Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.<ATTRIB>—John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Holt, 1927)</ATTRIB>
In many urban communities, John Dewey's concept of the neighborly community is more an ideal than a reality. In our city, Philadelphia, the poverty rate hovers above 25 percent, and the unemployment rate hit 11.6 percent in October 2010 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). The community's struggles affect the life prospects of its children well before they enter school. In neighborhoods in West Philadelphia not far from the University of Pennsylvania, there are infant mortality rates of approximately 20 per 1,000, compared with 0–8 per 1,000 in adjacent, wealthier sections of the city (Health of Philadelphia Photo-Documentation Project, n.d.). Only about 55 percent of the students who enter 9th grade in Philadelphia public schools graduate four years later (Green, 2001).
Yet urban communities like Philadelphia harbor rich resources that they can mobilize to make a profound difference in the lives of young people. Urban universities and colleges, in particular, are well positioned to play a role in responding to the challenges facing our cities (Harkavy & Zuckerman, 1999). More than one-half of all institutions of higher education are located within or just outside urban areas (Initiative for a Competitive Inner City & CEOs for Cities, 2002). As rooted, place-based institutions, colleges and universities provide stability to a city.
How can we effectively marshal the enormous resources of these institutions to improve the quality of life and learning in urban K–12 schools and their communities? One powerful strategy is university-assisted community schools.
Partner 1: The University
The idea that universities should be intimately connected to their communities has deep historic roots. In a pamphlet that led up to his founding of the University of Pennsylvania in 1749, Benjamin Franklin articulated a vision of an institution predicated not on classical education for the elite, but on a modern education for all able students to develop an "Inclination join'd with an Ability to serve Mankind, one's Country, Friends and Family."
Franklin's idea of higher education for service was echoed in the land grant movement in the 19th century, which expanded the public university system and directly tied its work to the betterment of society. This idea also animated the development of the modern research university, most notably when William Rainey Harper (1905), the first president of the University of Chicago, argued that the university was the "prophetic interpreter of democracy," and that communities, schools, and universities should be inextricably linked (p. 20).
In the past two decades, a renaissance in college and university engagement has occurred (Hartley & Hollander, 2005). More and more, institutions of higher education are coming to view deep engagement with the community not merely as laudable, but as a superior way to fulfill their mission of teaching, research, learning, and service (Boyer, 1994). From the early 1990s on, hundreds of universities have established offices or centers aimed at encouraging partnerships with the community, and hundreds of thousands of college students have participated in various community-based activities.
This work now faces a major challenge: how to move beyond limited (and at times palliative) community involvement toward the establishment of deep, lasting, democratic, reciprocal university-community partnerships that address significant real-world problems.
Partner 2: The Community School
Community schools are also an old idea in the United States. Long before schools looked the way they do today, the community school idea was prevalent in the settlements of colonial America; it continued after the American Revolution in the farming communities and towns of the fledgling nation. The current resurgence of community-centered schooling draws on these historical roots.
As each generation of communities has struggled anew with the social problems that affect their children and youth, educators have struggled with what role makes most sense for schools. Today's community schools recognize that students' academic success depends in large part on factors beyond the school walls. They respond in a range of pragmatic ways, all with a common purpose: providing and integrating the necessary additional supports and services to enable all students to reach their highest potential (Benson, Harkavy, Johanek, & Puckett, 2009).
Probably the most influential leader to envision a central coordinating role for the public school was John Dewey, whose ideas about education and democracy were directly influenced by Jane Addams and her settlement house model of working within the community to address social needs. In an address that sparked the school-based social center movement and that still influences debates about schooling, Dewey (1902/1976) drew on Addams's theories of education and democracy:
The conception of the school as a social centre is born of our entire democratic movement. Everywhere we see signs of the growing recognition that the community owes to each one of its members the fullest opportunity for development. (pp. 92–93)
In the last two decades, momentum has built on several fronts toward a more expansive and sustainable version of community schools. The community schools movement draws on Dewey's idea that because public schools belong to all members of the community, they should serve all members of the community.
Beginning in the late 1980s and expanding in the 1990s, schools and communities developed new, integrative approaches that make wider use of school buildings and extend school programs to meet the needs of young people, families, and the broader community (Coalition for Community Schools, 2000; Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Typically, community schools work with a coordinator to ensure that all students have health, dental, and mental-health services. Participants in the effort include community activists; businesspeople; professionals (social workers, nurses, physicians, and so on); and college students and faculty.
Public schools are particularly well suited to function as neighborhood centers, or hubs, around which to generate local partnerships. When they play that innovative role, schools function as community institutions par excellence, providing a decentralized, democratic, community-based response to rapidly changing community problems (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007).
Bringing the Two Partners Together
For the last 15 years, we at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) have been working to develop democratic, respectful, mutually beneficial partnerships with our neighboring West Philadelphia schools and communities. The Netter Center for Community Partnerships, working with Penn faculty, pursues this goal through the development of university-assisted community schools.
