Claire Smrekar

Schooling Closer to Home: Desegregation Policy and Neighborhood Contexts

This article uses census data, information collected by health and police departments, and GIS mapping software to analyze the neighborhood contexts surrounding schools in one Southern school district. When courts lifted Nashville’s desegregation order in 1999, the district agreed to implement a new student assignment plan geared toward neighborhood attendance and shorter bus rides—in short, schooling closer to home. The return to neighborhood schools is embedded in widespread assumptions about the power of the neighborhood as a potential source of school improvement and school quality. Neighborhood schools are expected to boost community attachment to schools, encourage resource sharing, and increase parent involvement and social capital. This article explores the implications of schooling closer to home by analyzing neighborhood contexts. What does “closer to home” mean and for whom? Our results suggest that geographic proximity does not necessarily translate into structurally supportive community contexts for children, and black children are much more likely to be reassigned to schools in high‐risk neighborhoods as crosstown busing is eliminated.

The Influence of Local Conditions on Social Service Partnerships, Parent Involvement, and Community Engagement in Neighborhood Schools.

By using Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping software to combine health and crime data with data from 20 schools in one Southeastern district, the study explores whether and how neighborhood conditions affect school-community arrangements. Findings show that the nature of the relationships and the strategies principals and teachers use to partner with social service organizations, encourage parental involvement, and engage with the community, in particular, are influenced by the conditions of the neighborhood in which schools sit. The implications for theory development, policy, and practice are discussed as are ideas for future research.

The Missing Link in School-Linked Social Service Programs

States and local communities have responded to the urgent demand for better coordinated services by creating organizational linkages across schools and human service agencies. In the rush to promote schools as the linchpin for this policy proposal, however, critical issues related to the nature of interactions between families and schools have been mostly ignored by policy-makers and educators. This study of the Kentucky Family Resource Centers explores the effect of family-school interactions on school-linked service programs. The findings suggest the need to connect the dialogue on integrated services to the impulses of reform in school-family-community networks.

Magnet Schools: Reform and Race in Urban Education.

magnet gained popularity in the 1970s when policymakers were designing desegregation plans in an effort to make them more attractive to parents, educators, and students. Magnet schools were established to promote racial diversity, improve scholastic standards, and provide a range of programs to satisfy individual talents and interests. Since 1975, when federal courts accepted magnet schools as a method of desegregation in Morgan v. Kerrigan (421 US 963), their number has increased dramatically. By the 1991-92 school year, more than 1.2 million students were enrolled in magnet schools in 230 school districts (Yu and Taylor 1997). During the 1999-2000 school year there were more than 1,372 magnet schools across the United States. Magnet schools are typically established in urban school districts with enrollments of more than 10,000. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 53 percent of large urban districts include magnet school programs as part of their desegregation plans, as compared with only 10 percent of suburban districts. For example, in the City of Chicago Public School District, 45 percent of all public schools are magnets, serving 48 percent of the student population (NCES 2001). Over half of all magnet programs are located in low socioeconomic districts (Levine 1997). Although they can involve all grade levels, more than half of the nations magnet programs serve elementary school students; onl 20 percent of magnets are at the high school level (Yu and Taylor 1997; Levine 1997). The most common type of magnet school is one that emphasizes a particular subject matter, such as math and science, computers and technology, or a foreign language. Other programs offer a unique instructional approach, such as Montessori or Paideia. Magnet school programs are extremely popular, as measured by the fact that in over 75 percent of all districts with magnets the demand for student slots is greater than the supply; half of these districts maintain long waiting lists (Blank, Levine, and Steel 1996). Most districts must manage the admissions process by using a lottery; others rely on a first-come, first-served arrangement. Only about one-third of all magnet programs use a selective admissions policy, usually involving either a minimum test score requirement, or in a performing arts magnet, an audition. In many instances, districts have supported magnet schools with a considerable investment of resources. On average, expenditures per student are 10 percent higher in districts with magnets; almost three-fourths of magnet programs have additional staffing allowances as well. Some magnet programs are funded through state desegregation funds. Most are funded by three-year grants through the federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP), which began awarding grants in 1985. These funds are made available to districts that are either implementing magnet programs voluntarily or that are acting under court desegregation orders. The MSAP serves a critical role in magnet school

From Curricular Alignment to the Culminating Project: The Peabody College Ed.D. Capstone

The Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations (LPO) at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, recently replaced the conventional Ed.D. dissertation with a team-produced, client-consultant oriented, culminating report. This article describes the purpose and principles associated with the “capstone” project and describes the “fit” between the curriculum and the capstone experience. The chapter also describes the “lessons learned” from the initial cohort of doctoral students and clients who collaborated in the pilot year of capstone projects.

