Critical Perspectives on Community Schools: Looking Across Cities to Gain Perspective

Urban education is a field concerned with how public schooling impacts communities in places where the “economy has left many families behind, where poverty and segregation are concentrated, and where severely under-resourced schools struggle to meet the increasingly intense needs of students and families,” (Darling-Hammond, 2014, in Milner & Lomotney, xi). Yet, so much of urban education reform has failed to account for the context of urban environments themselves. Without that understanding for the institutional inequity that has left urban schools without adequate resources, reform efforts have been inadequate at best.

More recently, community-based organizations have been advocating for the expansion of community schools (Journey for Justice, 2014) because they present an alternative to reforms, which narrowly focus on school choice, test-based accountability processes, and punitive financial budget measures, (Fine & Fabricant, 2012; Lipman, 2013; Saltman, 2010; Scott, 2011; Trujillo, 2012). Community schools are a promising strategy because they attempt to address the broader social, economic, and political contexts of students’ and families’ lives (Oakes et al., 2017). Built upon the premise that increasing access to coordinated services and resources can address barriers to student success, research is showing improvement in outcomes such as increasing attendance and family engagement (Sanders, 2016), academic achievement (Moore & Emig, 2014), and decreasing dropout rates (Jenkins & Duffy, 2016).

Community schools are grounded in the idea that communities and schools are inextricably connected, and that in order for one to succeed, they must mutually support each other. In that way, community schools are set up to address the dual tasks that scholars of urban education urge schools to do: (1) Transform urban school settings to better meet the needs of families and communities, and (2) Advocate for and with urban parents, families, and communities (Boutte & Johnson, 2014, p. 168). Yet, community schools need to be interrogated just like any other reform promising to improve urban education, as the history of urban education has demonstrated, the potential for urban school reform strategies to improve and enhance public education is afforded and constrained by the context and conditions in which they are embedded.

Therefore, in this special issue, the authors examine community school initiatives across cities across the country, looking at a variety of local initiatives using critical frameworks. Looking across Oakland, Hartford, CT, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, each article dives into the local context of community schools on the ground to understand how community schools are defined and enacted, how they are different than neoliberal reforms, who they serve and benefit, and to whom they are accountable. For the authors, these issues are essential to making community schools a reform distinct from the neoliberal reforms of the past. Collectively, they argue that neoliberal reforms fail in large measure because they ignore community concerns and context. Community schools, on the other hand, offer a new possibility because they are, in theory, driven by community needs. The degree to which they succeed in this effort, however, is the subject of this special issue.