Early Waves of School Effects Research

Schools as Social Systems

Shifting to Social Models of Urban School Effectiveness

Still, the Issue of Change

Increasing School Funding

School Restructuring

Redesigning School Social Environments

Conclusions

Note

References

For many Americans, the words urban schooling conjure up bleak images: old buildings; glass-strewn concrete playfields; hallways and classrooms decorated more by graffiti than by the signs and symbols of learning; and teachers and students struggling against, but often succumbing to, defeatism and apathy.  For those closer to the daily life of city schools, however, the image is more likely one of contrast: caring teachers and principals striving to create countercurrents of hope; students and parents working to overcome endemic social obstacles to educational attainment; and the daily exchange of enormous efforts for "small victories" (Freedman, 1990).  In fact, both sets of images are real, for indeed, urban schools in the United States epitomize both its greatest problems and its greatest promise for addressing some of its most perplexing social issues.

The greatest challenge of "urban schooling," of course, relates to the fact that the term connotes concerns about the educational experiences of minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged youth.  Improving urban schools thus conveys the notion of overcoming inequalities in educational, occupational, and social opportunity across racial and economic categories. The great promise relates to the evidence that urban schools can become more effective and thereby truly contribute to the attainment of these goals (Boyd, 1991).

Although school "effectiveness" is typically, and with justification, understood in terms of achievement test scores, equally important is the school's ability to attract, engage, and establish social bonds with students at all ability levels.  It is also clear that researchers have generally understood the task of improving school effectiveness as relating mainly to the needs of "disadvantaged" students.  Numerous barriers to this task confront urban schools, including gangs, violence, and dangerous neighborhoods; dysfunctional, top-heavy bureaucratic governance; highly politicized and unionized environments constraining leadership and management; funding problems; inadequate employment opportunities for inner-city youth and adults; weak morale, academic climate, and motivation; insufficient social capital and support in the surrounding community; and role conflict, overload, and "burnout" for teachers.  In short, urban schools seem bogged down in a mire of social, economic, and structural constraints.

Despite all of this, however, it is strange that so little progress has been made in improving the academic effectiveness of urban schools.  Beginning with the so-called Coleman Report of the mid-1960s (Coleman et al., 1966), the past 30 years have witnessed a burgeoning of research studies aimed at reducing the gap in quality between the school experiences of disadvantaged and more affluent youth.  Many of these studies, moreover, have actually identified samples of "effective urban schools," and considerable agreement exists among researchers about the characteristics contributing to their effectiveness.  Still unattained, however, is the most crucial research goal-that of establishing a reliable set of techniques for transforming ineffective schools into effective ones.  This challenge still confronts and perplexes today's school "restructuring" movement.  As we discuss below, however, progress is being made in learning how to reconstitute the sense of professional and academic community within schools.

To a real extent, then, the issue of how to change urban schools takes on an importance equal or even paramount to that of school effectiveness. Improvement requires fundamental change in urban schools, but the forces arrayed against change in schools (and especially in urban schools) are truly formidable.  So, if change and improvement are vital, then the barriers impeding this in urban schools demand special attention.  In this chapter, we look at both the impediments to change and improvement and the characteristics of effective urban schools, tracing the path followed since the Coleman Report and describing what appear to be promising further avenues for improving urban schools.  In doing so, we note how school effectiveness research has shifted in emphasis over the years, from economic to structural and on to social models of urban school effectiveness-for example, from highlighting school funding and physical resources to teachers' instructional behaviors and on toward a school's sense of community and academic culture.  What is important about this shift is not that older perspectives have been left behind, but rather that new perspectives have allowed the old ones to become better refined and applied.

Unfortunately, although a more sophisticated understanding of the factors determining school effectiveness now exists, our inability to quickly and effectively implement this knowledge in schools has contributed, along with adverse social and economic trends, to declining public confidence in public schools (and, needless to say, in educational research as well).  Urban school systems, in particular, now face nothing less than a crisis of public confidence and legitimacy.  Demands are mounting for radical reforms to alter the governance structure or to break up, privatize, or "voucherize" urban systems (replace them with more or less privatized systems of school choice for parents and students; Education Commission of the States, 1995). Indeed, this crisis is now so acute that calls for the reform of their governance and institutional structures increasingly eclipse demands for programmatic and pedagogical reforms within these systems (Cibulka, 1995, 1996). Critics assert that fundamental flaws in the governance and institutional structures of urban school systems (including especially their tendency to have dysfunctional incentive systems) impede the basic changes that are essential for real reform (Boyd, 1991).  Consequently, a question we address in the conclusion of this chapter is whether real improvement is possible in urban schools in the absence of fundamental reform of their governance and institutional structures.

