January/February 1999

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites a number of educators, researchers, community activists, and policymakers to talk about timely topics in education. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these talks. This is a new endeavor and we would like to have your feedback. Let us know if you enjoyed reading this and if it's an effective way to present a live event. Please email your suggestions to hepg@harvard.edu. Also, you may respond to this conversation if you like as we will post readers' comments periodically. If you have a question for any of our speakers, we will try to get it answered for you. Welcome--and Enjoy!

Talking Through the Tough Issues of Family-School and Community Relationships

For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Presentation by Joyce Epstein
• Presentation by Ernie Cortes
• Discussion among Speakers
• Questions from the audience
• Final Words
• About the Speakers
• Other Resources
• HGSE Forums Home Page
• Transcripts of Past HGSE Forums

You can also scroll right through the transcript without clicking on above links.

Below is an edited transcript of a forum that took place at HGSE on November 12, 1998. The speakers are two of the country's leading experts in the field of family-school and community involvement, who work actively with family, schools and communities on issues related to family-school community partnerships: Ernesto Cortes, Jr., southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation ([IAF], and Joyce Epstein, a leading national researcher and activist around parent involvement. The conversation was moderated by Heather Weiss, director of the Harvard Family Research Project.

HEATHER WEISS: The way we've organized this event is to have each of our guests do about a 10-minute presentation and then they'll respond to several questions. We hope to address the following questions: Is family involvement a priority for parents? Why or why not? Is it a priority for schools? Why or why not? To what extent is family and community involvement a vehicle for change in public education? What can family-community involvement efforts realistically accomplish?

JOYCE EPSTEIN: I would like to share with you the work we do at the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University. We conduct research, development, policy analyses, and then work in practice with schools, districts, and states across the country, to assist them in developing comprehensive programs of school, family, and community partnership. What that means to me, is that every school, every elementary, middle, and high school, every preschool as well, has a program that enables families to know what is happening for and with their children, involves them, informs them, gains input from them, and works with families and communities in partnership on behalf of children.

I'd like to paint a picture of how I would like to see work on partnerships develop across the next decade or so. I'd like to address the way that states, districts, school leaders, administrators, teachers, and communities, understand and implement what you may call parent involvement, but that we prefer to call school, family, and community partnerships.

When people have referred to "parent involvement" in the past, they have put the burden of involvement on the parents' shoulders. If they became involved, it was a good thing; if they did not become involved, well, those parents were either negatively labeled, criticized, or ignored.

Parents shouldn't shoulder burden

Our view of school-family and community partnerships is that schools have responsibilities, families have responsibilities, and communities have responsibilities to learn how to work together, so that we can do better for all children. We are not talking about a few parents who get involved, or an elite group of parents who get involved; we're talking about ways that we can help all parents get involved in their schools, in their children's education.

This means that we need programs in each school that are planned, that are purposeful, that are permanent, so that we think of school-family and community partnerships in the same way that we think about reading, math, writing, history, testing, sports, or other programs that you know are part of school life. Right now, we know that there's a lot of inevitable change in education. Principals change, superintendents change, teachers move on, parents move along with their children, and by the time we turn around, it's a new school year. Yet, when we open those school doors in September, there will be reading, math, writing, history, and whatever testing program is required by the state, whether people like it or not. It will be there in the fall, when the doors open. Parents can expect it.

But up until now, it really has been the case that school-family and community partnerships, or any involvement of parents, has been a matter of luck and accident. Parents even talk about it in terms of luck. They will say, "Gee, I'm so lucky this year, the teacher keeps me so well informed. The school is so welcoming. You should have seen this place last year."

We know that if it is not a matter of luck, if it is a matter of purpose, if it's a matter of commitment, then programs of partnership can be developed that actually help schools reach school goals---that tap the resources of families and communities. That engage them in important discussions and interactions, in ways that will help schools and help youngsters reach important school goals. It is that kind of permanence that we seek as we try to assist schools districts and states with this work.

Many years of research have helped us to understand, "What do partnerships look like across the grades, in different school levels, and in different communities?" We recently put together the knowledge gained in a framework of six types of involvement, to help schools consider "How does our program of partnership look? Where do we have weaknesses? What do we need to think about to make a good program of partnerships?" What that really led us to is a theory-based approach, a research-based approach that can be tailored to each school site, to each district, and in each state.

In 1995 we initiated what we call the National Network of Partnership Schools. The network is now three years old. Instead of just talking about what we have found in research, we've tried to translate it into action-based practice. And instead of just having an audience say, "Well, gee, that's sort of interesting. Where do we read more about it?" we now can say, "If you join the network, we will follow your work. We will learn from the sites. We will learn from practitioners and policy leaders in order to better understand the best practices, the best and most effective, efficient, thrifty, and useful practices of partnership."

What are we learning?

There are about a thousand schools, a hundred school districts, and nine states involved in the network. The schools and districts are located in thirty states. We're learning, first, that there is no such thing as a State Department of Education in the United States. Every single one really is very different. But the policy context does not seem to change the policy statements. At first there is the rhetoric about partnerships, of how they are important, and how we must do them. And, yet, at all of these levels, school districts and states, we find that people don't know what to do to translate policy into action; to be inclusive of parents who may not speak English, or speak it or read it well; to include families across the grades, and not just in the youngest years; to think about fathers and not just mothers in family involvement; to think of grandparents and community resources in terms of what a program of good partnerships looks likes to help youngsters succeed in ways that will help them through the grades, and into high school or post-secondary education.

