson.” As such, Oscar took changing WHS’s culture very seriously. He said, “When you start talking about school culture, you sort of have to do it all. You can’t change a culture by addressing one part of it.” He continued, “There has to be a sense of urgency . . . Everyone has to understand the vision.” Moving with urgency, Oscar took two main actions to link and transform the school’s culture: change WHS’s aesthetic appearance and develop youth leadership.

Changed the school’s aesthetic appearance

“Woodson High School was awful [looking], it was institutional white, and it looked like a prison. The paint was peeling off [the walls], it was junky, it was nasty,” recalled Oscar. He explained his philosophy and rationale behind changing the school’s appearance:

You can’t take a student and put him in the housing projects and ask him to treat it like it is Taj Mahal. So your facilities need to look like a place conducive to learning. But, more importantly, your facilities need to show that you take pride in the school if you want the kids to take pride in the school.

Oscar was opposed to the school looking like a jailhouse and took actions to change WHS’ aesthetics. To do so, Oscar partnered with several CBOs and the school district, which all contributed to changes in WHS’s appearance in several ways. Oscar worked with the school district to get the entire school painted inside and outside. His rationale was that he wanted the school to have bright and vibrant colors. Oscar also added flat screen televisions in the school’s lobby to, as he explained, “To put up motivational clips; things that really became more engaging to kids.”

Importantly, Oscar admitted that making atheistic changes was superficial and simply not enough. He said, “We did a lot in terms of environment. But, that is just all superficial. That is just a part of changing school culture.” To make deep school culture changes, Oscar and his staff made youth leadership a central component of the school’s culture.

Developed youth leadership

To start, Oscar established a relationship with a CBO that worked with students on issues of racism, youth voice, and youth leadership to specifically address gang violence in schools. Oscar explained,

We brought in an organization called Critical Youth Development Group [located] here in the city that really focuses on student leadership and racial harmony. So we sent a group of about 45-60 kids to a 2 or 3-day camp, away from school at our expense. And they were really trained on teamwork and unity and things like that. And that was really the foundation for our student leadership model.

As such, drawing on community resources, Oscar connected with a local organization that had expertise in areas where his staff needed further capacity building. Moreover, students who went through the initial youth leadership training brought a spirit of solidarity and bonding social capital back to WHS that helped to develop other students’ capacity to work on these issues (Putnam, 2000). As Oscar noted, “You have to start building the capacity and ownership of kids. The thing about it is that the kids want it. They want the responsibility . . .”

In addition, to institutionalize the youth leadership momentum that students started at the training, Oscar created space for students to have a central role in the school’s decision-making process. In turn, this helped to foster stronger leadership and relationships among students at WHS. He explained his philosophy for youth leadership:

In a school the size of Woodson, we had 1,400 kids, which means in total we had 140 to 165 staff and 5 administrators. How do you expect a handful of adults to change the culture with 1,400 kids? It is not going to happen. We can mandate compliance, we can suspend, but when you really want true reform and commitment you have to do it differently. If you want true change to happen, make the kids own it.

Oscar was unwavering about sharing leadership to include students. He relied on students to make decisions throughout the school on a range of issues such as school policy decisions as well as reducing gang graffiti and food fights during lunch. Oscar said, “The students had input on policy change, but I also used the students to address areas of concern to me.” Mrs. Williams, a teacher, corroborated, “Oscar used the students to make decisions. If he had questions, he would pull them all in and say, ‘Here is what we are looking at doing because this is the problem.’”

Furthermore, Oscar established a five-strand youth leadership structure called Student Voice, which was centrally focused on what is known at the school as United Nations, to sustain the initial work that was done with the neighborhood organization around issues of racism and youth voice. The United Nations is comprised of students from across the 50 nations who attend WHS. Oscar implemented the United Nations because he wanted to teach students, especially first-generation immigrant students, how to navigate the U.S. governmental system. Oscar said, “The school’s population were extremely immigrant. Most of our population was not aware of governmental structure. So we thought this is an opportunity to teach them the governmental structure.” According to nearly all participants, Student Voice was instrumental in changing WHS’s culture, which began with working with the Critical Youth Development Group to foster student leadership. To this end, a primary metric that WHS used to assess how much the school’s culture changed was the number of fights. School data revealed between the 2007 and 2012 school years, the first month of school, there were about 30 fights. In the first month of 2012, the school only had two fights; both were ninth graders who were still learning the WHS culture.