As suggested above, the quest for more effective forms of schooling has traditionally been synonymous with the quest for greater educational equity across racial and socioeconomic levels.  The basis for this understanding was established more than 30 years ago by James Coleman et al. (1966) in Equality of Educational Opportunity.  In trying to explain the significant achievement gap between racial and socioeconomic groups through an analysis of survey data on a large national sample of schools, these researchers examined how differences in various types of physical, human, and social resources across schools related to average school achievement levels.  The Coleman Report reached four major conclusions.  First, the strongest predictors of achievement across all racial groups were social characteristics of the student's home environment (e.g., parents' education, income).  For minority students, the next strongest predictor of achievement related to social characteristics of the school (its percentage of white students and the average economic background of all students).  Third, but exclusively for Southern black children, teacher characteristics (education and years of experience) had a modest impact on achievement.  Fourth, after controlling for all of the above characteristics, factors related to school fiscal resources (per-pupil spending and curricular and instructional facilities) appeared to have little or no effect on school achievement.

The Coleman Report posed a tremendous challenge to educational researchers and policymakers, no doubt troubled by the surprising finding that inequities in fiscal resources had little or no influence on student learning across schools.  And although it received a good deal of methodological criticism (e.g., see Murnane, 1975), later investigations have tended to support its general pattern of findings.  A main weakness of the study, however, was its "production function" framework.  In other words, schools were implicitly conceived of as "black boxes" through which resource inputs were somehow converted into educational outputs.  Although a reasonable first step in understanding school effectiveness, it did not accurately portray the way schools actually work.  Students within the same school, for instance, do not typically receive equal doses of school resources.  They tend not to share equal access to the library, to the computer lab, or to the most experienced teachers and often are exposed to different types and levels of instruction via tracking or ability grouping.  In reality, then, schools are better understood as "switching yards" than as units of instruction (Barr & Dreeben, 1983).  Left to be explored, then, were the internal processes of schools, their relationship to student learning, and the possibility that their quality might vary within and across schools as a function of students' race, urbanicity, or economic background.

The Coleman Report thus triggered a new wave of "process-product" research, epitomized by the so-called effective schools studies of the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., see Rosenholtz, 1985).  Peeling the lid off the black box, these studies took primary aim at the workings of urban (usually elementary) schools.  The typical methodological approach was to identify samples of significantly effective (and sometimes of significantly ineffective) schools, with "instructional effectiveness" typically defined by student test score results higher than one would predict on the basis of the socioeconomic status (SES) of students' families.  Next, an attempt was made to identify school processes and characteristics that actually seemed to make a difference in student learning.  Collectively, these studies produced lengthy lists of "effective practices" or "best practices" for classroom instruction and school management and organization.

Summarizing these findings, Odden and Odden (1995) note that effective teachers maximize instruction time, are well prepared, maintain a smooth and steady instructional pace (especially during the first few weeks of school), focus on academic learning, and emphasize student mastery of material.  With regard to organizational characteristics, effective schools evidence strong instructional leadership, usually provided by the principal; a consensus on academically focused school goals; realistic but high expectations for student learning; regularized monitoring of progress toward academic goals; ongoing staff development; and an orderly and secure environment with a strong, consistently enforced student discipline program (Odden & Odden, 1995, p. 67).

The effective schools "movement" was extremely influential among researchers and educators, as well as among policymakers at all levels of U.S. government. Equally important, it signified a major shift in the understanding about how schools work, moving from explanations involving fiscal capital to those centered around human and social capital. Questions persist regarding its various recommendations, however, particularly the direction of causal effect. In other words, although certain characteristics might produce higher-achieving students, the reverse might also be the case; that is, schools may maintain these characteristics because they are fortunate enough to have greater numbers of high-achieving students. That some schools identified as effective at one point in time were found not to be so a few years later might, for example, suggest the latter possibility. Thus, although "effective schools" clearly share important practices, it was never consistently established that ineffective schools could become more effective by adopting these features.

