community organizing as an education reform strategy: nmef report

The Strengths and

Challenges of

Community Organizing

as an Education

Reform Strategy:

What the Research Says

C O M M U N I T Y O R G A N I Z I N G A S A N E D U C AT I O N R E F O R M S T R AT E G Y S E R I E S

prepared by MICHELLE RENÉE | SARA MCALISTER

JANUARY 2011

Nellie Mae Education Foundation

Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University

The Strengths and

Challenges of

Community Organizing

as an Education

Reform Strategy:

What the Research Says


LEAD RESEARCHERSMichelle Renée, Senior Research Associate, Annenberg Institute

Sara McAlister, Research Associate, Annenberg Institute

Tracie Potochnik, Research Associate, Annenberg Institute

Richard Gray, Co-Director, Community Organizing and Engagement,Annenberg Institute

RESEARCH SUPPORTJill Corsi, Student Intern, Brown University

Rachel Fischhoff, Student Intern, Brown University

Kate Monteiro, Systems Coordinator, Annenberg Institute

Deinya Phenix, Senior Research Associate, Annenberg Institute

PROJECT COORDINATION AND PUBLICATIONJoanne Thompson, Research Associate, Annenberg Institute

Margaret Balch-Gonzalez, Staff Editor, Annenberg Institute

O’rya Hyde-Keller, Copyeditor, Annenberg Institute

Mary Arkins Decasse, Publications Coordinator, Annenberg Institute

Haewon Kim, Graphic Design, Annenberg Institute

COVER PHOTO

Jason Masten, Technology Coordinator, Annenberg Institute

SUGGESTED CITATION FORMATRenée, M., and S. McAlister. 2011. The Strengths and Challenges of Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy: Whatthe Research Says. Community Organizing as an Education ReformStrategy Series. Prepared by the Annenberg Institute for SchoolReform at Brown University. Quincy, MA: Nellie Mae EducationFoundation.

Prepared for the Nellie Mae Education Foundation by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

© 2011 Nellie Mae Education Foundation

Annenberg Institute for School Reform i

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) at Brown University is a nationalresearch and reform support organization. AISR promotes quality education for all chil-dren by building capacity for systemic education reform among policy-makers, districtleaders, educators, parents, and community groups, especially those serving low-incomeneighborhoods and communities of color. The Annenberg Institute works with districtcentral offices and community constituencies to explore and refine the concept of “smarteducation systems” – networks of schools, community organizations, and services thatpromote high-quality student learning and development inside and outside of schools.1

An important part of that work is to provide research, data analysis, capacity building,and other supports for adult and youth organizing groups working for education reform.In New York City, staff now part of AISR pioneered a collaborative model for parent-and youth-led education organizing in the South Bronx.2 This work laid the foundationfor additional neighborhood collaboratives and the formation in 2006 of the New YorkCity Coalition for Educational Justice, a citywide collaborative of parent organizinggroups. AISR staff were instrumental in the formation of the Urban Youth Collaborative,a citywide coalition of five youth-led organizations.

Building on the work in New York City, AISR staff now provide support to other localand state education organizing initiatives. We are also expanding our capacity to provideresearch and policy support to community organizations focused on federal policy.

In addition to supporting organizing efforts, AISR specializes in conducting research oneducation organizing. The 2009 series Organized Communities, Stronger Schools was anational study to examine the impact of urban community and youth organizing onschool and district capacity to promote student learning. The study concluded that thereis strong evidence for the impact of community organizing on resource allocations andequity, relationships between schools and families, teacher professional culture, and stu-dent outcomes. The study also identified key aspects of organizational capacity that areimportant for leading successful campaigns.3

The Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy Series, of which thisresearch report is a part, further builds on this research agenda. The series includes thisresearch report, an executive summary, and a directory of community organizations inNew England doing education organizing. All three products are available at<www.annenberginstitute.org/Products/NMEF.php>.

1 For more information, see <www.annenberginstitute.org/Vision/index.php>.2 These staff joined the Annenberg Institute in 2006.3 See <www.annenberginstitute.org/Products/OrganizedCommunities.php>.

ii The Strengths and Challenges of Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy: What the Research Says

The Nellie Mae Education Foundation

The Nellie Mae Education Foundation (NMEF) is the largest charitable organization inNew England that focuses exclusively on education. NMEF believes that to improve col-lective prospects for the future, all learners must possess the skills and knowledge neces-sary for full participation in postsecondary education, work, and life. Toward this end,NMEF supports the promotion and integration of developmentally appropriate, rigor-ous, student-centered approaches to learning at the middle and high school levels. Theseapproaches acknowledge that in today’s world, students need to know not only mathand English, but also how to collaborate, solve problems, and utilize technology.

Student-centered approaches draw on the science of how people learn and are character-ized by: innovative uses of time; the inclusion of a wider variety of adults to complementteachers in all aspects of learning; the measurement of skills and mastery of content usinga combination of performance-based assessments and traditional testing; an acknowl-edgement that learning takes place both in and out of the classroom; and a persistentfocus on the needs and interests of learners. In this type of educational experience, learn-ing becomes the constant, and the where, when, and how it happens – as well as who theadults are who facilitate it – become the variables.

In an effort to serve as a catalyst for a remodeled educational system, NMEF utilizes athree-part strategic approach:

• We work with practitioners to develop and enhance effective, evidence-based, student-centered approaches to learning.

• We dedicate ourselves to shaping policies that allow these approaches to flourish.

• We concentrate on increasing public understanding and demand for high-quality edu-cational experiences for all learners.

NMEF awards grants primarily through four strategic initiatives:

• District Level Systems Change, which includes the promotion and integration of stu-dent-centered approaches, as well as policy and community organizing/advocacy workat the district level;

• State Level Systems Change, which focuses on promoting state and federal educa-tion policies that support student-centered learning at scale;

• Research and Development, which not only informs our work, but also that of prac-titioners in the fields of education and philanthropy;

• Public Understanding, which aims to increase both awareness of student-centeredlearning experiences and the public demand to implement them.

NMEF understands that community organizing and engagement is essential to attainingits goals. Rather than engaging communities at the end of efforts, NMEF works with itsDistrict Level Systems Change grantees to include community partners in the design,development, and implementation of reforms.4 For these reasons, NMEF commissionedthe Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy Series.5

4 For more information, see <www.nmefdn.org/grantmaking/Initiatives/District>.5 See <www.annenberginstitute.org/Products/NMEF.php> for more information on the series.

Contents

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University...............................i

The Nellie Mae Education Foundation.............................................................ii

Introduction ................................................................................................1

Overview ..................................................................................................3

How Does Community Organizing for School Reform Work? ..............................3Why? 3

Who? 5

What? and How? 5

What Makes Community Organizing a Unique Reform Strategy?.........................7Addressing Power Relationships 7

Political Will to Advance Equity 8

Relevant, Innovative Solutions 8

Beyond Education: Comprehensive Reform on Multiple Issues 9

Building Democratic Capacity 9

Evidence of Impact ...................................................................................10Qualitative Research and Case Studies 10

The Challenges of Systematic Evaluation 11

Research for Action Indicators Project 11

Annenberg Institute Study: Organized Communities, Stronger Schools 12

Effective Strategies in Community Organizing for School Reform ........................15Working at Multiple Levels 15

Working through Alliances and Coalitions 16

Using Data and Research 17

Balancing Collaboration and Pressure 18

Challenges Facing Community Organizing for School Reform ...........................20The Importance and Fragility of a Favorable Political Climate 20

The Limits of Organizational Capacity 21

Insufficient Density of Organizations Working Together 21

The Critical Role of Funders 22

Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy..................................23

References ...............................................................................................23

Annenberg Institute for School Reform 1

IntroductionCommunity organizing for school reform offers anurgently needed alternative to traditional school reform– one that situates schooling issues within larger eco-nomic and social systems, directly attends to issues ofpower, and builds democratic capacity to sustain mean-ingful reform over the long term (Anyon 2005; Medi-ratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a; Oakes & Rogers 2006;Shirley 2009). Perhaps the largest and most recogniza-ble example of community organizing for schoolreform was the national desegregation of the educationsystem that followed the civil rights movement of the1960s. Desegregation was ordered by the court; butbuilding public will to challenge racist practices andaccept huge changes in the structure of public schoolswas the result of decades of careful research, planning,and community organizing (Kluger 2004).6

Though their work is not at the scale of the nationalcivil rights movement, organizers around the nation arecurrently working in communities to ensure that his-torically marginalized parents and students can partici-pate in local, state, and national education debates anddecisions. With the Obama administration’s recentannouncement recommending that parents becomemore involved in high-stakes, local education policydecisions, it is important to understand the growingmomentum behind the community organizingapproach to school reform.7

Research has shown that around the nation, the com-munity organizing approach to school reform has led tosuccesses such as increases in education funding, moreequitable distribution of education resources, greateraccess to college preparatory curricula, and more effec-tive teacher recruitment and retention in hard-to-staffschools (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a). Oneexample – the Boston-area Youth Organizing Project(BYOP) – appears in the recent directory of commu-nity organizations doing education organizing in NewEngland that is part of the Community Organizing asan Education Reform Strategy Series.8 BYOP’s primary

aim is “to increase youth power and create positivesocial change,” which it accomplishes by working onspecific school reforms such as increased access toguidance counselors, funding for textbooks, cleanbathroom facilities, and safe, accessible transportationto school, as well as campaigns to increase local andnational funding for education (Renée, Welner &Oakes 2010). Local community organizing efforts likethis are increasing around the nation (Shirley 2009).

