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In this article, Mark R. Warren argues that if urban school reform in the United States is to be successful, it must be linked to the revitalization of the communities around our schools. Warren identifies a growing field of collaboration between public schools and community-based organizations, developing a typology that identifies three different approaches: the service approach (community schools); the development approach (community sponsorship of new charter schools); and the organizing approach (school-community organizing). The author elaborates a conceptual framework using theories of social capital and relational power, presenting case studies to illustrate each type. He also discusses a fourth case to demonstrate the possibilities for linking individual school change to political strategies that address structures of poverty. Warren identifies shared lessons across these approaches, and compares and contrasts the particular strengths and weaknesses of each. Warren concludes with a call for a new approach to urban education reform that links it theoretically and practically to social change in America's cities.
What sense does it make to try to reform urban schools while the communities around them stagnate or collapse?1 Conversely, can community-building and development efforts succeed in revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods if the public schools within them continue to fail their students? The fates of urban schools and communities are linked, yet school reformers and communitybuilders typically act as if they are not.
Twenty years ago, one would have been hard pressed to find a communitybased organization that was actively working on education issues. The young community-development and organizing groups that had arisen in the wake of the 1960s typically focused their efforts on housing, safety, and economic development initiatives (Halpern, 1995). In turn, public schools lost the close connections they had to neighborhoods at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Progressive Era reforms centralized control of schooling in professionally run district administrations (Reese, 2002). For the last half of the twentieth century, then, educators and community developers have operated in a separate sphere, both institutionally and professionally.
More recently, though, a wide range of initiatives has emerged that seeks to forge collaborations between community-based organizations and schools. This new movement has historical roots both in John Dewey's conception of democratic, community-centered education (Dewey, 1915) and in the community-control movements of the 1960s...