It has become increasingly clear that changing urban schools amounts to something deeper than simply adjusting key processes. More than switching yards, schools are, in fact, small societies in which beliefs, values, and informal norms and sanctions help shape and redirect those processes. As some classic sociological studies indicate (Bidwell, 1965; Coleman, 1961; Gordon, 1957; Waller, 1932/1967), the day-to-day realities of classroom life draw teachers away from objective, "universalistic" interactions with students toward those more subjective and "particularistic." A strong student culture (or particular characteristics of student culture) can thus have tremendous power to either reinforce or erode teachers' academic standards and success with students.

The problem is particularly acute for urban schools in two distinct but complementary ways. First , behavioral norms among urban students often run in opposition to academic goals. As described by one inner-city high school teacher, "To be intelligent around here is considered a crime. They don't bring in their books or supplies because of peer pressure. If you're making real good grades and everybody else is not, . . . you're just not going to be part of the group" (Shouse & Schneider, 1993, p. 80). Moreover, in the case of African Americans, Ogbu (1978) contends that their background as an involuntary minority group in the United States led them to develop a subculture in opposition to their oppressors. Ogbu believes that this subculture promotes an especially strong resistance to schooling that is perceived to be controlled by the dominant culture-an analysis that supports calls for Afro-centric schooling.

A second problem associated with the stark realities of urban life is that teachers are naturally drawn away from academic concerns and toward social concerns.  An art teacher at the same school mentioned above asked, "How can I ask this kid to be concerned with principles of color composition when there are people outside who want to kill him?" A less extreme but more insidious example of this is reported in The Shopping Mall High School (Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 198S): A Spanish teacher remarks that a particular student, though "not very good at all in the language . . .  tries very, very hard, and she always attends, and it makes you feel very sorry for her.  So she'll probably get a B or a B minus" (p. 59).

Under such conditions, changes in curricular and instructional processes and practices are likely to be co-opted or redirected to suit the perceived needs and limitations of students.  In other words, even as best practices become implemented in urban schools, their students may still be more likely to experience educational treatment more socially therapeutic than academically challenging.  This likelihood helps in explaining the lack of success of the effective schools movement in establishing a "portable" model: The movement underestimates the "DNA" of educational organizations, those deep social structures that work to either constrain or promote academic teaching and learning.

Numerous scholars have used the concept of "sense of community" to explain or highlight social differences between schools.  Coleman and Hoffer (1987), for example, argue that, in contrast with modern-day public schools, Catholic schools tend to be based around "functional" communities in which school members share the same place of worship and interact with each other both in and out of the classroom and in and out of the school. They also make the point that urban Catholic schools are able to attract large numbers of non-Catholic families by offering a "value" community supportive of their beliefs and expectations about schooling and child rearing. For the school and its members, the result is a network of mutually reinforcing social relationships - a well of "social capital" to be tapped for the purpose of attaining meaningful educational goals.

Bryk and Driscoll (1988) expand this understanding of school commonality, clarifying its organizational foundations and showing how they apply to public as well as Catholic schools. In a key study combining elements of theoretical and empirical analysis, Bryk and Driscoll argue that whether public or private, "communally organized" schools evidence (a) a consensus over beliefs and values; (b) a "common agenda" of course work, activities, ceremonies, and traditions; and (c) an ethic of caring that pervades the relationships of student and adult school members. On the basis of analyses of a national sample of schools and students, Bryk and Driscoll found that schools with higher levels of commonality (as measured by an array of survey items representing each of the three core components) also evidenced higher attendance rates, better morale (among both students and teachers), and higher levels of student achievement.

The fact that there is nothing explicitly "academic" about any of the three core components described above or, in fact, any of the survey items representing them is perplexing. Would it not be possible for schools to become "dysfunctional communities" (Monk, 1992), where common values, activities, and styles of caring run counter to academic goals? Would this most likely occur in urban schools where teachers, daunted by daily realities, came to view positive social relations and student self-esteem as reasonable substitutes for meaningful academic demand and student effort?