Local community organizations are also building theircapacity to work at the state policy level (Oakes &Rogers 2006) and, even more recently, at the federalpolicy level. BYOP, for example, worked in collabora-tion with the Alliance for Education Justice, a newnational alliance of youth organizations, to voice itssupport of the Obama administration’s increased fed-eral spending on education.

Another trend around the country is for organizing toprogress from a focus on the condition of facilities andschool safety to core issues of teaching and learning(Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a). Issues of imme-diate safety and school facilities are a natural place forcommunity organizations to begin their work – theseissues are most visible to students and parents, whointeract with a school every day. And unfortunately,many schools still struggle with basic needs that mustbe remedied before instructional and cultural changes

6 Community organizing has a long history in the United States. Warren(2001), Shirley (1997), and Oakes and Rogers (2006) provide excellentreviews of the historical roots of modern education organizing, includingthe evolution of the theories of Saul Alinsky and others. To learn moreabout the history of community organizing in the Latino community, we recommend G. San Miguel Jr. and R. Valencia, “From the Treaty ofGuadalupe Hidalgo to Hopwood: The Educational Plight and Struggle of Mexican Americans in the Southwest,” Harvard Education Review 68,no. 3 (1998). To learn about the history of community organizing in theAfrican American community, we recommend C. M. Payne and A. Green,eds., Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism,1850–1950 (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

7 Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech regarding this recommendation can befound at <www.ed.gov/news/speeches/equity-and-education-reform-sec-retary-arne-duncans-remarks-annual-meeting-naacp>.

8 See <www.annenberginstitute.org/Products/NMEF.php> for all threeproducts in the series: this research report, the directory of communityorganizations, and an executive summary.

2 The Strengths and Challenges of Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy: What the Research Says

can take hold. For example, one youth organizinggroup identified in our New England scan – YouthRights Media of New Haven, Connecticut – recentlycompleted a campaign to move an alternative schoolfor struggling students out of a live armory, where stu-dents came into contact with armed National Guards-men every day.9

Organizations must address these immediate concerns.But a national study of community organizing foundthat as leaders and staff build a deeper understandingof issues facing schools and develop their confidenceand reputation as powerful advocates, they often focusmore closely on issues of school capacity and studentachievement. South Central Youth Empowered thruAction, the youth organizing arm of the CommunityCoalition in Los Angeles, for example, began its educa-tion organizing by fighting for funding to repair andreplace crumbling, neglected school buildings and pro-vide basic supplies like up-to-date textbooks for thehigh schools its youth leaders attended. After convinc-ing the school board to allocate extra funds to improveschools in low-income neighborhoods, youth leaderssurveyed their peers to identify issues for subsequentcampaigns. The surveys identified the lack of access tocollege preparatory classes as students’ central concern.Youth leaders began documenting disparities in courseofferings in low-income high schools – one schooloffered nine sections of cosmetology and only four ofalgebra – and worked with UCLA researchers, otherorganizing groups, and a range of advocacy and servicegroups to launch a campaign to equalize access to col-lege prep classes across the district (Shah, Mediratta &McAlister 2009).

The evolution from concerns about facilities, materi-als, and safety to campaigns that unpack the work ofteaching and learning is far from linear. But there isclear evidence that the issues community organizationswork on largely reflect the issues that research has

shown matter most for school improvement (Medi-ratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a; Oakes & Rogers 2006;Shirley 2009). Furthermore, community organizing,with its emphasis on building long-term, mutuallyaccountable relationships and developing distributedleadership, is a particularly apt strategy for buildingtrust among school stakeholders (Shirley 2009). TheConsortium on Chicago School Research identifiedfive “essential supports” shared by those Chicagoschools that had accelerated student improvement:leadership, parent–community ties, professional capac-ity, student-centered learning climate, and ambitiousinstruction. Mediratta, Shah, and McAlister (2009a)found that nearly all the campaign issues taken up bythe groups it studied had direct bearing on at least oneof these essential supports and that groups were able toeffect real change in these domains.

9 Personal interview with Laura McCargar, March 18, 2010.


OverviewThis paper examines a small but growing body of litera-ture on community organizing for education reform.The field of research is just emerging and includes casestudies of individual organizations and efforts; regionaland national scans of the field; theoretical investigationsof why this reform strategy matters; and one large studydocumenting the impact of community organizing oneducation policy, school capacity, and student educa-tional outcomes across organizations. It is important toemphasize that community organizing, like educationreform, exists within a practical, political, and norma-tive context. It would not only be impossible andimpractical, but also unethical to completely isolate acommunity organization and measure its impact byexamining only test score gains or number of policywins (Shirley 2002). Community organizing for educa-tion reform aims to build the capacity of a community,increase the efficacy of individuals, change the dialoguearound reform so it complements the needs of a com-munity, and ultimately improve the educational, social,and political environments within and surroundingschools so they more effectively educate under-servedyoung people.

That is not to say that community organizing isabstract or intangible – quite the opposite. Communityorganizers are on the ground in schools and at decision-making tables daily because they want to see real, sys-temic reforms reach students in a timely way. Butcommunity organizers work to overhaul the entireprocess of schooling: how problems are defined, who isincluded in developing and implementing decisions,and what is the role of schools and education in oursociety. This paper aims to guide the reader throughthis multilayered understanding by first presenting aclear definition of community organizing for schoolreform, describing the practical aspects of how it works,and going into depth about what makes this strategyunique. We then look at existing evidence on theimpact of community organizing. The paper concludeswith a discussion of both the strengths and limitationsof this approach to school reform.

How Does Community Organizing forSchool Reform Work?Community organizing for school reform leverages thecollective power of parents, youth, community resi-dents, and/or institutions to alter existing power rela-tionships and policies and create more accountable,equitable, and high-quality schools for all students.Key aspects of this definition are outlined in the side-bar. Thinking about the questions, Why? Who? What?and How? helps structure the definition of communityorganizing.

Why?The answer to this question is perhaps most straight-forward – community organizing aims to alter long-standing power relationships that produce failingschools in under-served communities in order to create excellent and accountable school systems for all students.

Though the terms in this description are expressed instraightforward language, many of them need furtherunpacking. The first term is “alter longstanding powerrelationships.” While some community organizingtakes the form of direct protest, community organizingis also about building powerful collaborations andpartnerships. The goal is to challenge the patterns ofinequality that are built into the rules and laws thatguide schools; the individual beliefs of many educatorsand administrators about who is capable of learning;and the relationships between stakeholders that dictatehow a reform is adopted and implemented. This isdone in multiple ways, from joining in partnershipwith key stakeholders to ensuring that parents have ameaningful role in shaping (not just signing onto) areform.

For example, Renée (2006) explains that simply havingmembers of the impacted community present andinvolved while a decision is being made can shift thetenor of a public debate. When community membersare absent, policy-makers can talk about “thoseschools” and “those students” in the abstract. Butwhen a policy-maker listens to the testimony of a


young person who attends a low-performing school,those references become real. It is hard to look at agroup of young people who came all the way to a gov-ernment meeting and say, “Those kids don’t careabout learning.” It is equally challenging to look atthose young people and say, “I can’t find the resourcesto help you succeed.” Thus, the testimony of a youngperson changes the debate on multiple levels by:

• bringing different analyses of a problem and some-times even different solutions into the debate;

• ensuring that the policy-makers are accountable to apresent public; and

• transforming the way the policy-makers think aboutunder-served students and communities.

Current federal policies require states to create stan-dards and assessments to measure student learning,then create a series of rewards and sanctions for schoolsthat fail to show growth according to those assess-ments. This approach focuses on holding studentsaccountable for learning and teachers for teaching, butdoes not hold policy-makers accountable for providingthe resources or conditions needed for students tolearn.

Community organizing, in contrast, focuses on theaccountability of policy-makers and school leaders tostudents, parents, and the community. From thisstandpoint, low test scores are seen not as the failure ofa single student, teacher, or principal, or as the unfor-tunate consequence of complex social factors, but asproof that the education system as a whole is failing toprovide all young people with all of the opportunities,resources, and supports they need to learn and becomeeducated citizens.

