Perspective on Alan Borsuk Education Column in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/mps-takeovers-abele-means-heading-in-a-different-direction-b99615729z1-348904831.html

Really interesting column on the task force.  What a political hot potato. Of course, the mention of community schools was of paramount interest to me.  

I wonder if MPS even realizes Hopkins Lloyd was reorganized a few years back as the first MPS community school.  Because that school was in the neighborhood where I did my field work and it was ostensibly interested in community engagement, I included it in my study.  I had a tough time getting entree and when I did talk to the principal, I got the impression he did not necessarily have the kind of positive attitude/leadership style needed to embrace the potential energy outside the four walls of the school building. Indeed, the people at Walnut Way told me he was not the most welcoming leader.  

It seemed like the most outward looking person at Hopkins Lloyd was Ruby, the coordinator of the Parent Center.  That place was happening.  She had the attitude of outreach and inclusion essential to building a community school culture.  Maybe she should have been the principal! 

When I looked at the literature on community schools across the country, I found that a principal with a positive attitude about the external community was an essential piece of creating a successful community schools.  A principal who can bridge those two worlds is essential to success, but my research findings indicated those types are really hard to find.  Going confidently outside those four walls is not necessarily part of the traditional leadership training programs. Some of it is tied to leadership style, some is the amount of time it takes to building relationships, some of it is history, and some is the different "language" between inside and outside the four walls. I called it the inside-outside dichotomy.  

One other flaw I continually came across when talking with educators about community involvement in school improvement was their inability to conceptualize community beyond parents (and in a low level easy, the bake sale volunteer-type).  Community in the community school model is much broader in its mobilization of people/organizations and more meaningful in the level of engagement.  

This narrow understanding of community leads me to my last point. While I am fully convinced this is a viable model for school improvement, it is a huge change from the common school tradition that has had a hold on schools since the turn of the century...the 20th century that is!  Too often I hear people use the word "paradigm shift" in a way that would make Thomas Kuhn roll over in his grave. People have a tendency to reduce the significance of the ideas that have created what Kuhn defined as a paradigm.  When  I wrote about community schools,  I saw them as so different from the traditional common school that I concluded only deep seated, in the Kuhnian sense revolutionary, change in the very ideas that have created school behavior would have to occur for them to be successful.  

I hope this task force grasps the depth of change necessary to create a true community school.