These questions were recently explored as part of a broader investigation into improving math and science performance among U.S. high school students (Shouse, 1996). Based on data from a national sample of schools, the study separately examined the achievement effects of commonality (measured along lines similar to those of Bryk and Driscoll's study) and "academic press" (measured in terms of an assortment of survey items reflecting school academic climate, disciplinary climate, and teachers' instructional behavior and emphasis).

The findings with respect to low-SES schools were quite striking. Academic effectiveness among these schools was significantly tied to academic press and to combined levels of academic press and commonality. Average achievement in low-SES schools having high levels of both academic press and commonality, in fact, rivaled that of schools serving more affluent students. But, the least academically effective low-SES schools were those that combined strong commonality and weak academic press. Although these findings reveal the tensions between meeting students' social and academic needs, they also reveal the tremendous potential of school social networks that are supportive, cohesive, and academically oriented to spark a quantum leap in the quality of urban students' educational experiences (Shouse, 1996).

These findings indicate that school leaders must strive for a management style and school culture that successfully balance a concern for performance with a concern for people and community. This indication underscores the significance of the classic tension for managers between the task or performance dimension and the of caring or consideration dimension of leadership.  In the case schools, research suggests four types of "school cultures" based on combinations of high or low emphasis on academic performance and on a caring community. ¹ Schools with high levels of concern for both academic performance and commonality can be said to have an integrative culture. The phrase that characterizes this culture is "No one fails here who works hard." Schools that emphasize performance but are low on commonality have an exacting culture, characterized by the phrase "Some will fail here no matter what they do." Schools that emphasize community but de-emphasize performance have a caring culture, which is captured by the phrase "No one fails here who shows up." Finally, schools low on both performance and community have an apathetic culture. The phrase that best characterizes these schools is "No one fails whether they show up or not." As we have discussed above, the challenging context of urban schools makes it especially important that educators resist the pressures pushing schools toward the deceptive caring culture (or possibly the defeatist apathetic culture).

Despite the encouraging findings about urban schools that combine a strong emphasis on both academic performance and commonality, is it possible that the dilemma we now face is similar to that of the effective schools movement? That is, we can suggest where urban schools should be, but we still cannot offer a reliable map for getting there. If student background and school composition factors remain the strongest predictors of school achievement, could effective urban schooling be merely related to attracting the most able and motivated students? Or, might catalytic factors or incentives exist to help schools evolve into strong, academically oriented communities? Several possible avenues warrant discussion and further research.

Despite the lack of consistent empirical  evidence during the past 30 years in its support, the idea that having more money would allow urban schools to overcome their most serious barriers remains an intuitively attractive one. More money leads to newer facilities, more talented and motivated teachers, and a higher quality and quantity of teaching equipment and supplies, things all seemingly connected to increasing students' social attraction to school. Nowhere, perhaps, is this point (and its converse) illustrated so pointedly as in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities (1991).

Although Kozol's work commands attention-and money certainly makes a difference (Ferguson & Ladd, 1995)-it is probably unfair to characterize the fiscal resource deficiencies of most urban schools as "savage" or to point to them as the primary source of urban school ineffectiveness. A great deal more is involved, as Hanushek (1995, p. 22) notes, in reflecting on Kozol's analysis:
The dichotomy between the good intentions of school finance and the reality of schools is pervasive. For example, it is instructive to contrast the school spending version of Jonathan Kozol with the school policy version of Jonathan Kozol. His recent book [Savage Inequalities], which identified truly outrageous situations in some of our nation's schools, pointed to fixing everything simply by bringing the unsafe and unsanitary schools up to the spending levels of the most opulent public schools that could be found (Kozol, 1991). On the other hand, the main theme of the equally as compelling Death at an Early Age (Kozol, 1967) is that the current organization of schools with few incentives to improve student performance squanders the good resources that are available. Nothing in Kozol (1991) indicates how the problems of Kozol (1967) will be overcome.

That greater funding is not, by itself, the solution to the problems of urban schools comes through rather clearly from an experience in Kansas City (Armor, 1995; CBS News, 1994). Under a 1986 federal court order aimed at redressing decades of de facto school segregation, the Kansas City School District spent more than $1 billion to improve the quality of its schools in order to attract suburban students. New schools were built with up-to-date materials and state-of-the-art computer labs. Teachers received significant raises, and class size was limited to 25 students. Despite these material improvements, white enrollment continued to decrease and student test scores continued to lag behind those of other comparable big-city school districts. In sharp contrast, however, were the significant achievement gains made at one of the district's middle schools, which, although making modest physical improvements, required its students to wear uniforms and their parents to sign contracts promising to oversee their children's attendance and homework.