Welner (2001) writes that the true measure of educa-tion equity lies in the extent to which treatment of lesspowerful people and groups “confer[s] benefits equalto those obtained by more powerful people andgroups.” This measure is intentionally systemic – itfocuses on groups of people, not individuals, and onsystems, not classrooms. It also explains equity not asgiving everyone the same thing, but rather as ensuringthat resources are distributed in such a way that theycreate equal benefits to all people. Such a notion ofequity has a historical presence in education policy –the free and reduced-price lunch program provides awell-known example. Equity, in this program, meansthat all students are provided with enough to eat – notthat equal government dollars are spent feeding eachstudent in the school.

Finally, though seemingly neutral, the definition ofhigh-quality learning is constantly being refined andnegotiated. For some groups, this means a rigorouscollege preparatory curriculum, for others it means acommunity school, and so on. That said, most educa-tionally focused community organizations are explicitin outlining their own definitions of high quality.

Community organizing for equitable school reform works by:• bringing together public school parents, youth, and community

residents and/or institutions to engage in collective dialogueand action for change;

• building grassroots leadership by training under-served par-ents, youth, and community members in organizing and civicengagement skills;

• building political power by mobilizing large numbers of peo-ple around a unified vision and purpose;

• recognizing that education problems and their solutions aresystemic and thus focusing on accountability, equity, and qual-ity for all students, rather than exclusively on gains for individ-ual students;

• understanding that the education system is a central part ofcommunity well-being and that improving schools also includesbuilding the economic, cultural, and political well-being of thecommunity;

• aiming to alter longstanding power relationships that producefailing schools in communities serving high numbers of under-served learners; and

• using the tactics of organizing to bring public attention to anissue, demonstrate that large numbers of people are con-cerned about an issue, or put pressure on decision-makers orpublic systems when necessary.


Who?The who of community organizing is clear. Organiza-tions work in communities and schools – with parents,youth, residents, and/or institutions. Some communityorganizations work with all populations and institu-tions; others work with a particular racial, ethnic, eco-nomic, geographic, or social community. Communityorganizing for education reform explicitly focuses onworking with – not just on behalf of – low-incomecommunities and communities of color.

The sidebar on page six provides definitions of the dif-ferent kinds of nonprofit organizations that work oncommunity and education issues. There are a numberof excellent advocacy organizations that work on behalf of under-served communities, as well as serviceproviders who provide them with much-needed sup-port. But these are not the types of community organ-izing groups discussed in this report. Communityorganizing, as we define it, is a strategy that specificallyworks to increase the power of a marginalized commu-nity so that residents can speak and act for themselves.

In the field, the distinction is also talked about interms of “having a base.” Community organizinggroups have a base of people who are from the com-munity and lead the organization. Paid staff can workfor community organizing groups, but the leadershipstructure and power come from this base of commu-nity members. Community organizing groups oftenwork in partnership with advocacy organizations, serv-ice providers, and others, but they have a unique defi-nition of their work and strategies (Evans 2009).

What? and How?What community organizations do and how they do itadd additional layers to the definition. Communityorganizers do not need to take a neutral or objectivestance on the problems in the education system, nordo they need to balance competing demands arisingfrom district and states mandates and from federalrules, regulations, and policies. Rather, communityorganizations and their members start from their ownself-interest – creating and maintaining quality schoolsand healthy communities for their children to studyand live in.

From this place of self-interest, organizers engage in acollective dialogue among people engaged in localschools; they identify concerns, brainstorm solutionswith allies, and then formulate a plan for creatingchange. Collective dialogue involves a careful processof reaching out to new and current members todevelop relationships, discuss concerns and aspirations,and surface issues of shared concern. Organizinggroups engage in a constant, iterative process ofrecruiting those most impacted by social problems andinequitable policies and developing broad, sharedcapacity to take leadership roles in demanding change.This process involves researching the dimensions ofidentified issues and how they affect the community,meeting with experts, building alliances with individu-als and groups, and analyzing the political terrain(AISR 2010a). The collective dialogue process resultsin the identification of key issues and a plan for mov-ing forward.

The next stage of the process involves taking somekind of collective action to implement the plan. Theprocess, by definition, is democratic and requires par-ticipation from leaders, members, and often profes-sional staff. Sometimes the campaign involves a singleorganization, but more often the community organiza-tions build relationships with other community organ-izations, advocacy organizations, researchers,


politicians, and other key stakeholders tomove the plan forward. In addition to devel-oping an agenda, another explicit goal ofengaging in this process is building the skillsof the individual and, subsequently, the collec-tive power of the group. Organizers are clearthat leadership development is not somethingthat simply evolves on its own. Many groupsspend significant time training members in all aspects of a campaign – for example, howto lead a meeting, how to partner with aresearcher, and how to write a press release.

From this discussion of the basics of commu-nity organizing, we now move into a moredetailed discussion of what makes communityorganizing different from other school reformstrategies. While touching on theory, our dis-cussion is intentionally practical in providingreal-world understanding and examples ofcommunity organizing.

Community Organizing. These groups have a membership and leadership drawnfrom a constituency that represents the community. Decisions are made by mem-bers/leaders, not by paid staff. Grassroots organizing groups provide memberswith political education and train them in leadership and organizing skills,including public speaking, negotiation with public officials, and member recruit-ment. Grassroots organizing groups use organizing tactics, including collec-tive action, and put pressure on decision-makers and public systems whennecessary. Community organizing is focused on systemic solutions anddemands for equity.

Leadership Development. These groups work to help young people and/or adultsdevelop particular skills in order to engage politically and civically, achievetheir personal goals, and act as leaders in their communities. These might befocused on education or on other areas. These groups overlap with organizinggroups in terms of the types of skills developed, and often they serve similar con-stituencies. These groups focus more on individual self-efficacy, education, andempowerment, rather than collective or contentious action.

Advocacy. These groups work on issues or sets of issues that impact a class of peo-ple. While they often work on behalf of low-income and under-served con-stituencies, the work of advocacy groups is carried out by professional staff.Most work is focused on putting pressure on elite places of power – publicelections, elected officials/civic leaders, agency rule making, or school districtdecision-makers. Activities include research, building public awareness,advancing policy positions, and lobbying and advising elected officials andother decision-makers.

Community-Based. Community-based organizations are located in and serve theneeds of a particular community. They engage in a variety of activities, includ-ing neighborhood and community development, cultural activities, adult edu-cation, leadership development, and sometimes direct provision of services.They may be led by paid staff or volunteers. While community-based organi-zations often have a constituency, mobilization and collective action is not a pri-mary focus.

Service Provider. These are agencies or organizations that provide direct services,free or at a cost. These could include after-school care, medical care, socialservices, counseling, childcare, or housing assistance. Some service providersare independent nonprofits, and some are affiliated with government programsor agencies.

Parent Association or Fundraising. Often connected to a particular school, parentassociations encourage the engagement of parents in supporting local schoolactivities and/or decisions. While these associations have significant impactin some communities, they rely on traditional kinds of parent engagement –fundraising, volunteering, and creating auxiliary programs or funding streams.

Types of Nonprofit Education Organizations


What Makes Community Organizing aUnique Reform Strategy?Transforming education systems is no simple task.Numerous scholars document the failure of decades ofreform (Payne 2008; Oakes & Rogers 2006; Anyon2005; Mintrop & Sunderman 2009). The compellingquestions behind such analyses are “Why?” and “Whatcan be done differently?”

Different scholars offer different answers:

• The combination of poor leadership, under-prepared teachers, and under-resourced school sys-tems creates a self-reinforcing bureaucratic system in which change is impossible and both adults andstudents are demoralized (Payne 2008).

• Traditional reforms fail because they isolate theschool from the larger political economy – and, inso doing, expect the education system to compen-sate for all other inequities in society (Anyon 2005).

• Few reforms take into account the long-term impacton an education system of multiple attempts torestructure it. Reforms and programs are imple-mented one after another, with little commitmentto very much beyond short-term test-score gains.The result is instability both in the schoolhouse andcommunity, which leads to fatigue and hopelessnessabout the potential for any new transformationscheme (Payne 2008; Mintrop & Sunderman2009).

• A series of misguided beliefs guide conventionalreform. One core belief is that inequality is contraryto American values and that there is public will tocreate equity in schools. It then follows that onceprofessionals and educators learn about inequality,they will both be compelled and have the tools toequalize the education system. Another set of corebeliefs is that schools function or ought to functionlike the free market – that increasing competition,ensuring that the bottom line is met (which, inschools, translates to test-score increases), andreforming systems from the top down, will createlasting and effective change. The logic of meritoc-racy is another core belief guiding modern schools.

The idea is that any student who works hard cansucceed, irrespective of whether or not that studenthas access to resources to learn and grow. Thesebeliefs are, in fact, myths, and because conventionalreforms fail to confront these beliefs directly, theyfail in both practical and political terms (Oakes &Rogers 2006).