It's the most unusual field that has grown up recently, in terms of a field of study, because of the close connection, time-wise, between the research that is done, the questions that are asked, and the usefulness in practice. I have found that both surprising and encouraging, because much research that gets maligned is really not very useful for a very long time to many people out there in the real world. Many studies sit on shelves, and don't do very much for improving school life and education.

I think the reason that this has been different, and the reason that this is energized in various departments--education, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and even history departments--is because the questions are being raised by practitioners themselves, and the usefulness is being generated by questions that are being asked in order to translate policy statements into practice.

We really want to begin to think about the topics that need further development. One of them is a focus on results. And we have been able to show that a framework of six types of involvement--parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision-making, and collaborating with the community--have hundreds of practices that can be used in schools. We are beset by challenges to make those practices excellent, and have them lead to better results for students, for teachers, and for parents.

Not just any involvement raises student achievement

What we'd like to see grow over the next several years is an awareness of which practices lead to what for whom. We have found, for example, that not just any practice of partnership will raise student achievement test scores. We have to stop talking in too simple terms, as if any parent involvement will make it possible for youngsters to do better in reading, or better in math. Rather, we have found that the particular practices of partnership that link to reading will be different from other practices that are needed to boost math scores.

Having said that, we should also say that the best way to raise reading scores or math scores is through excellent teaching every day in class, every year in school. And that family and community involvement will be a tool to help us boost students' successes above and beyond what happens in any kind of a curricular instructional approaches.

The other topic that we find compelling has to do with transitions. How are family and community connections tapped when children move from pre-school to elementary school, from elementary to middle, from middle to high school, from high school to post-secondary settings, college, or work?

At each transition point, we lose involvement and information. We lose connections. We lose connections between families and children, and families and schools. And so we have to think of new ways to address the transition points in our educational processes, and what that means for school, family and community partnerships.

ERNESTO CORTES: I'm not an expert on education. My experience about public education, frankly, comes from the work that I do as an organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation, and from my relationship with three very, very important people: my children. My daughter is an elementary school teacher. My second daughter went to public school in Austin, Texas. And my son, who is the real expert on public education, is a junior at Lyndon B. Johnson High School in Austin, Texas. He previously attended Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School and he's constantly making not so complimentary comparisons between Massachusetts schools and Texas schools. He does ask some tough questions about public education from time to time, and those have forced me to kind of rethink my different attitudes and perspectives.

I work for the Industrial Areas Foundation. I'm an organizer. I got into this business of educational reform because it was an issue that came up in our organizations. We got involved early on in very challenging issues, but they had to do with bathrooms, you know? And the dangerous electrical fixtures with live wires coming down from the ceiling. And the lack of air conditioning in schools. And the fact that every time it rained -- and it flooded in San Antonio -- kids couldn't get to school at all. And so we got involved in those kind of issues.

And then as we began to do this kind of organizing, and as we began to create networks of organizations around the state of Texas, we began to find out that one of the reasons why school reform was not taking place was because there were these property-poor school districts.

Working with the wrong people

And so we got involved in this kind of strange and perhaps somewhat dubious relationship with a fellow by the name of H. Ross Perot, who as you know is a little bit nuts, but kind of interesting. And he told me, "Ernie, I'm going to organize the power brokers. And you organize the community. We're going to bring them together, okay?" And I said -- 'cause I didn't really trust him -- "Why are you interested, Mr. Perot, in this whole issue of school reform?" He said, "Well, I got a friend, and I tell my friend, 'I know you don't like black people. So I know the color black is not appealing to you. I know you don't like brown people. You don't like Mexicans. And so the brown color is not appealing to you. But I know you love green. And if you want to make a lot of money, you're going to have to invest money in educational reform, because otherwise we're not going to have the kind of work force we need in this state at the end of the 21st century."

So Saul Alinsky, [founder of IAF], used to teach us that people do the right thing for the wrong reasons. So, you know, I quit looking for people with the purity of motives, and, frankly, Perot was willing to organize the people he thought he should organize. And so we organized, and we were able to get some things done. For example, we were able to get lots of money for property-poor school districts.

One of the happiest moments of my life was when we were able to turn a bill around, which had been defeated by the Texas legislature. We kind of got an undeserved reputation, because of Perot's lawyer -- a fellow by the name of Tom Luce who's a very good guy. He was kind of downcast on Father's Day of that particular year because the House Committee on Education voted down all the education reform bills. And it didn't look like reform was going to go anywhere. And he had thought they had the game plan worked out, and said, "The only way this is going to change, is if there's a massive uprising and a massive onslaught of people at the Capitol."

Unbeknownst to them, we had planned a rally of five thousand of our people. So today Tom Luce goes around the state of Texas telling everybody that in 24-hours we were able to deliver five thousand people to the Capitol. Power is not just what you've got, you know--it's what people think you've got. And at that particular time I was willing to take a little bit of that appearance of power.

Anyhow, the point of the story is, what we learned was, unfortunately, that even though money is very important, money matters, money is not the only thing that matters, okay? 'Cause we found out that it doesn't do a whole lot of good, in Austin, Texas, for example, to be able to reduce people/teacher ratios -- which I think is real important, by the way. I do think it matters whether you've got fifteen kids in a classroom, or whether you've got forty-five kids in the classroom. I had the privilege of teaching for a year as a visiting professor at MIT, and I noticed at that prestigious institution that, in the graduate classes anyway, there were no more than twelve, fifteen kids. And you know, I think what's good for MIT ought to be good for Austin, Texas, or for San Antonio, Texas.