;The Kansas City case illustrates a major problem with using money as a catalyst for school improvement.; It tends to be "broadcast" at districts, schools, or broad programs, and those most responsible for eventual student outcomes (teachers) have little power to direct it toward their own specific needs and problems.  If money is to work as a catalyst for school change, it may need to be "narrowcast" to create new incentives and relationships at the bottom of the organizational pyramid-that is, for teachers, students, and parents.

As an example of this, consider a recent school business partnership program designed to improve graduation and college attendance rates among students at two "at risk" inner-city high schools. During a 4-year period, the sponsoring company offered students college tuition vouchers of up to $4,000 for maintaining reasonable attendance and at least a C average. During the same period, teachers could earn up to $4,000 for serving as regular mentors for small groups of students. Although a systematic evaluation of the program's impact revealed contrasts between two schools, it reported several significant improvements in such areas as attendance, educational aspirations, and achievement among "borderline" students (Shouse, 1991; Shouse & Schneider, 1993).

One story from this particular program reveals not only the stifling effects of insensitive bureaucracy but also the contrast between the power of narrowcast money and the impotency of broadcast money. Having taken on the task of mentoring, an English teacher at one of the schools directed her stipend toward engaging her group of 15 students in a series of school fix-ups, cleaning and painting areas of the school, inside and out. For one of these fix-ups, students painted bright colors and original designs over dismal lavatory walls. Not long afterward, when it became time for the school to receive some general maintenance, a team of district painters obliterated the students' work with their own standard issue battleship gray. Stunned and disappointed, the teacher and her students complained about the action. Word was eventually passed down to them that they really had no business painting anything anyway.

In short, modest amounts of money could be redistributed to provide resources, incentives, and a sense of empowerment and provide ownership to those on the "front lines" of urban schooling. This theme, of course, parallels that of the area to which we now turn, that of school restructuring.

Like the effective schools movement, the school restructuring movement has come to denote a fairly specific array of prescriptions for improving organizational effectiveness and student achievement. At its foundation, the restructuring idea is a response to concern that school systems have become too large and bureaucratic to permit the types of effective site-level management and professional and instructional practices necessary to meet the teaching and learning needs of teachers and students. Teachers work in isolation from each other, as well as from critical decision-making processes. School principals are too often handcuffed by bureaucratic rules and central office edicts. For the sake of efficiency, students are often sorted by ability and are exposed to instruction driven primarily by short-answer standardized tests. Finally, because of bureaucratic and professional barriers to lay involvement, schools tend to be poorly linked with the parental and community networks that can support and facilitate the successful education of children.

The prescriptions offered by the restructuring movement thus center around three basic areas:

1. Shifting the thrust of school governance to a more "bottom up" direction through decentralization, site-based management, staff professional development, teacher empowerment, and greater parent involvement

2. Refocusing curriculum and instruction toward cooperatively organized, mixed-ability classrooms; greater emphasis on higher-order learning; and the use of performance-based student assessment

3. Reducing school size, typically through the creation of "schools within schools"

Several more specific changes have been recommended across these three areas by reformers, and some recent evidence links their collective adoption with significant gains in high school achievement. A study by Lee and Smith (1994), for example, contrasted achievement gains in three types of school: (a) those with no reform or restructuring, (b) those that had sought to improve on their traditional, more bureaucratic practices, and (c) those that had engaged in some level of organizational restructuring. Although students in traditionally oriented schools that were seeking improvement outgained those in nonreform schools, students in restructured schools (those having adopted at least 3 out of 12 restructuring practices) significantly outgained those in both other types of schools. More important, the greatest achievement differences occurred among students at the low end of the socioeconomic scale. In other words, the achievement gap between more and less economically advantaged students was narrowest within restructured schools.