We have found in our review of research and in ourown work that all of these problems play a role in thefailure of school reform efforts. Community organiz-ing for school reform offers an alternative to conven-tional reforms that have not worked – an alternativethat situates schooling issues within larger economicand social systems, directly attends to issues of power,and builds democratic capacity to sustain meaningfulreform over the long term.

Addressing Power RelationshipsCommunity organizing begins with the assumptionthat school reform is a complex process that includesnot only the practical business of curriculum andteaching, but also many layers of power, politics,beliefs, and culture (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister2009a; Oakes & Rogers 2006; Renée 2006; Shirley2009). Along with addressing the technical aspects of a reform (e.g., whether the school day should beextended, a new literacy curriculum adopted, or ahigh-stakes test implemented), community organizingalso works toward understanding the power relation-ships that can move a reform forward or impede it. Forexample, some community organizers create “powermaps” of the political terrain they are working on(Oakes & Rogers 2006). A power map can be drawnon a poster or interactive computer slide. Politicians,school leaders, and groups with power in the systemare placed on the map based on how likely they are tosupport an idea, how much access the group has tothem, and how much power they have to implement achange.


By discussing power and politics directly, organizersare able to identify potential allies and opponents inthe system. They can also identify the kinds of strate-gic alliances and resources that will help them influ-ence the political landscape. By the time a reform isimplemented, the community organizers and theirpartners can then anticipate challenges to the reform.In contrast, many traditional reforms ignore micro-politics, and these seemingly small factors end upbeing the very things that impede implementation(Malen 1994; Oakes & Rogers 2006).

Political Will to Advance EquityCommunity organizing also is unique in taking bothan “outside in” and “inside out” approach to schoolreform. Organizing develops a broad constituency forreform and ensures that the proposals put forwardreflect the needs and interests of those who will beimpacted. Mediratta, Shah, and McAlister (2009a)found that community organizations can create thepolitical will needed to implement and sustain a par-ticular change. This political will helps education offi-cials justify implementing equity-driven changes thatconfront the interests of groups accustomed to favor-able access to resources. Through negotiation, publicawareness, and pressure, organizing creates a politicalenvironment in which demands for equity can gaintraction, ultimately increasing the social capital ofunder-served communities so those gains can be sus-tained.

Because community organizers are often personallyinvested in a reform (they or their children attend theimpacted school), they have a personal interest in theequitable implementation of policies. The creation of adefault college preparatory curriculum in Los Angelesand the Grow Your Own Teacher program in Chicagoare excellent examples. In Los Angeles, organizations

began by holding protests against the district andended up receiving a large grant from the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation so that they could join thedistrict in implementing the policy (Renée, Welner &Oakes 2010; Shah, Mediratta & McAlister 2009). InChicago, what began as a successful program of theLogan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) torecruit, train, and retain community residents as teach-ers evolved into a state-funded collaboration betweencommunity organizations, universities, school districts,and the state (McAlister, Mediratta & Shah 2009).LSNA remains a key partner in the state collaboration.

Relevant, Innovative SolutionsEngaging the people most impacted by inequality andpoverty in creating, adopting, and implementingreforms adds unique and relevant ideas and solutionsto the process. Many examples appear in the directoryof organizations doing education organizing in NewEngland that is part of the Community Organizing asan Education Reform Strategy Series, along with thisresearch report.10

Youth 4 Change (Y4C), a youth organization in Provi-dence, Rhode Island, is working as part of a nationalcoalition to implement a “Student Bill of Rights.”While the content of the proposal, which frames aquality education as one of the basic human rights stu-dents should be entitled to, was developed nationally,young people are working locally to get the Bill ofRights implemented in Providence school-district policy. Y4C students recently used the Bill of Rightsframe to organize a debate between mayoral candidatesin Providence. While the candidates may have thoughtof some of the ideas covered by the Bill of Rights ontheir own, the fact that these youths were able to pres-ent a clear policy idea to the candidates and the publichelps shift the focus of the overall mayoral debate tothe ideas most important to the youths (Marcelo2010).

10 See <www.annenberginstitute.org/Products/NMEF.php> for more infor-mation on the series.


In New Haven, Connecticut, low-income youth andtheir parents identified limited access to textbooks,inadequate translation services, and inconsistent schooldiscipline as problems in their schools. Workingthrough the organization Teach Our Children, thesecommunity members were able to make their concernsvisible and worked with the school district to createequitable changes in all of these areas.

In both of these examples of successful communityorganizing, problems in local schools were identifiednot by education research, a Washington staffer, or aschool district administrator. Rather, the people withinthe system came together to think about the problems,both acute and systemic, that they encountered intheir (or their children’s) education. They went frombeing concerned to proposing a solution and thenworked to turn that solution into a policy. In the Con-necticut case, the policies were passed, and the organi-zation remains engaged to ensure that the districtcontinues to enforce the new policies.

Beyond Education: Comprehensive Reformon Multiple Issues Because many community organizations work on mul-tiple issue areas like poverty, housing, transportation,or health care, their ideas and priorities embed schoolreform in a realistic and comprehensive web of socialand economic issues (Anyon 2005). In fact, the major-ity of organizations identified in our New Englandassessment of community organizing and engagementwork on multiple issues.

Multi-issue organizing can also lead to out-of-schoolservices that create better conditions for students. Forexample, working on increasing access to public trans-portation ensures that students have a safe way to getto school; working to raise pay for low-wage jobsincreases the income of families whose students attendschool (Anyon 2005). In this way, community organiz-ing demands that schools be an integral and centralpart of the community, not a separate, isolated institu-tion (Warren 2001).

Building Democratic CapacityIn addition to bringing about tangible policy and per-formance benefits, community organizing builds thecapacity and democratic participation of the commu-nity. For example, in a study of school reform in asmall working-class California community, DelgadoGaitan (2001) found that by engaging in schoolreforms to benefit their children,

these people changed their perception about theirlives from one of deficit to empowerment, [which]led to the cultural changes in the family, the com-munity, and in their personal lives. (p. 175)

Delgado Gaitan found empowerment to be a non-lin-ear process, consisting of cycles of action and leader-ship development. Alliance building evolvedorganically and built long-term commitment, trust,and eventually engagement in the community.

Scholars of community organizing are not naive. Theyexplain that community organizing works best when itis coupled with numerous other reform efforts (Renée,Welner & Oakes 2010; Shirley 2009). Communityorganizers, parents, and students are most successful inimplementing change when they work in partnershipwith other reform partners – education researchers,political leaders, educators, and school and districtleadership. There is a zone of mediation around schoolreform – a space where the confluence of multiple fac-tors like power, policy, timing, funding, and so forth –interact to either promote or prevent reforms (Renée,Welner & Oakes 2010). Community organizing isperhaps best understood as a force – composed of thepeople most marginalized and under-served by existingsystems – that uses democratic participation to shiftthe space so that it becomes more hospitable to equity.


Evidence of Impact Qualitative Research and Case StudiesThe body of research documenting the activities,processes, and outcomes of community organizing forschool reform has grown precipitously over the pastdecade. While there are many examples of communityorganizing campaigns, we have chosen the followingexamples from the reforms that most closely align withthe student-centered learning strategies that the NellieMae Education Foundation is interested in supporting.

Often referenced more simply as “education organiz-ing,” the research field was launched with two book-length studies documenting the emerging AllianceSchools model of school-based organizing developedby the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (Shirley1997), an affiliate of the national Industrial AreasFoundation (IAF), and the efforts of BaltimoreansUnited in Leadership Development to strengthen theircity’s schools (Orr 1999). As the number of commu-nity organizing groups pursuing educational changegrew, more and more scholars turned their attention todocumenting the methods and outcomes of educationorganizing campaigns.

To date, most of this research has been qualitative andhas often taken the form of case studies (Warren 2001;Zachary & olatoye 2001; HoSang 2005; Evans 2009;Delgado Gaitan 2001). These studies describe thecommunities and neighborhoods in which organizingtakes place; the process of building grassroots organiza-tions and the various models of and approaches toeducation organizing; how local leaders identify issues,develop demands, and craft campaigns; and the con-crete outcomes of these campaigns. Much of thisresearch uses interview and observation data to explorethe ways organizing groups interact with educators,reshape the culture and practices of schools, and con-tribute to social capital and personal transformationfor individual participants.

Another body of research maps and analyzes trends ineducation organizing, such as the exponential growthof youth-led campaigns (Evans 2009; Ginwright,Noguera & Cammarota 2006; Su 2009) and the use ofresearch in education organizing (Renée 2006). Schol-ars have also worked to flesh out the theory of organiz-ing as an equity-focused educational change strategy(Anyon 2005; McLaughlin 2009; Oakes & Rogers2006; Renée, Welner & Oakes 2010).