Anyhow, I think it does matter that there are these small class sizes, particularly at the elementary school years. But it doesn't do a lot of good to teach fifteen kids the same way you teach thirty kids, okay? I think it's important that teachers be trained differently, and learn how to teach in different kinds of ways, and have the time to plan and collaborate and all those kind of things.

So we began to get into this whole question of school reform, because we didn't see a whole lot of new results coming out of the reforms of House Bill 72. So we got involved in an elementary school in Austin, Texas, by the name of Zavalla. It was a very low-performing school. It was a school which was...well, it was dead last. And we got involved in some other schools which were going to be shut down. And because we were able to reorganize those schools, and begin to get significant parental engagement in those schools and create what we call the community of learners, we found that Zavalla went from being a school which was dead last in Austin to a blue ribbon school. And some of the other schools that we began to work with also were able to go through that same kind of transformation.

And as a result of working with what became an alliance school networks of about 150 schools, we were able to generate some ideas and some perspectives about what we think ought to be involved in any strategy for school reform.

A strategy for school reform

Number one is, we think it's really important that there be a powerful constituency of parents and community residents who understand educational reform. We think that if you're going to be successful, at least in Texas, that you have to be able to both organize and mobilize large numbers of parents and teachers in a collaborative relationship to support whatever appropriate initiative you think makes sense at that particular place; whether strategies for teaching and learning reading or math differently, or whether it's strategies for organizing after-school initiatives -- which we did a lot of. We were able to get significant, I think, achievement levels, achievement accomplished by effectively organizing after-school programs, which were run by the parents and teachers. Which, ironically, the teachers seemed to have a lot more energy for. But we think it's important, therefore, that there be an effective strategy for identifying leadership among parents, identifying leadership among teachers, and beginning to create this constituency of school reform.

The second thing we think is really important is that we got to change the culture of the school. Now, I would suggest that everybody who gets involved in educational reform have two very important books on their reading list. The first book is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. There's a chapter in that book that you should all memorize. And that's the chapter on the grand inquisitor. You all know the story of the grand inquisitor, right? Okay, Christ comes back to earth in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition. He's recognized by all the people. Miracles are performed. But he's also recognized by the Grand Inquisitor, who has him thrown in jail. He goes to see him in the dead of night and says, "Why did you come back? We tried it your way. For fourteen hundred years we tried it your way. It doesn't work. People don't want to be free. They want magic, and they want mystery, and they want authority in their lives. So after fourteen hundred years, a few of us, we had to make a deal with the other guy. We accepted the temptations that you rejected. And in your name now we serve him. And we give people what they want." You know the story. Magic and mystery and authority.

Well, unfortunately we found, at least in Texas, that the Grand Inquisitor is alive and well in most of our schools. In most of our elementary and secondary schools, and most of our universities and most of our workplaces. Unfortunately, the Grand Inquisitor is even alive and well in some of our churches. And so part of what we've got to do if we're going to be successful in any kind of school reform strategy is to begin to change the culture of schools. From one which is unilateral, domineering, hierarchical, bureaucratic, command and control; to one which is collaborative and relational. Where there is an understanding of what we call relational power, which is not only acting on, but being acted on.

To me, the happiest moment of my life was when we organized . Every year we have a week of training our alliance school principals and teachers and parents. And at the end of it, one of the principals said, "I'm a recovering dictator, okay? But the only way I'm going to change is if we can begin to create what we're calling now this community of learners, this community of parents and teachers and community leaders." And parents, and students and janitors, and cafeteria workers, and anybody who's got a stake in that school--we have to get them together.

So we've got to change the culture of the school from that of the Grand Inquisitor, okay? Where somebody said kids come to school as questions marks and then leave as periods. We've got to change the culture of schools, from one which is unilateral to one which is much more collaborative and relational. And that's going to mean that we got to teach another rule, which we call the iron rule. The iron rule is: Never do for anybody what he or she can do for themselves. And that rule is lifted up in that other book I wanted to tell you about, the Book of Exodus and the Book of Numbers. Well, the five books of Moses. What the heck, the whole thing.

A Lesson from Moses

And in that book, there is a great story in there about Moses's relationship with his father-in-law, Jethro, because Jethro says to Moses, "Moses, you're a jerk. You try and do everything by yourself. You don't understand delegation. You're trying to be this single charismatic leader. And you're going to be dead before you get anything done. There're a lot of competent people out there, and if you have any sense at all, you'll learn how to mentor and you'll have to learn how to guide and teach." Of course, Moses doesn't learn any of this stuff. And so he's confronted by the people in the Book of Numbers. They come at him and say, "Back in Egypt, we used to have great..." -- you know, the Hebrews were like a lot of us, who say, "What have you done for us lately, Moses?" "Back in Egypt we used to have it great. We used to have garlic, and leeks and cucumbers, and fish every day for free. And now we got nothing to eat but this tough, crummy, terrible manna; it's boring and it tastes terrible."

