Strengthening Families, Communities, and Schools to Support Children's Development

Neighborhoods of Promise

Edmund W. Gordon, Betina Jean-Louis, Nkechi Obiora

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351666251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on a range of contexts influenced by the Promise Neighborhoods Program—a federal place-based initiative to improve educational outcomes for students in distressed urban and rural neighborhoods—this book outlines effective characteristics and elements for implementing supplementary education. Chapter authors demonstrate that the disparities in educational achievement between white and non-white students can only be addressed by a holistic approach that takes the communities in which schools are situated as its focal point. This edited collection distills the insights gained from the communities implementing such comprehensive education programs and provides the framework and models for reproducing such successes.

Part I

1
Comprehensive Education and Family Resource Centers for the 21st Century

Edmund W. Gordon and Andrew C. Shurtleff

Introduction

There is no doubt that much has been has done in the effort to reform schools and reduce the achievement gap between the classes. From “Head Start” to “No Child Left Behind,” the government has made calculable efforts to improve the lot of children in education. However, this has not led to the desired result needed, and so much still has to be done in order to not only make education equitable, but to stop America’s decline in education in the ranks of the developed world. If we agree that efforts have been made towards improving education, what, then, is missing? Extant research has proven that focusing exclusively on schools is inadequate for meeting the complex and myriad factors that impinge on young people today, especially those growing up in impoverished environments. Poverty, both financial and cultural, constricts the opportunities for developing necessary infrastructures that extend beyond schools.

In order to address these concerns, it is asserted that education take a multi-leveled, multi-purpose, and integrative approach that extends beyond the physical locales of schools. Indeed, if one is to make any headway against the pressures and limitations intervening in the road toward personal well-being and academic success, one ought to assume a comprehensive and multi-faceted orientation. With the previous administration’s introduction of the Promise Neighborhoods approach, we here consider the elements of comprehensive education that have proven to be the missing component in the myriad of efforts being made to achieve equity in education. That our hope for reducing the achievement gap be not illusory and our efforts in stopping the decline of quality education in our schools be achieved, we insist that this continuing policy widen its scope to influence different variations of complementary education so long as they show proof of enhancing academic achievement. Thus, what follows considers the value of comprehensive education as a method for empowering students, parents, teachers, and community members. While we consider such approaches where research and models that incarnate this vision are discussed, our overarching aim is to provide insight into how best to meet the needs of schools and communities most in need of attention and support.

Background and Context

Comprehensive (or supplementary) education (Gordon, 1999) is defined as the formal and informal learning and developmental enrichment opportunities provided for students outside of school and beyond the regular school day or year. Some of these activities may occur inside the school building but are beyond those included in the formal curriculum of the school. After-school care, perhaps the most widespread form of supplementary education, includes the special efforts that parents exert in support of the intellective and personal development of their children (Gordon, 1999). These efforts may range from provisions for good health and nutrition to extensive travel. They may also entail the mediated exposure to selected aspects of both indigenous and hegemonic cultures.

Informed parents, scholars, and educators have known for some time now that schools alone cannot enable or ensure high academic achievement (Coleman et al., 1966; Bridglall & Gordon, 2001; Wilkerson, 1979). James Comer asserts this position more forcefully in Waiting for a Miracle: Why Our Schools Cannot Solve Our Problems and How We Can (1997). Colloquial knowledge among many parents “in the know” reflect awareness that there are a number of things that occur outside of school that appear to support academic success. Examples can be found in the many education-related opportunities that affluent and academically sophisticated parents make available to their children. These include travel, dance, book clubs, music lessons, scouting, tutoring, and summer camp, among numerous others.

It is reasonable to assume that the most academically successful populations (primarily European Americans and Asian Americans with mid- to high socioeconomic status [SES] backgrounds) tend to have combinations of strong home and school resources to support their academic development. The least successful groups (African American, Latina/o American, Native American, and the poor) have, on average, a much weaker combination of home and school resources (Birch & Gussow, 1970; Gordon & Meroe, 1999; the National Task Force on Minority High Academic Achievement, 1999). Without demeaning the importance of adequate and appropriate school resources, comprehensive education and family resource centers place emphasis on those educative experiences and resources that are accessed through the families and communities from which students come.

In 1966, James Coleman concluded that differences in the family backgrounds of students, as opposed to school characteristics, accounted for the greatest amount of variance in their academic achievement. While this finding was later found to be less valid for low-income and ethnic minority children than for the general population (Gordon, 1999), typically, family background and income stand as strong predictors of achievement in school (Jaynes & Williams, 1989; Gordon & Meroe, 1999; Sexton, 1961). In related works, Mercer (1973) and Wolf (1966) posited that it is the presence of family environmental supports for academic development that may explain this association between family status and student achievement. They made the now obvious point that reading books, positive academic role models, help with homework, and a quiet place to study in the home are associated with school achievement.

When examined in context, the idea of comprehensive education is based on the premise that beyond exposure to the school’s formal academic curriculum, high academic achievement is closely associated with exposure to family and community-based activities and learning experiences in support of academic development that occur outside of school. For low-SES and non-Asian students of color, these opportunities are generally underutilized. In the home environment, for example, high-achieving students benefit from literate adults, home computers, books, magazines, journals, and the academic assistance and encouragement of older siblings and/or parents. In terms of community resources, the combination of local library privileges, mentoring and tutoring programs, peer-based study groups, Saturday and/or after-school academies, and mediated participation in various folk and “high” cultural events and faith-based activities influence the development of proactive and engaged dispositions conducive toward academic learning.

Many activities, considered routine in the settings in which they occur are nonetheless thought to be implicitly and deliberately engaged in to ensure adequate intellective and academic development of young people. These routines include reading to and with one’s children; dinner conversation and inclusion in other family discussions of important issues; exposure to adult models of behaviors supportive of academic learning; active use of the library, museums, and community and religious centers as sources of information; help seeking from appropriate sources; and investments in references or other educational materials (Gordon, 1999).