This initial body of research has been qualitative andfocused on individual cases; thus, it has offered limitedevidence of links between education organizing andoutcomes for schools and students in general. How-ever, some common trends have emerged that point tothe effectiveness of organizing as a strategy for improv-ing equity, improving school culture, and winning pol-icy and practice reforms that are in line with what theschool reform literature identifies as best practices.One of the most studied education organizing effortsis the work of the Texas IAF to build a statewide net-work of Alliance Schools. The IAF applies communityorganizing principles to engage parents, communityresidents, teachers, and principals in shared work tostrengthen instruction and address barriers to studentsuccess inside and outside of schools (Warren 2001;Shirley 1997, 2002). The Alliance Schools model hasproduced deep, meaningful engagement with parentsand community members in schools across Texas;changed the way educators relate to each other and tostudents; and won hundreds of millions of dollars inadditional funding to support professional develop-ment, health clinics, and other services for students, aswell as community resources like ESL and GEDcourses.11 Warren (2001) and Shirley (1997, 2002)have also documented the Alliance Schools’ contribu-tion to strengthening social capital among school com-munities and religious congregations.

11 For more about the Alliance Schools model and a case study of the impactof the model in Austin, see Mediratta, Shah, and McAlister, 2009b.


The Challenges of Systematic EvaluationAs community organizing has grown in prominenceand prevalence as a school reform strategy, the need tosystematically examine its contributions to district-and school-level change and improved student out-comes has grown more acute. This has been no smallchallenge. Community organizing is a complex, itera-tive, unpredictable process tightly bound to the con-text in which it arises. Schools and districts becomesites of organizing because of their particular connec-tion to the families and community members who areinvolved in organizing. Issues are selected because theyreflect specific local challenges and the needs and pri-orities of the individuals involved in organizing at agiven moment.

It is therefore impossible to use an experimental orquasi-experimental design that randomly assignsschools or districts to “treatment” and “control”groups (Shah, Mediratta & McAlister 2009). Theserealities also mean that research findings cannot bereplicated, as they often are in scientific research – the same conditions, context, and issues cannot be re-created in another setting, or even in the same settingat a different point in time. Another challenge is theimpossibility of completely isolating the impacts ofcommunity organizing from the myriad other reformefforts often under way, particularly in low-performingschools, or from the impacts of teacher and leaderturnover, changes in neighborhood demographics, orshifts in policy.

Research for Action Indicators Project Despite these challenges, some progress has been madein elaborating methods for analyzing the outcomes ofeducation organizing. In 2002, a team of scholars atResearch for Action in Philadelphia and the Cross CityCampaign for Urban School Reform (Gold, Simon &Brown 2002a) undertook an important project todevelop a framework of indicators for educationorganizing that could begin to assess the impact oforganizing activities on schools and communities. Theframework builds on a theory of change that describes

“how the work of community organizing groups cre-ates a process that leads from increased communitycapacity to improved student learning” (p. 7).

The framework reflects the ways organizing groupsintervene in schools: they develop collective capacity todemand public accountability for school performanceand use that public accountability to work for changesin school practice, climate, and culture with the goal ofimproving student outcomes. Gold and colleagues(2004) identified eight indicators of communitycapacity and school improvement, along with relatedstrategies, results, and data sources for documentingresults. The researchers located more than 140 educa-tion organizations that met the criteria of working onequity, building cross-community alliances, developingdemocratic leadership, having an active membershipbase, and aiming to improve the civic participationand power of low-to-moderate-income communities.The team also published five case studies of variousorganizing efforts around the country and applied theframework to document impacts (Gold, Simon &Brown 2002b, 2002c; Blanc, Brown & Nevarez-LaTorre 2002; Simon, Gold & Brown 2002; Simon &Pikron-Davis 2002).

One example is the work of the Alliance OrganizingProject in Philadelphia, which created new roles forparents in school and district decision making,increased parent–teacher collaboration, and securednew funding for after-school programs. In New York,ACORN used strategies developed to test compliancewith fair housing policies to expose and end schools’racially discriminatory practices in informing parentsabout gifted programs; helped bring about changes atthe state level to equalize access to high-quality cur-riculum and qualified teachers; opened a small, com-munity-themed school; and won facilities andcurriculum improvements in two other high schools(Simon & Pikron-Davis 2002).


Annenberg Institute Study: Organized Communities, Stronger Schools In 2002, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation com-missioned a study of the impacts of education organiz-ing on school capacity and student outcomes byresearchers at the New York University Institute forEducation and Social Policy (the same research teamjoined the Annenberg Institute in 2006; see footnote1). The C. S. Mott Foundation had invested exten-sively in community organizing as a strategy to addresspoverty and was interested in systematically analyzingthe contributions of community organizing to schoolimprovement. The Annenberg Institute study Organ-ized Communities, Stronger Schools built on the Insti-tute for Education and Social Policy’s previous workmapping the field of education organizing. It also builton Research for Action’s indicators project, adopting asimilar theory of change. Organized Communities,Stronger Schools used a rigorous, mixed-methods,multi-case study design to examine the work of sevenestablished community organizing groups engaged ineducation campaigns.

Like Research for Action’s indicators project, Organ-ized Communities, Stronger Schools begins from aconceptual framework illustrating the way educationorganizing influences school capacity and, ultimately,student learning (see Figure 1). In the conceptualframework, organizational inputs and organizing activ-ities simultaneously develop school and district capac-ity (defined as district policies and practices, schoolclimate, professional culture, and instructional core)and community capacity (defined as leadership skills,community and political engagement, and knowledgeabout the school system). Community capacity enablesorganized communities to both support and hold dis-tricts and schools accountable for improvement. Theincreased capacity of schools and districts should createa stronger learning environment for students, whichresults in improved student learning outcomes (Shah,Mediratta & McAlister 2009).

The data sources included 321 interviews with educa-tors, district and state officials, organizers, leaders, andallies; 75 observations of organizing activities; 509teacher surveys; 241 surveys of adult organizing groupmembers; 124 surveys of youth members; district

ORGANIZATIONALINPUTS

COMMUNITYORGANIZINGACTIVITIES

OUTCOME: COMMUNITY CAPACITY

• Leadership skills• Community engagement• Political engagement• Knowledge about school and

school system

OUTCOME: DISTRICT & SCHOOL CAPACITY

• District policies & practices• School climate• Professional culture• Instructional core

IMPACTON STUDENT

LEARNING

FIGURE 1

Community organizing for educat ion reform: a conceptual f ramework

Source: Shah, Mediratta & McAlister 2009


administrative data; and media coverage of organizingcampaigns and education issues (Shah, Mediratta &McAlister 2009). As noted earlier in this paper, anexperimental or quasi-experimental design was inap-propriate. Rather, the researchers looked for points ofconvergence across multiple qualitative and quantita-tive data sources. Where possible, researchers identifiedcomparison groups of similar schools to further pin-point impacts of education organizing on schoolcapacity and student outcomes. The following sectionsreview the major findings regarding impacts on districtcapacity, school capacity, student outcomes, and com-munity capacity.

District CapacityAcross all sites, education organizing resulted inincreased responsiveness to the demands and needs oflow-income communities; new resources for facilities,curriculum, teacher development, and parent engage-ment; and new policies that reflected the priorities oforganizing groups. In thirty-eight interviews, districtand state leaders reported meeting regularly withorganizing groups and indicated that organizing cre-ated the political space to respond to demands forequity. District and state leaders directly creditedorganizing groups with securing new resources, includ-ing $153 million for facilities in South Los Angeles,$11 million for a Grow Your Own Teacher pipeline inIllinois, and $8 million for the implementation of theDirect Instruction program in Florida. District andstate officials also attributed important policy changesto organizing campaigns, including the creation of anew small-schools policy in Oakland, the Grow YourOwn initiative in Illinois, the Direct Instruction initia-tive in Florida, and the new policy increasing access tocollege preparatory curriculum in Los Angeles (Medi-ratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a).

School CapacityThe definition of school capacity is based on what theresearch literature identifies as crucial building blocksfor student learning (Elmore 1996, 2002, 2004; Mayeret al. 2000; Bryk & Schneider 2002), drawing heavilyon the “essential supports” framework developed bythe Consortium on Chicago School Research fromyears of data on Chicago public schools (Sebring et al.2006). Because education organizing campaigns targetaspects of school and district capacity, we use improve-ments in these domains as a major indicator of impact.

The analysis of school capacity draws primarily on sur-veys of 509 teachers in Miami, Austin, and Oakland,where intensive school-based organizing took place. In each site, surveys were administered to teachers inschools involved in organizing, as well as a set ofdemographically similar comparison schools (for acomplete description of survey methodology see Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a, chapter 2). Thesurvey data was complemented with interviews withteachers and principals across the sites.