Anyway, Moses has this problem. And he goes to God and he says, "What am I going to do with all these people. We've got five hundred thousand. They want meat to eat." God says to Moses, "Moses, you're a real jerk. Okay, it's real simple; your father-in-law, Jethro, explained it to you. Gather your seventy best leaders. Leaders you've tested out with individual meetings, training sessions, house meetings, people that you've seen, you've done small research action with; bring those folks together to the tent for a meeting. And there I'll put the burden that you're feeling on them. And they'll have meat to eat, not for one day or two, or ten or twenty, but for a whole month until it becomes loathsome to them and they vomit it out of their nostrils." God gets a little carried away. [laughter]

Anyhow, the point of all this is that we have to begin to figure out how to change the culture of schools. And move from this culture of unilateral, bureaucratic, Grand Inquisitor kind of model to one where you begin to develop the capacity. And that requires a quality which we call agitation. You can't develop schools without agitation. Now, the problem is, some people think that agitation and irritation are the same thing. And they're not. And because what we've got to develop is the capacity of the organizers to understand, you can't agitate somebody unless you have permission. You can't agitate somebody unless you have a relationship. You can't agitate somebody unless you're willing to be reciprocal, because agitation is not prying, it's probing. Agitation is stirring people's imagination, their curiosity. You got an old-fashioned washing machine at your house? What's in the middle of that old-fashioned washing machine? An agitator. And that's what we need if we're going to have significant, meaningful school reform. We're going to have some outside person, or agency, who stirs people's imagination and curiosity. Alinsky teaches that all organizing is disorganizing and reorganizing. Some people think that that's a kind of simple way of talking about the second law of thermodynamics, which basically says we're all headed towards atrophy. And so the only way you can overcome that is to stir things up so that you prevent organizational dry rot. My good friend at the Urban League used to say that the alliance schools were the moral equivalent of angioplasty. You've got to be able to try to get inside the organizational veins if you're going to begin to open people's imagination to the possibility of school reform.

The third thing that the alliance school is all about is to try to create some kind of civic culture. When I grew up in San Antonio there were 250 adults organized against me. There were 250 adults who felt that they had ownership and responsibility for my life. They felt that they had the right to tell me what to do, to discipline me, to question me, to interrogate me, and to lecture me about what I needed to do. And, of course, as fast as I could, I wanted to get out of town. And I did. And I went away to school.

A loss of community

But the problem is that those 250 adults were part of a bunch of overlapping networks of relationships. Of congregations, and schools, and families, and labor unions, and political parties; and they created a very thick substantive network, which created a civic culture, which enabled kids to have a framework to operate in. Now it may have been oppressive, it may have been difficult. There may have been all kind of problems, but it enabled us...it enabled the school to kind of operate in a context which is no longer true, I think. We have got to figure out how to recouple the culture of the school with that of the community.

In 1954, we made a decision, an order to end racial apartheid in the United States. It was a decision that I support. We had to do it. And I'd do it again. But that decision involved decoupling the culture of the school from that of the community. So now we have an autonomous school culture which has kind of spun out of control. It's driven by experts and professionals who speak a language that the average lay person, particularly people like me, cannot understand, okay? And our eyes gloss over. So we have to figure out, how to develop parents' capacity to understand the research, the best practice that school people understand, so that we can begin to recreate this kind of civic culture and begin to restore some capacity to have moral authority over our children.

HEATHER WEISS: When we were talking today, Bob Sexton from Kentucky -- who's part of DeWitt Wallace family--was talking about Ernie's approach to things as daunting. And I added that it was daunting and energizing. Now I have here with me two pros who are used to engaging in groups like this, who are real pros at sort of a give and take. And I want to mix things up a little bit, and also give the audience some time to ask questions.

So I would like to cut to the chase, and put two questions to them that I think follow from some of the remarks that they made. First of all, as somebody who's worked in this arena for a fairly long time myself I'm struck that we're still in a stage in the family-school community partnership arena, if you will, where there's still a lot of finger-pointing. If you read the Phi Delta Kappan polls, teachers say that if parents would do their job, then they could do theirs. And parents say "Teachers don't want us in here." We're still doing a lot of back and forth finger-pointing. I think Joyce has said -- and Ernest as well -- that we've tried to reframe from parent involvement that puts the burden on parents, to family-school community, which puts the burden on all parties. So part of what we've tried to do, to get beyond their finger-pointing, is just to reframe it.

But I would argue that we are not there by a long-shot. We've re-labeled it, but we have a long way to go. There are a few pockets where there are promising practices of family-school community partnerships. But why do we have such a long way to go? Why have we been pushing on this set of issues for twenty-five or more years? Why are we where we are? And what do we need to do in the next five to ten years to get further on this family-school community agenda; to the kind of vision that I think you laid out, Joyce, in terms of family-school community partnership, being as institutionalized and predictable as reading, writing, and arithmetic in schools and communities? What do we need to do?

To some extent, Ernesto, you represent a kind of a bottom-up perspective, organizing, as you have, a great deal of Texas. Joyce, you represent, to some extent, by virtue of being with a national center trying to organize across the country and provide information across the country, kind of a top-down perspective. I think you both probably have elements of both top-down and bottom-up, but for purposes of our argument, let me stereotype you in that way.

So, the first question is: What do we need to do, in the next five to ten years, to make real progress so we have more real family-school community partnerships around the country? That's the first question. Second is -- what I personally think is one of the absolutely critical issues in this field-- How do you take research and translate it into action-based practice?

CORTES: I have a lot of difficulty with the second question, not because it's not a good question. But, I'm not sure I'm the right person to ask, because I have a particular perspective. And it's not quite the way you put it. I think what is important is organizing, to be sure. And so, number one, for me is, if this is going to go anywhere, then you've got to have -- in my humble opinion -- a lot more organizers. And by that I mean people who've got some imagination, curiosity, who care about kids and think that it's real important to put together what I call these communities of learners, of parents, but not just parents, but also community leaders, and also networks of community institutions. Congregations, settlement houses, teacher organizations, labor unions, business groups, so that there's a whole network of institutions, because I think requisite for all these things we want out of schools is a community infrastructure. The kind that people talk about in our intermediate institutions. Now part of why we have to do this is we also have to recognize that one of the reason why we're in the shape we're in is that the world has changed radically and profoundly.