And yet, before educators bestow panacea status on school restructuring plans, they need to look closely at some key questions. For instance, were we to imagine school restructuring as represented by a "check off" of reforms, we should expect the items on the list to vary greatly in terms of their actual contribution to student achievement. In fact, for some items on the list (e.g., cooperative learning, heterogeneous grouping), the evidence is either inconclusive or extremely complex. Moreover, there is considerable potential for friction among these restructuring reforms. At a recent national conference, for instance, a well-known researcher bemoaned the fact that resistance to de-tracking plans increased as teachers and parents gained a greater share of decision-making power. Apparently, their intuitive sense of the practicality and logic of grouping students according to their interests and learning pace conflicted with the commitment to "de-tracking" of educator elites.

Sooner or later, decentralizing decision-making power-to schoolsite administrators, teachers, and parents-raises questions about standards and consistency across a "system" of schools. The central office of school districts is naturally inclined to resist decentralization or to try to "recentralize" power when it can (Crowson & Boyd, 1992), in large part for reasons of consistency and accountability. Further, with its advocacy of national standards and associated testing schemes, the recent "systemic" school reform movement tends to conflict with the desire to decentralize and empower site-level educators.

Effective school reform thus requires us to look at the separate components of the restructuring agenda-and they may or may not fit together-rather than to accept them all as a package deal. As an example, consider the restructuring practice of students keeping the same homeroom throughout their high school careers (one practice included in the Lee & Smith [1994] study cited above). Although urban students might benefit from sharing the first 15 minutes of each day with the same people, evidence from Asian secondary schools indicates that a stronger sense of belonging and cooperation would result if they shared the entire day in the same classroom, with their teachers being the ones moving around the school. With regard to ability grouping, evidence from U.S. Catholic schools suggests that narrowing the range and coordinating the content of ability groups makes more sense than the complete abandonment of curricular differentiation (Bryk, Lee, & Holland, 1993).

Further, a strange irony surrounds the school restructuring movement. Although it aims to debureaucratize and decentralize school organization, it also tends to carry its own specific agenda of reform. Not so many years ago, as a teacher at an urban high school, one of the authors observed a beautiful illustration of this. The faculty were considering and discussing their concerns about the district's new plan for local school control. On the basis of a majority vote, a school could become "empowered"-that is, be governed by a small local school council consisting of the principal and parent and teacher representatives. Confronting a list of teacher concerns over the proposal, the principal exclaimed, "People, understand this!  We will become an empowered school!" What the teachers feared (and perhaps what the principal understood) was that empowerment could actually lead to disempowerment; that is, in this case, because teachers might end up in a minority on the council, overruled by the parents and the school principal, it might de-legitimate teachers' experiential knowledge about what does and does not work in schools and about what they are and are not professionally capable of accomplishing in the classroom.

In short, for urban school restructuring to be effective-for it to be honest-requires that teachers' understandings not be viewed as obstructions to change.  Put another way, new educational structures must result as much, if not more, from bottom-up than from top-down efforts. Thus, to be effective and honest, restructuring must provide teachers formal and informal opportunities to develop appropriate professional norms; to examine, question, but in the end select effective instructional methods based on what they know and can learn about their craft.

Indeed, significant, collective involvement of teachers appears to be a key to effective school restructuring, based on the extensive program of research on restructuring conducted by the federally supported Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Newmann & Wehlage, 1995). The center's researchers found that school effectiveness and student learning were enhanced when schools took on the qualities of "professional communities" (Louis & Kruse, 1995; Newmann & Wehiage, 1995).  Such communities had three basic features: "Teachers pursue a clear shared purpose for all students' learning. Teachers engage in collaborative activity to achieve the purpose. Teachers take collective responsibility for student learning" (Newmann & Wehlage, 1995, p. 30). Summarizing the center's findings, Newmann and Wehlage (1995) stated: The quest for more effective community and professional involvement in the education of urban children is central to two of the most promising approaches to the reform and restructuring of urban education, the programs led by James Comer and by Henry Levin. Comer's work began with an intervention project in New Haven, Connecticut. His analysis of his two project schools "suggested that the key to academic achievement is to promote psychological development in students which encourages bonding to the school. Doing so requires fostering positive interactions between parents and school staff, a task for which most staff people are not trained" (Comer, 1988, p. 46). This interaction requires that school staff and parents overcome a natural resistance to cooperation, which seems to pervade the schools. The intervention required the reduction of "destructive interactions" and the establishment of "cohesiveness and direction to the school's management and teaching" (p. 46).