Mediratta, Shah, and McAlister (2009a) found eitherpositive statistically significant results, or positive effectsizes, in favor of schools involved in organizing onmost measures in Austin and Oakland and on severalmeasures in Miami. Teachers rated teacher outreach toparents, parent influence in school decision making,teacher collaboration and commitment to school, andteacher influence in the classroom, in particular, morehighly in organizing schools than in comparisonschools. Importantly, teachers themselves stronglycredited the organizing groups with influencing theseimprovements (p. 45). These findings are in line withinterview data, in which teachers expressed thatinvolvement with organizing groups had transformedschool culture to allow deep collaboration with par-ents, as well as the development of collegial, mutuallyaccountable professional culture among teachers.


Student Outcomes Data on student outcomes were collected in Oakland,Miami, and Austin. In Oakland, new small schoolscreated through Oakland Community Organizations’organizing scored better on California’s Academic Per-formance Index than the large schools they replaced;the new small schools also showed early evidence ofimproved college-preparatory coursework completion,graduation, and college-going rates. In Miami, gains inthe percentage of students meeting standards inschools using the Direct Instruction literacy programand receiving intensive support from People Acting forCommunity Together (PACT) outpaced gains in thedistrict and in a demographically similar set of schoolsin third and fourth grades. The schools targeted byPACT’s organizing also outpaced the district and com-parison group in moving students out of the lowestachievement level. In Austin, researchers were able toconstruct a measure of organizing “intensity” and con-duct a regression analysis on the relationship betweenorganizing intensity and improvements in student testscores. The analysis using this measure showed that thegreater the intensity of organizing, the more likely aschool was to make gains in the percentage of studentsmeeting standards (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister2009b).

Community CapacityBoth national studies of education organizing foundthat community capacity is what allows communitiesto mobilize the power needed to hold systems account-able. Long-term community capacity is also an impor-tant source of stability and support for schools. Tounderstand the contributions of education organizingto the development of community capacity, Mediratta,Shah, and McAlister combined extensive interviewdata with a survey of adult and youth members oforganizing groups. Leaders reported that their partici-pation in organizing had increased their ability toresearch and solve problems, form relationships, andcarry out organizing activities including facilitatingmeetings, public speaking, and meeting with publicofficials. Leaders reported that their involvement inorganizing had increased their knowledge of the schoolsystem and understanding of school policies and hadmade them more likely to look at data on school per-formance. Leaders also reported new personal aspira-tions as a result of their involvement in organizing –60 percent of adult leaders reported that they hadincreased aspirations for themselves and their families,and 80 percent of young people intended to pursue acollege education. Eighty-nine percent of young peo-ple reported that their involvement in organizing hadmade them more likely to complete high school(Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a; Gold et al.2004).

The studies just reviewed showed positive impacts onschool capacity, student outcomes, community capac-ity, and a number of specific local and state educationpolicies. They also documented the growing presenceof community organizations in school reforms. But theimpact of community organizing is only one part ofwhat we can learn from this literature. Many of thesame studies also discuss effective strategies and chal-lenges of the process of community organizing forschool reform.


Effective Strategies in Community Organizing for School ReformCommunity organizing employs a unique set of strate-gies to influence school reform decisions. This sectionlooks across existing research to identify the specificstrategies that are most successful to communityorganizations. Where appropriate, we cite specificscholars in this section, but in other places we pullfindings from across the studies previously reviewed.

Della Porta and Diani (1999) categorize the multiplestrategies into the logic of numbers, material damage,and bearing witness. Inflicting material damagethrough a product boycott or demonstrating that largenumbers of people care about an issue through a con-frontational protest are the most visible and radical ofcommunity organizing tactics, but they are not theentirety of community organizing. Bearing witness isalso used frequently – publishing a report about anissue, providing testimony at a school board meeting,or holding a press conference. Renée (2006) found sixactivities were most common among the sixty-fourCalifornia education organizations in her study: build-ing strategic alliances with decision-makers, leadershiptraining, member education, campaign activities, plan-ning campaigns, and conducting research.

The many book-length investigations and shorter casestudies of community organizing for school reformthat have been published over the last decade vividlydescribe the organizing process, the obstacles facingorganizing groups, and the strategic choices they maketo further their goals. Across the literature, severalcommon strategies have emerged that effective organ-izing groups use, in concert, to win meaningful educa-tion reforms:

• Recognize the complexity of school systems andfocus their work at multiple levels – school, district,and often state.

• Develop alliances with a range of institutions,organizations, and stakeholders to develop a broadconstituency for reform and to access knowledgeand relationships beyond their immediate scope.

• Work with academics and use data and research oneducation reform strategies to craft demands thataddress core problems of teaching and learning.

• Develop mutually accountable relationships witheducators and education officials and carefully bal-ance inside negotiation with public pressure.

In this section we describe each of these strategies inmore detail.

Working at Multiple LevelsCommunity organizing groups have come to recognizethe importance of working at multiple levels of theschool system simultaneously. While many groups ini-tiate organizing at one level – often the school level,where they have close connections to parents or youngpeople – they often find that changes at the district orstate level are necessary to provide the resources orflexibility necessary to implement school-level cam-paigns (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a).

Individual schools are important sites for building abase and cultivating relationships. Parents and youngpeople relate to their local schools and naturally vieweducation issues primarily through the lens of theschools they or their children attend. Schools are alsowhere the buck stops in terms of educational change –personalized instruction, improved school climate, andstronger teacher–student relationships all play out atthe school and classroom levels.

Many organizing groups have found that buildingschool capacity and improving student outcomesrequires intensive, sustained engagement with teachers,principals, and parents. The engagement focuses onissues at the school level, as well as on district and state policy. Districts establish policies that constrainschools’ choices on curriculum, staffing arrangements,and after-school programming and control the bulk of


the resources flowing to schools. States have taken onever-larger roles in setting standards and establishingaccountability regimes, particularly since the passage ofthe No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. State depart-ments of education have access to larger pots of fund-ing than do districts, and organizing campaigns oftentarget state legislatures for additional appropriations.

Community organizers in Chicago followed such apath after identifying high turnover of teachers, due totheir lack of experience with and connection to thecommunity, as a major problem. Drawing on a suc-cessful teacher preparation program developed by theLogan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA),Chicago ACORN called for creating a statewide“Grow Your Own” teacher pipeline strategy to trainteacher paraprofessionals and community residents tobecome teachers in their neighborhood schools.ACORN worked with LSNA and the Cross CityCampaign for Urban School Reform to assemble acoalition of community organizing groups, districtofficials, leaders from university teacher preparationprograms, the teachers unions, and elected officials toadvocate for the statewide teacher pipeline program.This coalition secured passage of the 2004 Grow YourOwn Teachers Act and won $11 million in successiveappropriations to support the program (McAlister,Mediratta & Shah 2009). The statewide Grow YourOwn Teachers program is implemented by regionalconsortia of universities, school districts, and commu-nity organizations that work together to develop localteacher pipeline programs.

Working through Alliances and CoalitionsAnother way that community organizing groups buildpower and the ability to act at multiple levels is bydeveloping alliances with a range of stakeholders andparticipating in formal coalitions. By working jointlyon issues of common concern, organizing groups canbring to bear the combined power of their bases andrelationships with officials and power brokers. Byworking collaboratively with advocacy organizations,education officials, researchers, businesses, and a hostof other stakeholders, groups can gain access to newdecision-making circles and new allies and demon-strate broad agreement about their proposals forchange.

In New York City, the Parents Action Committee(PAC) established by New Settlement Apartments, ahousing and social services group, organized for theouster of the unresponsive principal of one of the low-est-performing schools in New York City. When theysubsequently failed to influence the selection of areplacement principal, the leaders of the PAC realizedthat they needed to build the power to influence deci-sion making at the local school-district level. Theyreached out to five other community-based organiza-tions in the area and formed the Community Collabo-rative to Improve District 9 Schools (CC9) (Zachary& olatoye 2001).

After several major victories, including a lead teacherprogram to improve staff development and retentionin ten schools, control of New York City schools wasconsolidated under Mayor Michael Bloomberg andChancellor Joel Klein, and local districts were abol-ished. Responding to the new need to act at the citylevel, CC9 joined forces with other local coalitions oforganizing groups in Brooklyn and Queens to formthe citywide New York City Coalition for EducationalJustice (CEJ). Similarly, youth organizing groupsformed the citywide Urban Youth Collaborative(UYC) to advocate for the needs of under-served highschool students across New York City.


Another well-referenced example is the work of abroad-based coalition called Communities for Educa-tional Equity (CEE) that led to a school board resolu-tion establishing the college preparatory sequence asthe default curriculum in Los Angeles. Conversationsbetween youth and parent organizations, the UnitedWay, and the Alliance for a Better Community, aLatino advocacy group, led to the formation of CEEby twenty-five parent and student organizing groups,universities, civil rights and advocacy organizations,and representatives of elected education officials. Thecoalition put the weight of research, advocacy, andwell-established civil rights organizations behind localorganizing by South Central Youth Empowered thruAction, the youth organizing arm of CommunityCoalition, and moved the push for expanded collegeprep access to a much larger stage. Since the passage ofthe school board resolution mandating college prep asthe standard curriculum, CEE has continued to moni-tor the district’s implementation of the policy (UnitedWay of Greater Los Angeles 2007).