Maybe I spent too long at MIT, but they tell me about this technological revolution that's going on, and information technology, globalization of the economy, the restructure of the work force, all these things are creating different kinds of contexts for people to operate. There's an interesting book by Richard Sennett called The Corrosion of Character which talks about the fact that people can no longer rely on the workplace for stories and examples and narratives to help them raise their children.

Because the values that work today in the 21st-century economy include making no long-term commitments. So you have this kind of "virtual person" who has no long-standing commitment to anything or to anybody. At least with the old capitalists, like John D. Rockefeller--- they were real repressive and mean, but they had a commitment to places and to buildings, etc. Well, this is a different world we live in now, number one.

Number two, Sennett points out example after example where there are no narratives or stories or examples that are useful to lift up the values that help us raise kids. So, consequently, we're going to have to figure out how to do that. There's a guy, the book editor of The New Yorker magazine, who wrote an article which says, "In order to raise kids today you've got to be a bully." Because you don't have these networks of parents that you can rely on, and you got to go at your kid, or they go at you -- my son goes at me all the time. He wants Nintendo, he wants this, he wants Nike shoes, and ba, ba, ba, all this kind of stuff. And I've got to just say, "No, no, no." And he organizes my wife against me. [laughter] And everybody else against us, because he's real good at it. So I've just got to be a bully and learn how to do that, okay? And it's a tough, exhausting fight, okay? Fortunately, I won most of them, but it's hard.

And then Sennett points out that it used to be that kids developed a soul before they became consumers or customers. And now it's the reverse. Kids become customers. They get credit cards. They get charge accounts. All that sort of thing. I'm not trying to be a Jeremiah, I'm just trying to say that there's a different reality. Kids have different experiences, a different set of expectations. They watch television all the time. So teachers have to kind of dance on their head, okay, in order to be entertaining, in order to kind of compete with all these distractions, okay?

This guy I know used to say that doing homework for him was wonderful, because he worked on a farm, and it meant he didn't have to do the chores. Doing homework was a nice alternative. So we have to think about the fact that maybe there is a different kind of reality that our kids are going under, and we have to face up to that. And so as a consequence, I think we have a much more daunting challenge to create the kind of community infrastructure which is going to be supportive and reinforce the kind of discipline, habits, understandings that are going to be required, if we want kids to have what [Richard] Murnane and [Frank] Levy [authors of Teaching the New Basic Skills] call the soft skills, which go beyond literacy and numbers, and involve working in teams, creating new knowledge, and all this sort of stuff.

We have a different set of expectations for kids when they finish high school than we did before. There's a whole different reality. We don't have the kind of buffer or support that used to exist. So we've got to face up the fact that we've got a different set of conditions. We no longer have women who are willing to work for nothing, okay? You know, committed to public education. Now those same women who used to work for nothing are going to graduate schools and becoming financiers and directing centers and professors, and all that sort of thing. And so all that talent that we used to be able to get for nothing is now making a lot of money. So we got a totally different situation. We've got to figure out how we keep and attract talent when we're not willing to pay them anything. And worse than that, we're willing to treat them like dogs, like they're clerks, all right?

So part of the reason why we have to do the things we have to do is that we have to face up to this different situation that we're in. And we don't want to look at that. We don't want to face up to the realities. So that's why I think we've got to have lots and lots of organizers who are willing to do the kind of organizing that I think is real important.

EPSTEIN: Let me take a different tack to answer these two questions. And I'm really responding from the point of view of what we see as we work with a thousand schools, in a hundred school districts, in nine states. And we've gotten to know these places very well over three years.

We know that over the next five to ten years, we really want to have real partnerships the way that I'm talking about them, six types of involvement that doesn't define partnerships as just bodies in a building. Ways of involving parents at school and at home, involving communities in the ways that we improve our schools. And seeing it as a process, not as an event. Where, certainly, agitation and communication is often a part of that work, and involves some of the things that Ernie is talking about, but I'm really talking a little bit more at the school level, and what really is going to happen at every school site.

If we want that to happen, it's my belief that over the next five years, we have to change what we call pre-service or advanced education for teachers, and for administrators. So that people who go out, those of you who went out from your graduate training and into practice, go into those buildings and into your first placements with the school-family community partnership understanding in the back of your mind; the same way that you have reading and math as part of your training. It has to be part of what we see as being professional, and not as being anti-professional. We need to have this as part of an in-service line, even if you had the best course in the world that prepared you to understand the theory of overlapping spheres of influence--which is the way that I see schools, family, and communities coming together--and even if you understood the six types of involvement and were ready to think about this, and knew the challenges, and could link them with specific results, so that you could be very playful about how you structured, and organized, and implemented partnership programs.

When you got out to your school placement, you might be in a Latino community. You could be in a community of African American students and families. You could be in a rich community or poor community. You could be in any kind of placement where your general knowledge from the best course in the world, you're still going to need to learn how to adapt and tailor the knowledge, the general knowledge, to the school site or district level where you happen to be placed.

We're trying to help schools begin to tailor their programs to the goals they're setting in their own sites. And to make possible programs that are consistent with the culture and the context of a community. And in order to do that, we're going to need both pre-service and advanced training for teachers and administrators, not just teachers; we need principals who understand what it means to open doors to family and community connections, and to have teachers do the same.