To accomplish these purposes, a team was formed to "govern and manage" the school (Comer, 1988, p. 46).  This team included the principal, a mental health professional, representatives from the nonprofessional staff, and elected representatives from among parents and teachers. Guidelines were established to mediate between the needs of the principal for authority and those of the team to represent concerns and needs of the students, as well as their respective constituencies. To ensure cooperation, consensus decision making was required (p. 47).

In addition to policy development, parents are also encouraged to participate in the life of the school and to assist in the growth of bonds between the community and the school.  Concerted efforts among social workers, school psychologists, and special education teachers combine to establish "school policies and practices so that students' developmental needs would be served better and behavior problems prevented" (p. 47). In addition to minimizing psychic distress and behavior problems to facilitate the student-school relationship, Comer's efforts also include a social skills curriculum to redress "the problem of social misalignment" (p. 48).

The totality of Comer's program is intended to develop the child socially as well as academically.  Whereas the social skills curriculum moves to align economically disadvantaged and minority students with mainstream society, the "team approach" to school management and governance represents an effort to modify school-community relationships. By involving parents and the community in the formation of social capital, the program also alleviates some of the cultural discontinuity problem emphasized by Ogbu (1978).

Henry Levin's (1987) "accelerated school" program represents another effort to achieve both academic and social success by combining effective pedagogical techniques with efforts to build social capital and reduce cultural discontinuity.  Thus, Levin tries to build on the strengths of culturally different children, rather than focus on their "deficits." His emphasis on the strengths and abilities of disadvantaged students contradicts conventional wisdom that assumes a need for slower, remedial treatment of such students:

The accelerated school is a transitional elementary school designed to bring disadvantaged students up to grade level by the end of sixth grade so they [can] take advantage of mainstream secondary school instruction. . . . The goal . . . is to bring all children up to grade level, rather than limit interventions for the disadvantaged to "pull out" sessions. This approach requires an assessment of each child's performance at school entry and sets a series of objectives.

Parents are deeply involved in two ways. First . . . [by] a written agreement that clarifies the obligations of parents, school staff, and students. Second . . . [by] opportunities for parents to interact with the school program and actively assist their children.

Another aspect of the program is an extended day. . . During this period, college students and senior citizen volunteers work with individual students. . . . These broad features make the accelerated school a total institution rather than a graft of compensatory or remedial classes onto conventional elementary schools. (Levin, 1987, pp. 20-21)

Much of the promise for more effective schooling for disadvantaged children seems to lie with such programs as Levin's and Comer's. It is encouraging that many serious efforts are being made to implement these models across the United States today (e.g., see Finnan, St. John, McCarthy, & Slovacek, 1996).

One further important idea for restructuring urban education involves the widespread movement to achieve coordinated, school-linked services for at-risk children. The traditional fragmentation of responsibility among a variety of agencies for the large array of social and health services needed by poor children and their families is increasingly viewed as dysfunctional and unacceptable. Consequently, with substantial support from foundations and reformminded state officials, the coordinated services movement has blossomed. Numerous projects and experiments with coordinated services are in progress across the United States. Usually linked with or centered on schools, these ventures have the potential not only to deliver much more coherent and satisfactory services but also to link the school far more effectively with its supporting community. This effort has come to be seen as part of the restructuring movement, and some advocates have even expected substantial changes in the internal operations of schools to flow from involvement with coordinated services approaches. However, for a variety of reasons related to such matters as "turf issues" and differences in professional cultures and languages among service agencies, research indicates that coordinated service ventures have been difficult to achieve and have rarely had much impact on the actual culture and operation of schools, although they are beneficial for at-risk children and their families (Crowson & Boyd, 1993, 1996). Significantly, sense of community emerges as a key factor in this domain too. Research by White and Wehlage (1995) indicates that the more bureaucratic and less communitarian the coordinated services projects, the less likely they are to succeed.

In closing this section, we want to emphasize again that a major challenge for educators as they strive to meet the social, as well as educational, needs of disadvantaged children is to not allow concern for their students' disadvantaged backgrounds to pull them away from high academic standards and expectations. As a report by the Committee for Economic Development (1994) stresses, the primary mission of schools is learning and academic achievement; social services "may be placed in the schools, they may be delivered through the schools, but they should not be made the responsibility of the schools" (p. 5).