Deborah McKoy

Engaging Schools in Urban Revitalization: The Y-PLAN (Youth—Plan, Learn, Act, Now!)

Operating out of the University of California, Berkeley, Y-PLAN (Youth—Plan, Learn, Act, Now!) is a model for youth civic engagement in city planning that uses urban space slated for redevelopment as a catalyst for community revitalization and education reform. The program partners graduate level mentors, high school students, government agencies, private interests, and other community members who work together on a real-world planning problem. This article analyzes the data produced by Y-PLAN between 2000 and 2005 and demonstrates the models effectiveness in fostering positive community outcomes and meaningful learning experiences, as well as its theoretical implications for the planning and education fields. We have identified three central conditions on which the success of the Y-PLAN rests: 1) authentic problems engage diverse stakeholders and foster a “community of practice”; 2) adult and youth partners share decision-making; and 3) projects build sustainable individual and institutional success.

Building schools, rethinking quality? Early lessons from Los Angeles

Purpose – Newly designed schools for centuries have projected fresh ideals regarding how children should learn and how human settlements should be organized. But under what conditions can forward‐looking architects or education reformers trump the institutionalized practices of teachers or the political‐economic constraints found within urban centers? The purpose of this paper is to ask how the designers of newly built schools in Los Angeles – midway into a

Book Review: Community Action for School Reform

27 billion construction initiative – may help to rethink and discernibly lift educational quality. This may be accomplished via three causal pathways that may unfold in new schools: attracting a new mix of students, recruiting stronger teachers, or raising the motivation and performance of existing teachers and students.Design/methodology/approach – We track basic indicators of student movement and school quality over a five‐year period (2002‐2007) to understand whether gains do stem from new school construction. Qualitative field work and interviews ...

Opportunity-Rich Schools and Sustainable Communities: Seven Steps to Align High-Quality Education with Innovations in City and Metropolitan Planning and Development

This may not be the kind of therapy that Sandercock mentions, but it provides poetic punch for planners lacking sympathy for the creative powers of individual people lost in the abstractions of citizen participation. Joe Barthel works as a private investigator helping trial lawyers defend death penalty and civil rights defendants. He investigates a defendant’s family and community life, preparing a story for courtroom presentation. He starts the chapter telling his own conversion tale, how he learned that stories have the power to move and how he wanted to use this power to tell the stories of people unfairly constrained by the stories others impose. His brief stories offer tantalizing yet compelling evidence that a well-told story offers urbane solidarity in a fragmented metropolis.