Using Data and ResearchResearch is an integral part of the community organiz-ing cycle. Regardless of issue area, organizing groupscombine one-on-one meetings, house meetings, sur-veys, and other forms of eliciting members’ concernswith research to hone leaders’ understanding of issues,craft solutions, and identify potential allies. Organiz-ing groups often establish research committees in theearly stages of a campaign and conduct “researchactions” in which they meet with officials and expertsto explore multiple dimensions of an identified issueand begin to map out who has the authority torespond to potential demands (Shirley 2009). Thepower maps described earlier are often part of thisprocess.

Because of the complexity of school reform, research iscrucially important in education organizing. Educa-tion justice organizations use research as a tool indefining policy problems, advancing political propos-als, litigating, and monitoring the implementation oflaws. Many groups have enduring relationships withuniversity-based researchers that afford them access todata on school performance and current scholarship oneducation issues (Renée 2006).

The Education Justice Collaborative in California, forexample, is a collaboration of organizing, advocacy,and legal groups, facilitated by the Institute forDemocracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) at UCLA,in which groups share information and strategy. IDEAresearchers conduct data analyses, identify relevantscholarship, and translate research into layperson-friendly formats to support the member groups of thecollaborative (Oakes et al. 2008).

In Philadelphia, youth leaders of Youth United forChange seized the opportunity created by schoolsCEO Paul Vallas to open new, themed academies of800 to 1,000 students and to envision the redesign ofseveral large, struggling high schools where the grouphad a base. The youth leaders surveyed students togather their ideas for a redesigned campus and workedwith the Cross City Campaign for Urban SchoolReform and Research for Action to research best prac-tices for small schools. With the assistance of the inter-mediary organizations, they traveled to Chicago,Oakland, Providence, and New York City to learnfrom the experiences of small schools there and delvedinto research on the small schools movement (Suess &Lewis 2007). They crafted a successful campaign todivide two under-served Philadelphia high schools intocampuses of small, themed academies of no more than400 to 500 students and identified a school designfirm to facilitate a public process.


Balancing Collaboration and PressureCommunity organizing groups are committed toensuring that their communities have equitable accessand equitable outcomes – not to any one set of tactics.Despite their reputation for protests, demonstrations,and other public actions to make demands of officialsand institutions, most organizing groups use a mix ofcollaboration and pressure and usually only resort topublic, contentious action when negotiation and col-laboration has failed (Ford Foundation and Center forCommunity Change 2008; Gold, Simon & Brown2002a).

The impetus for collaboration is even greater withineducation organizing. Because of the complexity ofeducation and the need to sustain and deepen multiplefacets of reform simultaneously (Coburn 2003), organ-izing groups need long-term access to education deci-sion-makers and experts. Organizing groups havediscovered the need to shift adversarial relationshipsthrough new tactics that facilitate constructive dia-logue around school reform (AISR 2010b).

The growth of school-based organizing has alsoencouraged the development of collaborative relation-ships with educators. Much of school-based organizingis about transforming the culture of schools so thatparents, teachers, principals, and the larger communitywork together for the benefit of children; it’s alsoabout creating the conditions for teachers to collabo-rate with one another. This kind of transformation isachieved through the traditions of relational culturebuilding in organizing. Groups emphasize trusting,mutually accountable relationships and the cultivationof leaders from across the school community, with thegoal of parents and educators viewing each other asallies in the work of improving the school. Thisapproach has been used in creating successful collabo-ration between community organizations and schoolsin both Oakland and New York. In both cities, com-munity organizations helped create policies establish-ing their presence on high school campus and nowprovide a range of services to students that extendbeyond community organizing.12

Organizing groups also seek common ground and cul-tivate collaborations and alliances with district- andstate-level officials. District officials often see organiz-ing groups as capable allies for advancing reforms thatwill benefit under-served students. Former Austin,Texas, superintendent Pascale Forgione met regularlywith Alliance Schools leaders and organizers fromAustin Interfaith. He was so convinced of the benefitsof their parent engagement strategies that he institutedthem districtwide (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister2009b). District administrators have been importantallies of the Alliance Schools work across Texas, wheretheir support facilitates school involvement anddemonstrates to school-level educators that the districttakes parent engagement seriously. In New England,the Pioneer Valley Project collaborated with theSpringfield, Massachusetts, school district and the localteachers union to develop a home visit program forelementary schools (Rose 2007).

Reliance on collaborative or pressure tactics is not aneither/or. All organizing groups use a careful balance of inside and outside strategies. Public actions such asletter-writing campaigns, accountability sessions, andlarge turnout at school board meetings are tools thatorganizing groups use to demonstrate the power oftheir organized base and establish themselves as legiti-mate education stakeholders. In the late 1990s, PeopleActing for Community Together (PACT) conductedextensive research to identify reading programs thatwould better serve the large immigrant and low-income student populations in local schools in Miami.They met extensively with school board members anddistrict administrators to gain their support for thecurriculum PACT had identified. PACT turned outhundreds of members to the meeting at which theschool board would vote on whether to use the pro-gram – not as a contentious or escalation tactic, butrather to demonstrate broad community and parentsupport for the program (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister2009a).

12 More information on these relationships can be found online at <www.maketheroad.org/article.php?ID=463> and <www.youthtogether.net/peace/2010/06/25/youth-together-sites>.


Yet, organizing groups are not unwilling to use publicaction to pressure or even embarrass officials, and thewillingness to engage in contentious action when nec-essary is one of the hallmarks of community organiz-ing. Organizing groups exist to further the interests ofmarginalized communities, and they prioritize theneeds of their constituency above their relationshipswith allies. The ability to publicly mobilize large num-bers of people with common interests and attractmedia attention is a core source of the power commu-nity organizing has to make demands for equity andaccountability. The IAF sums up this stance in the say-ing, “No permanent friends, no permanent enemies”(Warren 2001).

While organizing groups generally approach school-level educators as allies, parent and youth leaders inPhiladelphia and New York and elsewhere have madethe decision to organize for the removal of principalswhen they agree that the principals are complacent inthe face of poor outcomes and unresponsive to parents’and young people’s demands for change. ChicagoACORN leaders mobilized against the district’s“Renaissance 2010” plan to close and replace dozens of schools because the ACORN leaders had evidencethat low-income children would largely be shut out of the new schools. ACORN was simultaneously coop-erating with the district to draft legislation for a newteacher pipeline program, but the ACORN leaders felt strongly enough about Renaissance 2010 to riskdamage to their relationship with district leaders(McAlister, Mediratta & Shah 2009).

One of the most striking findings of Mediratta, Shah,and McAlister’s 2009 study of community organizinggroups is that principals and district and elected offi-cials nearly unanimously endorsed this mix of insidecollaboration and outside pressure as an asset. For onething, educators appreciated the advocacy of organiz-ing groups on shared interests, especially when politi-cal and bureaucratic relationships constrain howforcefully educators themselves can made demands.

Though Chicago ACORN, for example, sometimestook an oppositional stance early in its educationorganizing that damaged its relationships with schools,the group quickly learned that organizing publicly forcapital funding on behalf of schools made principalsand teachers more receptive to subsequent work onteacher quality. In New York City, a local superintend-ent noted that the Northwest Bronx Community andClergy Coalition could “leverage support for mutuallyidentified district needs” based on their relationshipswith elected officials and reputation as effective organ-izers (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a).

Furthermore, organizing groups played a crucial role as“critical friends” of school systems. Educators appreci-ated organizing groups’ abilities to frame district deci-sions in terms of their impact on low-income andmarginalized communities. Former Austin superin-tendent Forgione explained,

Austin Interfaith has got to be my critical friend.They’re not my best friend. They’ve got to becritical. They’ve got to be the conscience of mycommunity. Sometimes I don’t want to hear it;most of the times I don’t mind because we’ve gotsuch shared values. But whether I like it or not,that’s their job. (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister2009a)

One reason educators are willing to hear criticism fromorganizing groups is that they view the groups asauthentic representatives of under-served communi-ties. The attention that organizing groups pay to build-ing a base, constantly developing grassroots leaders,and listening to the needs and desires of memberstranslates into trust on the part of educators. Paul Val-las, who served as schools CEO in both Chicago andPhiladelphia before taking the helm of the RecoverySchool District in New Orleans, explained why he waswilling to work with organizing groups in those cities:

A lot of school reformers don’t even live in thecity. [Organizing groups] represent some of themost racially and economically isolated districtschools in some of the poorest communities.(Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a)


Challenges Facing Community Organizingfor School ReformCommunity organizing as a school reform strategyfaces most of the same daunting, well-documentedbarriers to sustained reform that other school reformmovements face: administrative and policy turmoil; anemphasis on short-term achievement gains versus long-term change; insufficient resources and competing pri-orities; the complexity of federal, state, and districtroles in American education; and the difficulty ofshifting deeply held beliefs (Shirley 2009; Renée, Wel-ner & Oakes 2010).