Connected Instruction With Community Realities

In the fall of 2007, the school district restructured several of its comprehensive high schools into smaller learning communities (SLCs), which subdivide students and teachers into smaller, autonomous groups. To adopt the SLC structure, WHS developed career academies (i.e., academies). The academies were implemented to prepare students for college and career using a curriculum that integrates real-world applications to a particular themed interest or industry. As Oscar said, “The academies caused a transformation in teaming and structure, in the way that I do things as a principal, in the way that I align my teachers and staff, and the way that teachers and staff work together.” The academies fostered continuity between the Oscar, teachers, students, and the community.

To make the academies relevant to students, Oscar partnered with several social institutions throughout the neighborhood and city, such as the school district, the chamber of commerce, local businesses, and CBOs to identify which career academies would be most fitting for WHS. To guide their decision, Oscar along with representatives from these various organizations analyzed current and projected labor market data for the city and state to identify high needs and high paying careers over the next decade. Oscar explained,

We looked at labor market data for the 14 top career fields . . . Then, we looked at our city. [We asked] what jobs are going to be the future projected high needs positions in the city? And we really wanted to focus on high-wage jobs. Jobs that really gave students an opportunity to have a very successful future based on income.

These data informed which academies WHS adopted to connect instruction to community realities. Based on this analysis, they identified five academies for WHS: Ninth-Grade Academy, Environmental and Urban Planning Academy, Business Academy, Health Science and Research Academy, and Hospitality and Marketing Academy to align with the city’s projected high needs, high-wage jobs. Importantly, implementing the career academies transformed teaching and learning at WHS and created opportunities to connect instruction to community realities. Through the academies, Oscar wanted students to develop, as he said, “21st century skills and real-world relevance that were connected to career fields and students’ interests.” For example, Oscar expanded the cosmetology program and connected it to small business development and entrepreneurship. He said,

We wanted to get away from just doing hair. We want students to really also learn about . . . building a small business model, so that instead of doing hair out of their mama’s kitchen they could really look at careers [and] at opening a salon . . .

This example illustrates how students could apply what they were learning at school to improve their economic and material realities.

Adding a small business component to the curriculum required teacher teams to partner with CBOs to co-develop curricula that were reflective of latest advancements in the field. The career academies thus created formal opportunities for local businesses to work directly with students and teachers. Although the school–business partnerships for instruction were still burgeoning, they showed great promise, especially the partnership between the science department and an architecture firm (Sanders, 2003). The architecture firm is a community partner with the school’s Urban and Environmental Planning Academy. The architect who works with WHS explained,

We did an externship with four Woodson teachers over the summer and we are doing an interdisciplinary project with them this year that came out of that externship. So, they spent a week at our [architect] firm and learned about what we do . . . and they are bringing that to the classroom in terms of curriculum for that project.

To support a more community-relevant instruction, these teachers had professional development in the community at local businesses. Although this particular example only included four teachers, it exemplifies new possibilities around community-based teacher professional development.

In addition, to make instruction more robust, Oscar hired a mid-level leadership team to specifically work on this area and serve as a liaison between teachers and administrators. He described, “We did not have a strong mid-level management that was the bridge between really working with teachers on instructional effectiveness.” Oscar used federal funding to hire a literacy coach, a numeracy coach, an instructional specialist, an inclusion specialist, a parent and community engagement specialist, and a federal compliance monitor. This leadership team was very useful for instruction, especially to assistant principals, as Oscar commented,

Through the mid-level leadership team it allowed the administrators to be more instructional leaders and to help develop the whole child . . . It got us in the classrooms so that we were able to sit side-by-side with students to truly understand where the challenges were that they were facing and then come up with a plan of action, versus being in an office.

Another example of how instruction was connected with community realities is the school-based community garden (i.e., urban garden) at WHS. Oscar described how it started:

We [he and leaders from several community organizations] started having conversations about how I have this dead space in the back of the building that is not being used. If we can find the funding . . . [We discussed] could we do a community garden?

The WHS science department, culinary program, and stakeholders from CBOs provided funding for the community garden, and students from WHS grew the produce. The school-based community garden is academically beneficial to students and helps improve neighborhood access to fresh produce. One educator noted, “If neighborhood residents need something [fruits and/or vegetables], it is free for them to come and get.” In addition, the students use their skills to help senior citizens at a local elderly facility. Oscar explained,

We had a partner in the health sciences academy and they had a program called renal herbs for the dialysis patients and to help their kidneys . . . Instead of them [the community organization] going somewhere else they decided, could we build a hanging garden around your greenhouse, [and] let your students grow the herbs. We will provide the seed, soil, and funding . . . and we give them [herbs grown at our school] to our dialysis patients. Now they [students] are providing a real service and are not just learning about how to be a nurse or a doctor, but how to go [produce] and work with dialysis . . . It just broadens the model.