In a related but different domain are efforts directed at influencing children’s choice of friends and peers; guiding and controlling use of their spare time; and guiding or limiting their time spent watching television and being influenced by other media. Here, we find a wide range of deliberate and incidental activities that serve to supplement the more formal and systematically structured learning experiences provided through schooling. These more intentional child development practices are no doubt dually responsive to the folk knowledge of academically sophisticated families and the empirically derived knowledge of experts in child development and education (Gordon, 1999).

In general, high degrees of congruency between the values promulgated at school, at home, and in a student’s immediate community are associated with high academic achievement. What may be equally critical are students’ perceptions that what happens at school matters and is consistent with what parents and other family members consider important (Wilkerson, 1979). This is conveyed through expectations, physical provisions for academic pursuits, attitudes toward intellectual activity, and models that are available for children to emulate. Participation in supplementary education activities thus contributes to the development of a sense of membership in the described High Performance Learning Communities (see Chapter 12) and shared values for the importance of academic achievement for personal fulfillment, community development, and social and political upward mobility (Gordon, 1999).

Thinking Comprehensively and Relationally About Education

The term “comprehensive” as a qualifier for education requires that we think of education as inclusive of conditions necessary for effective teaching and learning. Such contexts should also include opportunities to learn and engage in the life processes by which learners encounter the experiences that are the grounds of the development of intellect. Despite the ubiquity of these conditions, opportunities, and processes in life, some institutions carry special responsibility for their delivery (e.g., family and school). Thus, effective comprehensive education is generally associated with the appropriate orchestration of these ubiquitous and redundant experiences.

In Lawrence Cremin’s (1975/2007) friendly critique of his mentor, John Dewey (1916), Cremin argued that Dewey’s conception of education had created an unnecessary dualism—schooling and the other educative institutions of the society. Cremin thought the duality was inappropriate in that he considered education as a single enterprise that should be thought of “comprehensively, relationally and publicly.” The recent growth in the After-School, Supplementary/Complementary/Comprehensive Education and the Out-of-School Learning movements appear to be repeating that dualism. This is generally true, except in the Community Schools (Dryfoos et al., 2005) movement, where school becomes the umbrella for all of the resources that need to be coordinated and directed toward the education of young learners.

Thinking comprehensively with respect to education, then, must include concern for all of the opportunities in life to learn and to teach; for the ways in which they complement each other; and for the appropriate orchestration of these opportunities to learn wherever they may occur. In the context advanced by McLaughlin (2008), Rebell (2008), Weiss (2005), and Varenne (2007) and Gordon, emphasis is given to family/home, school and community, though comprehensive education is not co-terminus with these institutions. It also occurs in peer and inter-generational relationships. It is ubiquitous to one’s personal and public efforts at making sense of the world. It is a function of commercial enterprise, gang life, political participation, fun-seeking, and problem solving. It happens in the solitary practice of shooting baskets on the basketball court, as one of the principal author’s students cautions that we are ignoring the learning involved in epistemic games (Yowell, 1996).

When Tiedemann (1963) distinguished between “other people’s data and one’s personal data” as competing concerns of school learners, he was referring to the tension between concentration on the mastery of the academic content of schooling and the pressing learning demands of peer relations, dating, pursuit of reputation, athletic and social competition, and the adjudication of the relationships in family as well as community politics. Schooling privileges teaching and learning related to the demands of academic knowledge and process mastery, which often competes with the learning and teaching related to learning to live and survive. Thinking comprehensively about education requires that we privilege both and the ways in which the two are conjoined and dialectically related. If we follow Cremin, logic requires that these processes be thought of as a whole and that they be thought of publicly (i.e. as in the public domain and as part of the public responsibility for education). In some contexts, it is useful to examine the implications of thinking about education comprehensively as posing yet another challenge and opportunity for the pursuit of Educational Equity. Likewise, we view it as a necessary component of the effort.

Family as Educator

The family and the home are both critical education institutions where children begin learning long before they start school and where they spend much of their time after they start school. So it stands to reason that improving a child’s home environment to make it more conducive to learning is critical (Barton & Coley, 2007). Indeed, children tend to perform better in school when there are supports for academic and personal development in their homes and communities, Mercer (1973) and Wolf (1966). Among these supports are: a quiet place to read, study, and do academic work; adequate and protected time for such work; books and other reading and study materials; adults, older siblings, or peers who read to and who read with children, talk with them, and engage them in relevant decision making; persons who expect them to put forth effort, to succeed, and who reward them for it; adequate health maintenance and good nutrition; and consistency and stability in relationships and resources (Gordon & Vergara, 2008).

Parents, caregivers, and other interested adults are responsible for providing children with the access to a well-orchestrated, motivating, and engaging learning environment in which students find consistency in the opportunities to learn. Family involvement in the learning process, however, must be a shared and meaningful responsibility. Both outside families and larger social structures play active roles in building and sustaining a family’s support for their children’s learning. Indeed, society is responsible for making the political, financial, and social investments that can promote a family’s capacities and opportunities to support their children’s learning and development. On the one hand, a family with ample access to Bourdieu’s (1986) forms of education relevant capital tends to provide these supports for the education of their children (see section “A Model from Public Health for Comprehensive Education” below). On the other hand, disadvantaged and marginalized families tend to need help in understanding the need for such support and are limited in their capacity to make such provisions, even when they are knowledgeable. Thus, family resource centers that provide such assistance and guidance to these families will better enable them to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART I
• PART II
• Afterword: Recontextualizing the Achievement Gap Through Neighborhoods of Promise
• Index