Community organizing as an “outside” strategy led bycommunities with comparatively few materialresources and a history of disenfranchisement facesadditional obstacles. Despite the evidence of groups’sophistication in balancing collaboration and pressureto maintain relationships with educators, such rela-tionships take time to develop, depend on a mutualunderstanding of the very different cultures of organiz-ing and public education, and are easily damaged.Community organizing often depends on buildingcoalitions between multiple organizing groups andwith other constituencies; groups have differentialaccess to potential allies, thought partners, and coali-tions, depending on their geographic location and thedensity of community organizing groups in their cityor town.

The Importance and Fragility of a FavorablePolitical ClimateCommunity organizing success depends on winningagreement around school reform demands from princi-pals, school boards, superintendents, mayors in somecases, and often state boards of education and legisla-tures. The degree to which community organizinggroups will be well received by all of these stakeholdersdepends on their experience with and dispositiontoward community organizing, as well as the strategiesused by groups to approach them.

Further, some political moments are more conduciveto organizing than others. Battles over contract negoti-ations, charter schools, vouchers, mayoral control, andother contentious issues can monopolize public atten-tion and squeeze out the other priorities of organizinggroups. Organizing groups affiliated with the Gamalielnetwork in Wisconsin worked for several years in theearly 2000s to put forth proposals for redesigning statefunding, only to see the state’s education budget heldhostage to prolonged wrangling over a cap on voucherschools (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister 2009a).

Community organizing groups have a stronger chancefor victory when their demands are well aligned to thepriorities of education officials. When district andschool officials see organizing demands as furtheringtheir own agendas for change, they are often morewilling to negotiate and compromise on the details ofproposals. In the absence of this alignment, though, itcan be hard for organizing groups to get traction.When leaders of Alliance Schools in Austin workedwith the local IAF affiliate, Austin Interfaith, todevelop a proposal for a subdistrict to pilot alternativeassessments, they faced intense opposition from theschool system. Though the superintendent, PascaleForgione Jr., was a strong ally of Austin Interfaith, hewas also a proponent of standards-based education andhad spent several years designing standardized tests.Nor was it politically feasible, in the home state ofhigh-stakes testing, to allow a group of schools to optout of the state accountability regime (Mediratta, Shah& McAlister 2009b).

Collaboration between educators and organizinggroups also requires some mutual appreciation of verydifferent cultures. Whereas organizing values leader-ship that is distributed and decision making by con-sensus, schools and districts are often hierarchical, and decisions are continually passed up the chain ofcommand.


At the school level, teachers often feel disempoweredand fight to be viewed as professionals. Teachers some-times see the demands of organizing groups for greaterdecision making as a threat to their autonomy andwhat little professional power they hold. This dynamicrequires careful attention and relationship building(Shirley 2002).

At the district level, PACT’s relationships with thesuperintendent and school board members in Miamihad been mainly positive; PACT had often invitedthese officials to accountability sessions to publiclystate their support for the group’s priorities. When the district hired a new superintendent, the group met with him several times and invited him to a largeaccountability session to negotiate his support formaintaining their literacy intervention in two dozenstruggling schools. The superintendent was unavailableand sent a deputy in his place; PACT refused to givethe floor to the deputy, since he lacked the authority tomake decisions, and kept an empty chair on the stageto represent the superintendent’s absence. This escala-tion, stemming from a lack of understanding on thesuperintendent’s part of the role of accountability ses-sions in PACT’s organizing and a failure on PACT’spart to appreciate the superintendent’s genuine desireto negotiate, ended any chance for compromise on theliteracy initiative (Mediratta, Shah & McAlister2009a).

On top of the delicacy of navigating the political cli-mate and conflicting cultures is layered the instabilityand turmoil that face many school districts. The aver-age tenure of an urban superintendent is three and ahalf years (Council of the Great City Schools 2008/2009); principals, especially in struggling schools, alsoturn over frequently. Building sustainable agreementsacross so many changing stakeholders, each with his orher own agenda, presents a significant challenge tocommunity organizers.

The Limits of Organizational CapacityCommunity organizing groups are often held up asgenerating large returns on the investments of founda-tions – they win major changes in policy, attract mas-sive resources, and generate social and communitycapacity with a handful of staff and tiny budgets. Butthe small size (and generally low pay) of the staff, cou-pled with the fact that the work of the organization iscarried out by volunteer leaders with families and workresponsibilities, puts a tremendous strain on the abilityof organizing groups to keep multiple campaigns mov-ing forward.

Organizers and leaders often play roles in several issueareas and campaigns simultaneously. Campaigns at the school, district, and state levels move at differentspeeds and require different organizing strategies.When organizers and leaders turn over, they take sub-stantial institutional knowledge with them. This is aparticular struggle for youth-led organizing, wherecampaigns can take longer to complete than the timestudents spend in high school.

Insufficient Density of Organizations Working TogetherCollaboration is an important strategy of communityorganizing. Yet without sufficient density of organiza-tions in one area, collaboration is challenging. Organ-izers interviewed for the Nellie Mae–initiated scan oforganizing in New England noted that while founda-tions often view funding multiple organizations to doeducation work in the same city as a duplication ofefforts, it is difficult for organizing to have an impactuntil it attains sufficient density for groups to worktogether and mobilize a large enough constituency toshift power dynamics.

Collaboration is particularly challenging in rural areas.Rural organizing, like rural school reform, is largelyignored in research literature and under-funded inpractice. The national organizing networks like IAF,ACORN, or PICO are important sources of training,leadership development, research expertise, and knowl-edge about promising practices, yet none of thenational networks have much presence outside ofcities.


The Critical Role of FundersExisting academic literature does not report muchabout the difference between community-initiated ver-sus foundation-initiated efforts, nor is there extensiveresearch on the role of foundations in supporting andshaping community organizing for school reform.However, based on our extensive experience in thisfield, especially providing research and policy supportto local organizations and state and national collabora-tions, we know that the role of foundations has beencritical to developing and supporting communityorganizing for school reform.

For collaboration between community organizationsand foundations to succeed, attention to building rela-tionships early on in the process of researching andshaping reform agendas is crucial. In addition, fundersneed to be able to weather some of the more con-frontational relationships that community organiza-tions engage in and trust in the longer-term process anorganization must go through in creating a space foritself in a policy-making venue. While uncomfortableat times, these moments, our experience and researchshow, are part of a cycle that often results in “criticalfriend” relationships between community organiza-tions and other stakeholders. These relationships add a depth, quality, and permanence to school reformefforts that are well worth moments of discomfort.

Despite these challenges, we know that most of theinitiatives described in this paper involved partnershipsbetween foundations and community organizinggroups. In these efforts, foundations bring not justfunding, but also capacity and social capital needed toform strategic relationships. For example, the substan-tial funding the Gates Foundation provided to organi-zations working on the implementation of collegeaccess policies in Los Angeles helped establish theorganizations as a key partner within the district. Thecombination of fiscal and social resources that theFoundation provided meant that organizations had the

capacity to participate in district meetings, join districtcommissions, and follow the district closely as itworked toward policy adoption.

Some foundations go beyond providing funding toorganizations – they have developed trainings onimportant topics like strategic communications andleadership development and have created criticalopportunities for community organizations to networkand learn from each other. For example, numerouslocal and national foundations joined governmentagencies in supporting the development of CEJ andthe UYC. The result is that both coalitions have stableresources to meaningfully and regularly engage inschool-district decision making. Another example is acoalition of funders, Communities for Public Educa-tion Reform (CPER), which works to leverage invest-ments from multiple foundations to strategically focuson developing community organizing potential in spe-cific cities around the nation. Many of the successfulcampaigns described in the research literature receivedfunding and capacity-building assistance from CPER.


Community Organizing as an EducationReform StrategyWith all its challenges, community organizing ishardly a magic bullet for all that ails public education.But community organizing offers a unique set of effec-tive strategies for achieving school improvement, especially in partnership with other reform strategies.The research suggests that community organizing forschool reform has the potential to advance equity, cre-ate innovative solutions that reflect the interests andexperiences of disenfranchised communities, and buildthe long-term social capital of under-represented com-munities both to support schools and districts and tohold them accountable for improving achievement.

Education organizing – unique in its blend of outside-in and inside-out strategies – is as much about build-ing coalitions with school districts and policy-makersas it is about protesting against them. In the end, mostof the people who work in schools systems – adminis-trators, teachers, and staff, as well as the communitiesthat are served by the school system – share a deepcommitment to improving the life opportunities ofyoung people. Some of the most effective campaignsfor equitable education reform succeed by leveragingthis shared commitment in order to create – and thensustain – improvement in the nation’s most under-served schools.

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