The Desegregation Aims and Demographic Contexts of Magnet Schools: How Parents Choose and Why Siting Policies Matter

This paper is designed to specify a set of new opportunities for educators, school administrators, and scholars to realize the practical aims and strategic advantages envisioned in magnet schools. The paper is divided into three distinct sections. In Section I, we examine the extensive research literature on parents’ choice patterns and school preferences in magnet schools and other school-choice programs. In Section II, we compare the reasons parents choose particular schools with the criteria school districts use to select magnet school locations (and themes). This section highlights desegregation goals and district-level magnet school policies pegged to the following questions: What is the policy context for siting decisions in districts with magnet schools? Are siting policies strategically aligned with what is known from the research literature about parents’ school preferences? Do neighborhood characteristics play a part in magnet school siting policies and specific decision-making? In Section III, we use geographic information system (GIS) tools to add both clarity and complexity to the convergence of parent choice patterns and sociodemographic diversity in our four selected school districts. The maps depict the racial and socioeconomic characteristics of the magnet schools in each district, as well as the demographic characteristics of surrounding census tracts (extended school neighborhoods). We conclude that GIS can be a viable option for improving the citing decisions for magnet schools, and that this can allow for the merging of parent choice priorities with educational equity and diversity goals of the district.

HOPE VI Neighborhoods and Neighborhood Schools: Understanding How Revitalized Neighborhoods Influence School Environments

This article poses the central question, How do neighborhoods (specifically, different public housing designs) shape parents’ social interactions and social networks? To answer this question, we interviewed families residing in a HOPE VI neighborhood and an adjacent Section 8 apartment complex, all of whom had at least one child attending the close-by neighborhood school (Crawford Elementary School, a pseudonym). We then compared the results of the HOPE VI neighborhood study against the interviews conducted with the school families in the adjacent Section 8 apartment complex. Findings suggest that the community structures of the HOPE VI neighborhood foster positive social interactions and the formation of social networks among residents, which was not the case with respect to the neighborhood structures of the non–HOPE VI community. Parents in both communities were usually busy with work and children and other concerns, but non–HOPE VI parents responded to these pressures by keeping to themselves, whereas HOPE VI residents evinced a greater openness to engaging with neighbors—neighbors who have some of the same goals for the future (e.g., homeownership, maintaining steady employment) and who share an ongoing positive residential experience.

Localism Rediscovered: Toward New Political Understandings in School District Governance

Our nation continues to struggle mightily with efforts to reform and to improve the public schools. The improvement efforts to date have been extraordinarily diverse—and there have been some major consequences over the years, particularly in the domains of curricular reform, teaching, and administration. Federal pressures toward reform have been quite strong under a succession of presidents, and these pressures continue despite a current falloff in legislative action and rather stagnant funding of late. State-level initiatives in education have increased in recent years, but with much less than full consensus nationwide vis-à-vis direction(s) to take in state agenda setting. Controversies abound over matters of: choice (charters? vouchers?); core curricula and statewide testing; teacher assessment and retention; the improvement of teacher-training programs; the remediation of failing schools; early childhood education; a diminished racial and socioeconomic diversity from school to school, promoting school completion toward college access; and revising state financing/funding formulas. Interestingly, although much of our national attention in educational reform has been upon national and state agendas, local (districtand community-level) action in educational policy has also been experiencing a revival. To a growing extent, there is a “new localism” currently underway in educational governance—reflected in a variety of contemporary movements, debates, coalition-building, and even some small “uprisings.” The uprisings have included instances of parental pushback against standardized testing and the core curriculum, an occasional “triggering” of a parental takeover (or threats thereof) in lowperforming schools, a decided increase in the number of candidates vying for positions on local school boards, and a notable upswing in the exercise of parental choice (representing many types and styles—e.g., charters, vouchers, magnets, residential location decisions, even “opportunity hoarding”). Emerging local agendas have also included a widely varying range of grassroots activities both in response to and in the implementation of state and federal mandates (e.g., everything from changes in school lunches to added test-mindedness, curricular emphases, and behavior controls). Furthermore, there has also been a substantially increased frequency of districtand