This type of instruction connected learning to community realities and provided local residents with access to fresh produce, something that previously did not exist in the community. WHS in collaboration with the renal center has developed bridging social capital through their social relationship (Putnam, 2000). These interactions address some important community, and even school, realities. For the students, they gain skills and experience serving the community; in turn, community residents gain access to produce, and local renal patients have access to fresh herbs for their kidneys.

In sum, although WHS still has some areas to improve, the work shows promise. Within 5 years of reform (2007-2012), Oscar’s leadership contributed to WHS winning a national school–community award. Graduation rates at WHS improved from 68% to 81% (+15%), access to Advanced Placement (AP) courses increased by +13%, and the school developed partnerships with more than 60 CBOs that support students, families, and the community in a variety of ways. In fact, WHS added 24 community partners who worked with teachers in the classroom and with students of career and post-graduation preparation.

Discussion and Implications

This analysis illustrates how a principal supported urban school reform and community development. In this section, I discuss the findings in relation to the reviewed literature and offer implications for practice and future research. Leveraging the social capital embedded in Oscar’s position as principal was key to brokering relationships with CBOs in the neighborhood. As a broker, Oscar established strategic partnerships with a variety of organizations (e.g., United Neighborhood Health Organization, Critical Youth Development Group) that supported WHS through leveraging those organizations’ networks to access resources, information, and expertise (Putnam, 2000; Small, 2006). In alignment with existing literature, establishing relationships with CBOs’ networks helped students, families, and community members connect to a range of resources that they could not access through their own networks (Small, 2006). For example, the school-based community clinic provided health care services to students and community members, who under typical conditions, would be excluded from such resources.

In turn, Oscar’s actions made WHS a resource broker where relationships and networks were fostered to share information between school–community stakeholders (Chaskin et al., 2001; Small, 2006). For example, through the parenting classes, WHS became an institution where parents could connect to an array of information that could support their social mobility such as GED, language, and other classes. WHS drew on CBOs to help build parents’ capacity to navigate the school system and develop greater social capital. In turn, parents ended up teaching other parents in other courses, which illustrates bonding social capital because parents could develop homogeneous social ties and learn about issues that were important to them (Putnam, 2000). As Oscar positioned WHS as a resource broker and place for bonding social capital, local residents gained access to fresh produce and health care. This finding aligns with existing research that suggests that organizational brokers connect separate organizations to one another to accomplish local neighborhood tasks (Chaskin et al., 2001). This study, however, shows that schools can play a pivotal brokering role in efforts that aim to link school reform and community development. These findings, thus, suggest that principals could identify the CBOs that have resource, information, or expertise that could be used to address school concerns and community needs, and develop strategic relationship with them.

Oscar’s actions also demonstrated community development in several ways. Community development was illustrated in how Oscar changed the function of WHS to more equitably benefit students and local residents, and changed how resources were distributed throughout the community, such as health care and access to WHS facilities (G. Green & Haines, 2012). For example, the school-based community garden that provided a means for local residents to access fresh produce illustrates community development because WHS changed how fresh produce was distributed in the neighborhood (G. Green & Haines, 2012).

In addition, Oscar’s actions offer implications for practice. His actions can be understood as creative and corrective. Creative actions include reimagining WHS position in the community and redesigning curriculum to be community based, whereas corrective actions address urgent issues such as changing school culture. This suggests that school principals who do this work should address the urgent realities through corrective actions but augment them with actions that aim to recreate the possibilities in urban schools and communities. As such, principals interested in this work might cast a vision for the community that makes the school integral, and neighborhood institutions that seeks to build robust partnerships that provide access to information and resources that students and local residents cannot typically connect with. It also suggests that principals consider ways to draw on the resources of the community to influence school culture in positive ways. In doing this, it also suggests that principals might think of ways to ground instruction in the neighborhood realities that children, families, and community members experience.

Finally, this study offers implications for future research. Future studies might further investigate the impacts of community-based professional development where teachers stay abreast on the latest industry standards to inform their instruction, which was a nascent practice at WHS. Research is also needed on the longitudinal school and community impacts of such reforms, and particularly how these efforts are sustained during leadership changes. As place-based education reforms gain more interest, scholars, reformers, and policymakers should reconsider school reform that is linked to larger community development agendas.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Terrance L. Green is an asisstant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Educational Administration Department. His research focuses on principals and school-community engagement/development. He also examines the geography of educational opportunity for children of color from low-income neighborhoods. He is the recipient of the William J. Davis award for the most outstanding article published in a volume of Educational Administration Quarterly. His work has also been featured in Teachers College Record, Journal of School Leadership, The Urban Review, Urban Education, Education Policy Analysis Archives, Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, and the Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Diversity and Equity.

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