Commentary

The article “Transforming Educational Experiences in Low-Income Communities” analyzes the efforts of a highly impoverished small elementary school to provide the kind of wrap-around services children in very poor communities need to give them a fair chance to succeed. For a child from a low-income family, what happens in the non-educational part of his or her life is often far more determinative than what happens in the classroom. In the absence of family resources and knowledge of the system, the school can become very important in connecting children to essential resources. Reformers have tried periodically for more than a century to produce close collaboration between schools and the out-of-school institutions deeply affecting children, beginning in the late 1800s with health collaboration with schools in some cities (Dryfoos, 1994). In areas such as social work, special education, and criminal justice, there is a need for collaboration, but it is seldom well instituted within schools. I was a faculty advisor to Harvard’s Collaborative for Integrated School Services (1900–2003), which spotlighted successful examples in various parts of the country. Full-service schools, however, never became a basic part of educational reform, though research shows that out-of-school conditions greatly impact school success. This article links the school’s success to the social capital of the staff and a well-connected school principal but argues that efforts were limited by the tension between the Latinos who made up more than two-thirds of the school’s enrollment and the African American and American Indian children and parents who often felt neglected.

This is basically a study of the impact of relationships inside the school’s staff and parents and the development of the strategy. The human capital making it possible was a strong leader with many positive contacts and a staff able to work with 23 external volunteer efforts and programs. The major limitations, according to the researchers, were caused by a shortage of resources and the divisions within the parent communities, some of whom perceived the school to favor Latinos and to be insensitive to other groups. Budget shortages are ubiquitous, of course, especially when agencies are asked to provide services outside of what they define as their central mission, but problems of race relations can and should be addressed within schools. The school leadership had not taken any specific steps to improve race relationships within the school. This is a general problem. A study of a national sample of teachers showed that most teachers, like this school, say that they treat all students the same and assume that is the best policy for fairness (Frankenberg, 2012). Research on suburban racial change, which is now massive, found the same kind of denial by educators about the need to do anything specific about race and resegregation (Frankenberg & Orfield, 2012). Educators without tools to recognize and address racial tensions often try to ignore them.

This study by Claudia Galindo, Mavis Sanders, and Yolanda Abel offers important insights on the need for comprehensive services and the complexity of delivering. The analysis is important, but further research on this subject has to include the outside institutions working with the schools and the lack of budget priority for such efforts. Research needs to recognize the continuous changes that produce evolving multiracial “minority” populations. Researchers need to examine the possible solution to divisions and the availability of research-based ways to diminish the polarization in such circumstances, thus increasing the school’s human capital and the likely success of the efforts.

School compositions are changing so rapidly that it is very difficult for school staffs and policymakers to keep up with the changes. Understanding and coping with such multidimensional changes are typically not part of the training of teachers and administrators. A generation ago, during the Civil Rights era, there was a great deal of research on Black-White integration and race relations. There was a major debate during the Black Power Movement claiming that Blacks and other minorities were better off taking control of their own highly segregated schools as administrators of color took over many urban distorts. Now, one generation later, there are almost no Black schools left in California, which has a large Black population, or in most of the Southwest, and as many Latinos as Blacks in the South. Black students are, in much of the country, attending increasingly Latino schools as the Latino share of U.S. students has quintupled. Latinos move into Black neighborhoods and often push out older Black communities, producing a Black minority within largely Latino schools in a neighborhood in transition, often with teachers and other administrators who have little or no training in the management of race relations between two impoverished populations. It is frequently a situation where there are conflicts in housing, between gangs, and changes of employment and businesses. This does not work out if it is just ignored. Third groups, including American Indians and refugee populations, are usually invisible to leadership. If, however, anyone thought that racial tensions and stereotypes were largely solved in the United States, the capture of the presidential election by a candidate using the most explicit appeals to stereotypes and racial fears in generations should put that thought to rest. Racial tension is part of the reality of a very diverse and polarized society going through massive change, and it comes into the schools.

There was a great deal of research and experimentation on Black-White relationships a half century ago, but federal funds and most foundations moved away from those issues by 1980, when the focus turned to measuring and sanctioning inadequate progress within schools, ignoring their context. Very limited large-scale research was conducted on the schools that were becoming segregated Latino high-poverty institutions and less on the other minorities in those schools. Even as the schools in many cities and a growing list of suburbs were becoming institutions with few Whites or Asians and African Americans and Latinos inheriting those systems, almost no work was being done on how to create positive Latino-Black relationships. As the article by Galindo and her colleagues indicates, if tensions and divisions fester, these schools are weakened.

A basic theory about the conditions for successful interracial contact and reduction of prejudice was laid out by Gordon Allport in 1954 in his classic book, The Nature of Prejudice. His theory about the basic conditions necessary for positive equal status interaction includes strong leadership and commitment to integration and fair rules and respectful treatment of the various groups within the schools. Allport’s theory has now been explored and supported in more than 500 pieces of research across the world (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). We need to examine the validity of that theory in Black-Latino settings. This case study also raises another challenge: The third group in this school is American Indian students who are almost entirely ignored in most educational policy discussions.

Before diversity programs and research were cut in the 1980s, substantial research was conducted and programs developed and assessed that actually used classroom and school techniques to improve race relations and academic achievement. These programs, such as Robert Slavin’s (1980) Student Team Learning program, the programs developed by Elizabeth Cohen (Cohen & Lotan, 1995), and Elliot Aronson’s Jigsaw method (Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979; Aronson & Patnoe, 1997, 2011), all produced substantial bodies of research showing that they worked to reduce prejudice and improve schooling outcomes. The central idea in this research is creating collaboration and teamwork in school that intentionally crosses lines of social divisions and generates positive collaborative experiences that undermine stereotypes and create positive contacts. That could be a way for educators and policymakers to increase the human capital of schools struggling with divisions.

Blacks are understandably concerned when institutions long defined as central to their communities become predominantly Latino and African Americans became a minority within a larger minority with a different culture and history, even though both groups are facing many of the same severe obstacles in the larger society. It would be invaluable, for example, for teachers and administrators to have tools, many relatively simple but powerful, to create better intergroup relations by systematically creating cross-racial groups working together on academic projects, bringing students from each group into teams and activities, and a variety of other techniques including dual immersion language programs. Unfortunately, not only local leaders and government have usually neglected these problems or pretended that they would go away by ignoring them; researchers have also failed. The reality is that we have become an extremely diverse society with intense separation and inequality without any framework of policy or even a serious ongoing body of research and legal analysis to help us through what is obviously a very difficult transition. Deeply rooted issues of social division do not heal themselves—they affect and limit the capacity of institutions—but they can be addressed by good leaders, and the research community can help illuminate and resolve problems. By returning to the lessons of earlier research and extending it in these new contexts, important lessons can be learned and schools and communities strengthened.