We need persistence and focus in our schools. Even as new technologies and new thoughts come along, we know that we've got to begin to focus, to keep partnerships on the agenda at schools.

We know that the school district and state dynamics have been very misunderstood in the past. Where the schools will talk about top-down direction, or the districts will talk about that they're afraid of bottom-up leadership. And what we have learned in the National Network of Partnership Schools is that there's a new way to think about district and state leadership. And we would look at it in the terms of facilitation, or enabling approaches, where the encouragement, assistance, small grants, celebrations, recognition begin to be the way that states and districts encourage the work of their schools. Not just deadly documentation. Not just mandates that mean nothing. But ways to think about these topics across levels, school district and state.

We're not talking about just a school program, although school-family community partnerships are most important where the kids are, and where the families are, at the school site. So everything that states do, and everything that districts do, has to be to help schools do what they need to do. And then we will be able to see this in every school, in every district, in every state. Just about every one of those places has this topic on their agenda, in their policy statements, their mission statements, their goal statements, right now. It is there right now.

In all of our surveys and studies and field work from 1980 on, we have learned that parents are ready for this. No question. This is not a case of having to wait for the parents to be ready to do partnerships. Parents are ready for partnerships.

Our center has an international network of scholars in thirty countries and teachers and administrators are initially resistant to these programs. But when programs begin in a sensible way, that initial resistance declines or disappears within three to six months if people begin to get a handle on a program that they can actually see as feasible and reasonable, and customized to their location.

So I have a very strong belief that where there is a policy statement, and if there were the will, every school could do this right now. I mean, there is nothing about what is happening in the schools in our network, that cannot be done by every elementary, every middle, and every high school that has the will to think in new ways about partnerships of family-school and community.

We find that everyone who's working successfully in communities, or in schools, or with families, is using team approaches. And the approach that we use in the action team approach, of teachers, parents, and administrators working, planning, and thinking together, actually does help begin to build a program that parents care about, as well as those that help the schools. So can we do this within five to ten years? The answer is yes, if there is the will.

In terms of research to practice, I see that as a mutual responsibility, a mutual obligation. And what I see, and what we've been doing over the past ten, fifteen, eighteen years, really, is about taking research to practice, but then taking practice to research. The reason that our research is useful in practice is that we listen to the practitioners, the educators and the policy leaders, and work with them to create the next question. And it is the notion that if you just have a question, and you think it's interesting, well, it may very well be, but it may not be pertinent.

And so the notion that this is a mutual obligation, that research gets translated into practice when it's important in practice, but practice has something to say to the next questions of research, is really what has been our guiding principle. And it is what has made, and energized, an increasingly deep agenda, since 1981, when we were simply asking, "What is parent involvement?" Because in those days, the watchword in a group like this was to say, "Oh, we don't know what parent involvement is, so there's no point in talking about it."

CORTES: Can I disagree just a bit? I don't disagree with the insights or the ideas. I do disagree with the idea that we can ,somehow or another, will this into existence in every school district around the country.

EPSTEIN: I didn't say "will it."

CORTES: My point is that this is not something that you can, by virtue of will plus information, plus some good practices, develop a program for the nation as a whole. I think we have to think hard -- in my humble opinion -- about the whole question of apprenticeship. That there are some practices that we have to think about, in terms of building relationships, in terms of agitating people's vision and imagination, in terms of developing just the capacity for real conversation between teachers, much less among parents. And those practices are not something that we really know how to do very well.

I had the privilege of sitting in a meeting with the principal of John Muir High School in Pasadena. And she met with some of her key teachers, her math teachers at this particular time, and her science teachers. And they began to talk a little bit about what would make John Muir High School a much better high school. And they were telling me that they were getting kids who had gone through first-year algebra, and were going into the second-year of algebra, but did not have the intellectual discipline and the maturity to do well in second-year algebra. But because they had gone through first-year algebra in the eighth grade, and then went right into geometry, and then were supposed to go into second-year algebra, they had all the grades and all the prerequisites, except they didn't have the intellectual maturity and the tool of understanding what was required in order to do well in second-year algebra. And so, they weren't really developing the intuitive appreciation and the discipline to be able to do well.

Now, that was something that could be rectified by the very good teachers, math teachers, at John Muir High School; having a conversation with the teachers at the middle school; having a conversation with teachers...with parents at the middle school; and then having a conversation with other community leaders, so that they all could begin to understand that algebra's not just these [numbers]--that there's a certain grammar, there's a certain logic, there's a certain discipline, there's a certain intuitive understanding which is required in order to do well in math. And that there are some things that parents could do with kids which would help develop that intuitive understanding, that kind of discipline. Which, unfortunately, is not part of the conversation that's going on. Now, I think that could be done by everybody, eventually.

But the point is, we had to learn how to do it well at John Muir. And we had to monitor that, and reflect on that experience, and do it very carefully. And then we have to teach people to do it well in the other high school in Pasadena, and the other middle schools. And then begin to convey to them a deeper understanding at the elementary school level, etc. So that we begin to develop some way of thinking about what these best practices are. What are the reflections? What are the conversations? What are the elements of conversation? That's going to require an enormous investment in training and development of people. I'm not sure we can do that without a different level of investment, of resources, of time, and talent, and energy, than we've been willing to do. And I think it's going to take some time.

WEISS: One of the things he said to me this morning -- it was enormously helpful -- was, that you cannot have a relationship unless you can fight. Now, if I wanted it to work right, I would do the following. I would have an organizer in the mix. And by that I mean, I don't think this can only be about, "We're all going to sit pretty and do family-school community partnerships." And, in fact, we had parents in this afternoon who've worked in Cambridge, and a lot of what we heard from them was about conflict, tension, fighting, power, politics, etc.

