Community Organizing and School Transformation

Abstract

Across the country, community organizing has emerged as a strategy for engaging low-incoming communities and communities of color in school transformation. There is increasing recognition that this approach can be used to develop relationships, leadership, and political power to support systemic and long-lasting educational change.

Oakland has a rich history of community-driven school reform. In the early 2000s, the mobilization of thousands of families across the city led to the passage of a new small autonomous school policy and the creation of over 30 new district schools through community-based design teams. However, since 2007, no new district schools have been authorized. Like many other urban districts, the charter sector has expanded, enrollment has declined, and the school district has turned to closing and consolidating schools, rather than opening new ones.

This strategic leadership project sought to combine community organizing and design thinking frameworks to develop institutional and community support for a new dual language middle school as part of a PK-12 multilingual pathway of schools in the Oakland Unified School District. Throughout the capstone, I use Mark Moore’s strategic triangle framework (public value, operational capacity, and institutional support) to organize my research and analysis of this strategic project. I describe my leadership of the design team and some of the complexities that arose in our authorizing environment when we attempted to develop the new school through an existing district transformation process.

The analysis includes implications for both new school design and school transformation work, and includes recommendations for how Oakland and other districts can more effectively facilitate communities to take leadership in school transformation.