Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Transition from Physical Environment
  • Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND)
    • Build one neighborhood at a time
    • Population size to support elementary school
    • Neighborhood center includes: Elementary school, park, pre-school / playground, small commercial businesses,  community meeting space, etc.
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Transition from Physical Environment
  • Most homes are within a 10 minute walk of neighborhood center / school
  • Schools as community center
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Transition from Physical Environment
  • Infill Development Zones
  • Retrofit existing neighborhoods along principles of Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND)
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Back to School
  • “If our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass through an equally complete transformation. To do this means to make each one of our schools an embryonic community.”
    • John Dewey, School and Society, 1898
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Public Education in Chicago
  • In early 1990s, half of Chicago’s public school children did not graduate from high school.
  • On ACT exams, 66% of Chicago schools ranked in bottom 1% of the nation
  • Low income children represented 79% of Chicago public schools’ students
  • Drop out rates at two predominately Latino schools were over 75%
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Recent Conditions
  • Flight of middle class to suburbs from 1950s to 1980s especially
  • Concentration of poverty in urban neighborhoods
  • Urban public schools typically have higher percentages of poor and minority students than urban populations
  • Enrollment of urban middle class and wealthier children in private and parochial schools
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Recent Conditions
  • Focus on individual performance and achievement
  • Results based on standardized tests
  • Ability to transfer students out of low performing schools


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“Professionalized” Educational Approaches
  • Parents delegate responsibility to schools
  • Schools are run by professional and licensed educators
  • Education is a “service” provided to enrolled students, living within a boundary area, during specific hours
  • Education is standardized


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“Professionalized” Educational Approaches
  • Progress is measured by results on standardized tests
  • Parents are passive recipients of information about children
  • Schools often are “protected from” conditions in the community
  • Community seen as potential or actual source of problems to students and the schools
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“Professionalized” Educational Approaches
  • “Many schools are like little islands set apart from the mainland of life by a deep moat of convention and tradition”
    • William Carr, 1942
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“Professionalized” Educational Approaches
  • “As you are the problem, the assumption is that I, the professional servicer, am the answer.  You are not the answer.  Your peers are not the answer.”
    • John McKnight
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Education as Problem Solving - Confronting the Whole Student
  • Motivation
  • Family financial stress
  • Nutrition
  • Drugs / alcohol
  • Housing
  • Peers
  • Gangs


  • Educational foundation
  • Parental guidance and assistance
  • Mental health
  • Physical health
  • Family stability
  • Crime / victimization / fear


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Community Education and Neighborhoods

  • The purpose of education:
  • “. . . not merely for freedom from [want], but for … freedom to create and construct, to wonder and to venture.”
          •        Eric Fromm
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Social Capital
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Why Public Schools?
  • May be most reliable source of stability and social support for poor children
  • Universal public education - access to students and parents
  • Geographically accessible - facilities available - familiar presence in neighborhood
  • Social spaces where interaction across race and class are possible
  • Low income residents have little choice other than attending public schools
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What is Community Education?
  • Community Education is a philosophy under which the school serves the entire community by providing for all the educational needs of all of its community members.  It uses the local school to serve as the catalyst for bringing community resources to bear on community problems in an effort to develop a positive sense of community, improve community living, and develop the community process toward the outcomes of personal and community self-actualization


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What is Community Education?
  • In neighborhood: Creation of a learning community based on the convergence of students, parents, teachers, and community members.
  • For individual: Being in the world, critical intervention toward goal, action and reflection, responsibility, subject rather than object, the unfolding of humanity.
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What is Community Education?
  • Community development : Purpose has never been building a road or improving a park, but “to teach others to teach themselves, to learn how to learn, and to evolve from a history of dependence . . . to one of independence and helpfulness”   Cardenas
  • School:  Eliminate the distinction between school and life
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Principles of Community Education
  • Self-help
  • Collaboration
  • Leadership development
  • Transformative leadership
  • Decentralized
  • Community-minded action
  • Inclusion of community
  • Mutual accountability


  • Welcoming school climate
  • High level of communication
  • Institutional responsiveness
  • Integrated delivery of social services
  • Life-long learning
  • School as the center of community life
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Community Education Across the U.S.
  • Florida
  • Minnesota
  • Kentucky
  • South Carolina
  • Anne E. Casey Fndt’s “New Futures” initiative
  • Robert Slavin’s “Success for All”
  • Johns Hopkins University’s “National Network of Partnership Schools”
  • New York “Beacon Schools”
  • Annenberg Fndt’s “Institute for School Reform”
  • Dept of Education “21st Century Community Learning Centers”
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Some Research Findings - Henderson
  • Parent involvement as: volunteers, observers, para-professionals, tutors, learners, decision-makers in operation of school
  • Parent involvement positively related to student attendance, discipline, reduced parent-staff conflict, achievement, positive attitude, and self-esteem
  • The more comprehensive and long lasting the parent’s participation, the greater the effect on the child.
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Some Research Findings - Henderson
  • Parent involvement in schools positively related to parent participation in the community
  • Parent involvement in the community positive related to student achievement
  • Involved parents saw themselves as skilled and successful
  • Where schools proactively address needs of student in family context, student’s achievement rises.
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"What are the appropriate functions..."
  • What are the appropriate functions for neighborhood planning, community education, community policing, and community organizing?
  • How are they inter-related?