CORTES: It takes five to seven years to train a very good organizer. And the problem is, we had to figure out how to make this attractive and interesting to people. Find the resources. So all I'm saying to you is yes, if we're willing to do that kind of thing.

WEISS: So one thing that would be interesting -- you've talked about experiments --would be to look at some of the schools you work in that have an organizer, and say, "What's the value added of having that in this mix?"

CORTES: But here's the problem. Everybody always wants to skip steps. They always say to us, "How can we do this without first going through the hard, tough reality of building an organization, training organizers? Can't we do this on a massive kind of way?" The New American Schools Project wanted to do this. They wanted to hire us to train people. And it cannot be done.

You have to do it systematically and carefully. And we don't have the patience for that, or at least a lot of us don't. Now I think at some point we will, because we realize we've got to do it. But right now, I'm not sure I see that.

EPSTEIN: I want to clarify a couple of things. We're really almost talking about two separate spheres that have to come together: a community sphere where organizers have a very prominent part to play, and the school and family sphere, with connections to community, that are, at first, simply saying, "Now listen folks, we heard from parents today, and you can interview your favorite two parents this evening if you like." We know that schools are not presently welcoming. Middle schools less than elementary; high schools less than middle.

We know that parents need a great deal of information about what is happening to their children in second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, in order to be an advocate for their children.

What we're trying to say is that we do not have to wait five to seven years to train an organizer to set up a community organizer. Which, when it occurs -- and it should occur simultaneously-- will enrich this mix. But while we're doing that, we also can immediately put into play the research-tested, field-tested, documented practices that are helping schools begin to talk with each other, build relationships among parents and teachers who never talked to each other. Opening schools in ways where the principal is no longer the dictator -- as your great example before really gave.

And we see that happening now. We see it happening in approaches that have been tried, and can be guided. And when I said "will" before, I meant not that we "will" it and it will happen, but that there is the will to do those things that are necessary to make it happen. And in our work, we have been able to identify what four or five requirements, absolute requirements, really are. And we find an action team approach of teachers, parents, and administrators, and community members, and students working together is an absolute necessity. If a school isn't willing to do that piece of that requirement, nothing much is going to happen in the next year, five years, seven years, or twenty-five years. But if they are willing to do so, right now, we can help them tomorrow, at no cost, and in the network. And we invite you to think about that in terms of your own location.

AUDIENCE: I direct a project in Massachusetts at the Dept. of Ed. and I'm also a community organizer in certifying elementary school teachers. What we're doing across the state is looking at involvement from a community organizing perspective. We're trying slowly to build coalitions, where you have at the table the different people. What we find is the coalitions that are working the best are the ones that have a strong community center. Some of the brick walls I'm finding are trying to convince people who make policy, who have power, to appreciate that this has to happen, that this involvement has to happen, that this partnership has to happen. And I'm not sure how to do this.

CORTES: Theodore Roosevelt used to say that you have to speak softly and carry a big stick. You don't have a big enough stick. At least in our experience, you can't just do it by just persuading them that it's the right thing to do. You also have to have the capacity. Franklin Roosevelt used to say, "Okay, you've convinced me. Don't try to convince me anymore. Now go out there and organize, and create the constituency that's going to make me do it. I'm persuaded already." Now the problem I find is that a lot of our folks never get beyond the persuading game. And they don't want to get into the hard, tough work of the organizing game, which is creating that kind of constituency which can back you up. One of our alliance school principals got a call from his boss, "Your parents are out of control. Reign them in." The parents had been down to the school board three times. Once for an after-school program, the second time for a healthcare clinic, the third time for a science academy. And he said to his boss, there's nothing I can do about it. There was a broad-based organization which gave the principal -- as he put it -- political space. So that he was not the advocate as the principal. The advocates were the community leaders. And we have to protect our principals. So we don't make them make the demands to their boss, who could then fire them. It's the community leaders who go in, who don't work for the school district. It's the pastors who don't work for the school district, okay? It's the teachers who have some backing, and some support from their association. So you get those folks going after the people who make the policy decisions.

EPSTEIN: The question is: how can we make this happen? We have to organize in order to do it. We have to be a little clearer about what "this" is. At the state level, I'd like to see Massachusetts come in as a state member to this network, because Wisconsin, Maryland, California, Kentucky, Connecticut, Ohio, Utah, and a couple of others, are doing some very exciting things to start defining this at a state level. And "this" is a very big word. It's only got four letters, but it's a very big word. And it can incorporate solving big problems, like after-school programs, which are an essential problem. In fact, that's on people's agenda now. And they're open to think about how to solve that particular problem.

But beyond the specific problem, we have to define this as the process of continuous information, involvement, input, engagement of families in the lives of their children.

Community is a sociological word that I say is vast and venerable. It's been around forever. And it's the biggest thing in the world. Community is everything we've been talking about. And if we define "this" as "that," we might as well throw up our hands in despair, because there is no way to get a hold of "it." But if we begin to define our "its" a little more carefully, particularly attuned to the written word in your state, or any state that's on the books and part of the superintendent's priorities, we can begin to that in new ways, in ways that these other states, and studies are showing are attainable and feasible.

AUDIENCE: I work as a community organizer. I imagine when you're dealing with education issues, that a lot of people's ideas about it must have cultural origins. And sometimes these ideas conflict. So I'm wondering, when you're working with community members, how do you address cultural ideas about education that conflict in a way that still lets people work together? I imagine in Texas there must be a lot of issues around language?

