A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Center for Research on the Education of Disadvantaged Students (CDS)

Project #7130: School and Community Connections

Project Description: School and Community Connections is designed to address three areas of needed research: (1) new data on the attitudes, situations, and behaviors that affect school and community connections; (2) analysis and synthesis of existing data on school/community connections; and (3) new evaluations on critical topics for school and community connections for disadvantaged students.

This project has conducted an extensive research review of practices and policies that influence school and community connections, and has produced guidelines and materials to promote community development of effective interventions for disadvantaged children.

Project Director: Nettles , Saundra Murray

Institution: Johns Hopkins University

List of Selected Publications

Statement of Finding(s): Community involvement can be conceptualized as a typology of four processes of social change: conversion, mobilization, allocation of resources, and instruction. Interventions that are community-based or implemented with significant community input, such as multi-cultural education and mentioning, can have positive effects for disadvantaged students on school-related behavior and achievement as well as attitudes and risk-taking behavior, but the implementation of these interventions is problematic.. The concept of resilience has particular applications in the development and implementation of community-related interventions.

Description of Finding(s): Multicultural Education: The implementation of multicultural education into schools will be neither quick nor easy, if it actually occurs at all. Evaluation of the three-year implementation of the Pittsburgh Multicultural Education Demonstration Program (a school-community collaborative project), a major effort to address racial and ethnic diversity in middle school, finds that the seven components of the program were minimally implemented. Surveys of parents, students, and teachers showed that stereotypes remained widely shared by African American and European American groups, the two groups had different perceptions about the quality of relations in the school, there was uncertainly about the commitment of all individuals to the multicultural ideal, and a substantial minority of European American parents had negative reactions to integrated education and the multicultural program.

Resilience: The concept of resilience can be applied to help redefine research on disadvantaged children to address positive factors rather than negative. Disadvantaged children who are succeeding against the odds illustrate the concept of resilience and move education research toward studying the protective mechanisms operating at key turning points in their lives that help them be resilient. The critical issues in education are not who is at risk or how many of the risk factors one has to have to be at risk. Rather, the critical issues for policy and instruction center around identifying the protective processes and mechanisms in schools, families, and communities that reduce risk and foster resilience.

Mentoring: Evaluations of Project RAISE, which used outside adults as school-based advocates and one-on-one mentors for at-risk middle grades students and which operated for two years in seven school sites, found positive effects on improving student attendance and their report card grades in English, but not on math grades, promotion rates, or standardized test scores. The positive effects were not enough to neutralize the students' academic risks -- after two years, the average student in RAISE still had attendance problems, grade performance problems, and retention-in-grade problems. The results indicated that the program's effectiveness could be improved if the students' recruited to the program had less initial disadvantage and one-on-one mentoring were more widely and rigorously applied.

Community involvement: Evaluations of community involvement programs indicate that these programs can consistently affect positive outcomes for attendance, pregnancy status and contraceptive behavior, and persistence in school. The effects range from small to substantial.

Are data from the study available? Yes

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