The university-assisted community school model extends and updates John Dewey's theory that to function as a genuine community center, the neighborhood school requires additional human resources and support. Universities constitute a strategic source of the broad-based, comprehensive, sustained support that community schools need (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007).
Penn's university-assisted community schools help educate, engage, empower, and serve all members of the community. A broad range of university resources support these schools, including site-based coordinators who are on the staff of the Netter Center. In 2009–10, approximately 2,000 Penn students worked in eight West Philadelphia community schools—445 student interns, work-study students, and student volunteers, plus 1,575 undergraduate and graduate university students who took academically based community service courses that link service in the community to teaching, learning, and research. Some of the academic supports the Netter Center provides include
- Academic enrichment programs, including programs in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Penn undergraduate students—supervised by two professional STEM educators— and Penn students enrolled in one of our 12 STEM-based community service courses, provide hands-on and inquiry-based learning in the classroom. These programs fill a pressing need in West Philadelphia schools, where learning is predominately from the textbook and science labs are mostly nonexistent.
- A range of after-school activities that provide homework help and tutoring, as well as recreation and arts instruction.
- Youth development programs that engage students as community problem solvers in such areas as health and nutrition.
- College access and career development programs. For example, more than 125 high school students are offered paid internships on the university campus, in Penn's hospitals, and in local businesses.
- Six weeks of summer programming for more than 600 K–12 students.
The university partnership also seeks to meet the needs of students' families. Netter Center staff members hold monthly parent meetings at school sites to share information about students' progress and provide guest speakers on such topics as parenting skills and homework. School site coordinators support various other school efforts to engage parents; for example, a recently opened parent resource center at one high school offers a variety of programs in such areas as health and fitness, financial literacy, healthy cooking, and community service.
A particularly compelling example of a university-assisted community school program is the health center located in Sayre High School. The health center is a separate nonprofit whose governing board is composed of at least 51 percent community members. It is staffed by doctors from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and supported by faculty and students from Penn's schools of Nursing and Dental Medicine, who work at the center as part of their professional training.
The Netter Center's Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative brings additional services to the health center at Sayre, such as healthy cooking classes for students and their families. This initiative operates a number of programs, including
- Conducting nutrition education classes for K–12 students. These classes incorporate many hands-on components; for example, university students who are enrolled in nutrition-related courses work with public school students to explore and address nutrition-related issues in the community.
- Organizing K–12 students to improve lunchroom choices, operate after-school fruit stands, and encourage neighborhood grocery stores to create convenient healthy food stations and to operate community farmers' markets.
- Working with physical education teachers and school coordinators to improve exercise opportunities during class; offering family-oriented exercise classes in the evening.
National Expansion
With grants from the Wallace Foundation, the Corporation for National Community Service's Learn and Serve America program, and the Mott Foundation, Penn's Netter Center has provided funding for 23 university–community school partnerships and training for more than 75 such partnerships. Here we highlight just three of the many universities that are powerfully contributing to this movement.
The University of Dayton, Ohio, is a key partner in the Dayton Neighborhood School Centers (www.udayton.edu/artssciences/fitzcenter/community_progs/neighborhood_school_centers.php). After the end of court-ordered busing in 2002, five neighborhoods and their elementary schools and local leaders, coordinated by the University of Dayton, began building sustainable partnerships. The five Neighborhood School Centers, with a local nonprofit as their lead agency, offer a diverse range of programming, all emphasizing developing the assets of youth and the community.
The University at Buffalo, New York, through its Center for Urban Studies (www.centerforurbanstudies.com), is advancing school and community development through a range of partnerships focused on neighborhoods in Buffalo's East Side. The Futures Academy is the site for the center's "Community as Classroom" initiative, in which students study their neighborhood's history and work on projects to improve it. For example, Futures Academy students, university students, and area residents transformed a vacant, derelict lot near the school into the Futures Garden, a community garden and art park (Harkavy & Hartley, 2009).
University of Oklahoma–Tulsa Community Engagement Center (http://tulsa.ou.edu/oucec/index.htm) was part of the original team supporting the creation of community schools in the Tulsa area and continues to participate on the management team of the Tulsa Area Community Schools Initiative. The Initiative, started in 2008, has developed a network of community elementary schools in the Tulsa and Union school districts. These schools provide a range of support services to students and their families, such as the school-based health clinics operated by the University of Oklahoma–Tulsa. The university also works with parents, developing their leadership skills so they can reimagine their schools and communities and take active roles within the schools.
The University of Oklahoma–Tulsa Community Engagement Center has now collaborated with Penn's Netter Center to establish a regional training center for the southwest United States. This center organizes workshops and conferences throughout the year to support education professionals interested in developing university-assisted community schools. The Netter Center expects to fund new regional training centers elsewhere in the United States every three years beginning in fall 2011.
A Movement with Great Potential
The university-assisted community schools now being developed in West Philadelphia and around the United States have a long way to go before they can effectively mobilize the untapped resources of their communities. Nonetheless, the initiatives described here indicate a growing movement, one that is producing significant change as it works to realize the democratic promise of the United States for all of its children and families.
