|
|
|
Spencer Fellows:Andrea
Dyrness My research focuses on the relationship between community organizing and school reform as exemplified in the movement for small schools in Oakland. In the past year, the Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools (BayCES) has undertaken a new venture in community organizing, partnering with Oakland Community Organizations (OCO) for the Small Schools Initiative. This collaboration is based on the recognition that urban school reform, if it is to be effective, must arise from the community and must speak to the issues that the community cares about. BayCES is part of a national school reform network using common principles to inform school change and school design. OCO, an affiliate of the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing (PICO), is a faith-based organization with a long history of political involvement in Oakland. Their partnership is charting new territory in the intersection of school reform and community organizing. I proposed to work with BayCES and OCO to evaluate their work to date, and to study the impact of OCO's organizing on particular communities and on the school reform movement in Oakland. My intent is to study this relationship as a window into larger issues of school reform and community development in urban areas. At a time when scholars and educators are increasingly troubled by the problems plaguing urban schools, and the failure of school reforms to remedy these problems, a focus on community development might be just what is needed to renew and revitalize urban education. Thus, my central research questions are: how might community organizing be a viable force for school reform in low-income urban communities? Conversely, how can school reform be a catalyst for community development in these same communities?
Indigo Esmonde The I Have a Dream/Stiles Hall mentoring project I'm working with a group of about 50 students who have been taking part in the I Have a Dream project for three years now. The I Have a Dream Foundation has been providing the students with many different kinds of support over the past three years, and will continue to work with them for the next 7 years.I have been investigating the mentoring component of the project; each students is paired with a UC Berkeley student as a mentor. They spend at least 3 hours a week together, doing literacy tutoring, homework help, and social activities. After the first two years of the project, the students' scores on the SAT9 test rose dramatically in reading, vocabulary and math. I'm doing some quantitative analysis of the scores, as well as qualitative research. I'm conducting interviews with mentors, students, and staff; I'm visiting the schools and watching kids and mentors interact. The goal is to understand the dramatic test results, and the other ways that the program is affecting the lives of everyone involved. What makes the mentoring program effective? What has changed for the children during their three years in the program?
Joe
Flessa The policy literature on urban education neglects to ask, much less answer, one simple question: in the urban context, where political, economic, and educational opportunity are unequally distributed, does urban school leadership really matter? While there is general agreement and empirical research to support that good schools have good principals, it is much less clear how--or whether at all--principals in fact produce good schools. Policy recommendations assuming that principals change schools (and not the other way around) are common; equally common are reports that chronicle the failure of the overwhelming majority of urban principals to do just that. How can this contradiction, between the faith invested in the principalship and the discouraging results normally achieved, be explained? Why care about principals at all if so few seem able to do anything to improve student achievement in their schools, much less address the pervasive inequality in urban areas? I approach this project from the standpoint that only by examining the expectations of and role played by the site principal in urban districts can we highlight both why too many urban schools continue to languish as well as what realms of possibility exist for making positive change in urban schools. While I contend that the principal is important, the traditional representation of the principal's role--as the one person sufficient to turn around a school--ignores the context of schooling which, in urban districts, means that crucial structural concerns of economic and racial injustice are ignored, to the detriment of urban schools and students. The goal of this project is to shape a research and reform agenda with the collaboration and support of the intellectual/activist community of CUE that bridges the predictable macro/micro (research/practice?) perspectives on urban school leadership that, up to now, have worked in isolation. This project is driven by the conviction that the writing on urban education that neglects site leadership, and the writing on site leadership that neglects the urban piece of urban ed, have failed, and the consequences are obvious regrettable, and unnecessary. What I will produce: 1. Analysis of qualitative data. I will produce an analysis, in the form of a lengthy paper, of the qualitative data on urban school administration that I have collected over the past three semesters. 2. Annotation of bibliography. This annotated list will go beyond the simple research/practice dichotomy to lay a foundation for developing further research projects. 3. Design of a year-long research project. Both of the products above build toward the development of a (dissertation) research plan. What are the key researchable questions that I should focus on?
Amanda
Godley I will use the mentorship offered by CUE to write a scholarly journal article and a paper proposal for the 2001 AERA conference using the database created by my dissertation research. My dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of the practice of gender through literacy learning in an ethnically diverse, urban high school. It examines how gendered practices, assumptions, and beliefs shape the way students read and write in their English class, and how particular reading and writing activities influence students' gendered practices. Using this perspective, my research addresses both issues of gender equity in Language Arts classes and the intersection of gender and ethnic equity issues in urban schools.
Lance McCready Anne
Okahara I am conducting research on parent involvement in an urban high school. Today, "parent involvement" in schools is often cited as having significant promise for improving student academic achievement and for reforming schools. It has achieved such widespread currency and legitimacy that its meaning is taken for granted, and its programmatic implementation and effects are typically not problematized. Parent involvement has been hailed as a promising avenue for promoting academic success for poor and minority students. But, the dominant parent involvement paradigm has backgrounded issues of power, race, class, culture, and immigrant status, leading to the construction of parent involvement concepts and programs that contribute to the privileging of some parents and the marginalization of others. There has been a failure to recognize that family-school relations are socially constructed and historically variable, and that the intersection of families and schools is shaped by social and cultural factors and institutional and structural patterns of interaction. My research contextualizes parent involvement on the political terrain, and seeks to promote the creation of alternate constructs of parent involvement. In my review of existing research related to parents and schools, I have found very little written about parents of color, marginalized parents, or parent involvement at the secondary school level. I am interested in continuing my research on the ways in which parents of students from racially identified minority groups and lower social class backgrounds have become marginalized in a school, differentially excluded from decision making processes in the school, and rendered relatively ineffective as advocates for their children's education. Additionally, I will explore the ways in which these parents engage in a struggle over the distribution of the benefits of education, and in the process, attempt to reposition themselves more centrally in the school. My research can help to reconceptualize the relationship between parents and schools so that these parents will be seen as a vital and necessary resource in any effort to reduce the disparities in student achievement, rather than as a problem or as the source of student failure. Without research that can inform the restructuring of parent involvement practices in urban schools, we can hope to achieve little more than adjust our formulas for "servicing" disenfranchised families. In striving for meaningful parent involvement, we must invent rich visions of democratic schooling and educational justice that begin to deconstruct the zero-sum game model of schooling, and make more real the possibility that in the context of ongoing conflict and struggle, multiple group needs and interests can be met, and a quality education can be acquired by all. Jean
Wing For the past four years, I have served as a GSR on the UC/Berkeley High School Diversity Project-a school-university collaborative aimed at creating conditions to reduce the disparities in achievement that break down along racial and class lines at Berkeley's only public high school. My dissertation research focuses on the impact of an uneven playing field upon the academic pathways and corresponding life chances for students from diverse backgrounds. I will combine qualitative and quantitative research strands of the Diversity Project's Class of 2000 profile to look at the ways that privilege and power interact to reproduce the same kinds of racial inequalities that desegregation sought to dismantle. I am working with a large set of longitudinal data, including school records, an annual survey of the entire Class of 2000, and interview transcripts and field notes for a sample of 35 diverse Class of 2000 students. This Spring, I am completing the collection, transcription, and organization of the data. Over the summer, I will make a first pass through the data. Among other things, I will be looking for indications of commonalities and disparities in students' academic achievement, access to college preparatory curricula, student interactions and relationships with teachers and other school staff; and students' views of the future. |
||||||
