Community Action for School Reform

By Howell S. Baum

Subjects: Social Context Of Education
Paperback : 9780791457603, 312 pages, August 2003
Hardcover : 9780791457597, 312 pages, August 2003

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Table of contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part 1: Introduction

1. School Reform and Educational Improvement: Challenges and Responses
2. Attachment and Knowledge
3. Building the Education Field: Getting Parents, Schools, and Communities Together
4. Baltimore, the Schools, and the Southeast Education Task Force

Part 2: Research as a Way of Getting Started

5. Getting Started, Getting Bearings

Part 3: Participation

6. Creating the Southeast Education Task Force
7. Organizing Networks for Southeast Education: Engaging the School System
8. Organizing Networks for Southeast Education: Connecting with Parents and Community Institutions

Part 4: Action

9. Doing Something
10. Education and the Empowerment Zone: Participation in the Service of Action

Part 5: Research as a Means to Action

11. Acting as a Way of Knowing: Action Research
12. Knowing as a Means to Acting: Research for Action

Part 6: Money

13. Money Matters: The Costs of Participation, Research, and Action

Part 7: Tensions between Attachment and Knowledge

14. Realities and Fantasies in University-Community Partnerships
15. Why Community-School Partnerships Are Unlikely
16. Building Networks in Turbulent Fields: Tension between Attachment and Knowledge

Part 8: Lessons and Conclusions

17. Evaluating the Southeast Education Task Force
18. Can Community Action Reform Schools or Improve Education?

Notes

References

Index

Presents an innovative community approach to educational improvement.

Description

Community Action for School Reform tells the story of a partnership between Baltimore community activists and a university as they created an organization to improve neighborhood schools. The book examines the challenges they faced, such as persuading community members that they had the necessary knowledge to do something about the schools, starting and sustaining an organization, conducting and using research, engaging the school system, and funding their work.

Howell S. Baum is Professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of several books, including most recently, The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning Themselves, also published by SUNY Press.