CORTES: Well, you have to teach people how to do politics. That there are rules of politics. And Alinsky used to say that there's one word which defines democracy, and that's compromise. We ask all of our leaders to read an article written by a fellow named John Randall, which was in The American Scholar in 1938. The article is entitled, "On the Virtue of Being Unprincipled." Randall wrote this article when Europe was being ravaged by totalitarian ideologues. And he said, "There are only two kind of people who can afford to be over-principled: lunatics and dictators. The rest of us mortals have got to learn to make concessions." I think Aristotle said that if you're an angel or a beast, you don't need politics, okay? But for the rest of us, you have to learn the rules of politics, the rules of deliberation, of engagement, which require that we learn how to negotiate with one another.

Now, in politics, there are two kinds of compromises. There's a compromise of half a loaf, which is still bread and life-giving. Then there's the compromise of Solomon. The compromise of Solomon is half a baby. Half a baby's a course. So in politics, it's not whether you compromise, it's which compromises do you make. The question is not do people compromise, but which comprises do they make. Which ones are life-giving? Which ones sustain them? And which ones really say, "It's over with." And that requires judgment. And that requires developing people's understanding of judgment.

So we try to teach people that they're going to have to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable. They're going to have to learn how to polarize and personalize, but also depersonalize and depolarize, because we're going to have to learn that there are no permanent enemies, no permanent allies. Your allies on Monday and Tuesday are going to be your adversaries on Wednesday and Thursday. And your best friends on Friday and Saturdays.

AUDIENCE: How do you compromise what you've already compromised? I mean, in terms of the political expediency, I can clearly understand what you need to do to build up relationships; but in that relationship, it's the power.

CORTES: You've got to figure out, are there ways in which we can begin to, using their rule book, do what we want to do? Now there are schools in California which are doing exactly that. And I think we ought to be proud of them, not try to not denigrate them, because they're being wise as serpents. And innocent as doves. They're trying to figure out, "How do we use the law, how do we use the situation, to our best advantage? Build for the future, so we can get to the point where we can make the kind of statements that we ought to be able to make."

EPSTEIN: But the issue also has to do with time. But it turns out that that compromise that's objectionable at one moment really does have processes underlying it that change the timeline. And so you can begin to look at the next action, the needed action, given wherever you are at a point in time. And there's nothing we can do about certain policies that have been accepted or passed at the moment, other than: Look again, act again, think again. You can't look backwards, so you have to begin to think about, "Well, what shall we do in order to change this?"

What we're seeing is, in schools, individual schools, and county districts that really go by that principle, the old principle of asking forgiveness and not permission, really are being able to be responsive to the students and families they serve, despite some things that are on the books. But then they've got to find a way to use waivers. They've got to find a way to change policies and elect people over time. But there's not much point in complaining about compromises that were made, without realizing that you've just got to make new ones; the process goes on.

This whole discussion today is about process. It is not about an event. It is not about an idea. It's about many ideas. And it's about much time, and continual change, of people, of thinking, of policies, of actions, and of the continuity of life that's represented by children in schools, and families in communities. This is a very big topic; it has no solutions or final answers, other than what we know from time to time.

CORTES: I always remind people that the great civil rights movement, which started with the Montgomery bus boycott--if we looked at what the Montgomery Improvement Association was asking for, most people could not believe it, because they were not asking for integration. All they were asking for was that black folks and white folks would enter the bus, and the black people would start to sit in the back of the bus, and when the back was filled up, if the seats which were available in the front were available, they could then sit in the front and not be asked to move, okay? Now, that's hardly revolutionary. I mean, if you think about that, I mean, most people who look at that, they say, "It would be incredible that they would be willing to settle for that."

But the point was, that that was a first step in the building of a movement, of an organizing process. When Moses goes to Pharaoh, the first thing he asks for is a day off. That's all they asked for. They don't want freedom or liberation, just a day so we can worship, okay? And so you've got to remember that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the taking of a single step, and you've got to think about that there are steps. We started off organizing. People kind of denigrated it when we did it in San Antonio. We built a great organization out of issues of cleaning up vacant lots, and flooding, and that sort of stuff.

And you start off real small. And you accept all kinds of compromises, because you ask yourself a question: How does what your doing build the organization? How does it build the leadership? How does it enable you to have that kind of mixed multitude, which can fight another fight, another day?

So that I can get to the point where I can ask for stuff that really matters, like we're doing now. But we could have never done that if we had gotten so preoccupied with the principle of the thing.

This forum was co-sponsored by HGSE Forums, HFRP, and the Dewitt Wallace Reader's Digest which funds a number of national organizations that work with state and local groups around family-school community partnerships.

Joyce L. Epstein (Ph.D., Sociology, Johns Hopkins University) is Director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships, Principal Research Scientist and Co-Director of the School, Family, and Community Partnership Program of the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR), with a joint/part time appointment of Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

Epstein has over one hundred publications on the effects of school, classroom, family, and peer environments on student learning and development, with many focusing on school and family connections. Her newest book, School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, guides schools, districts, and states to develop and maintain programs of partnership. Another book, in preparation, is School and Family Partnerships: Preparing Educators and Improving Schools -- for use in preservice and advanced education courses. Earlier publications focus on middle grades organization, curriculum, and instruction and their effects on early adolescents. These include two books: Education in the Middle Grades: National Practices and Trends and Promising Programs in the Middle Grades, both written to help educators improve schools. Previous books include The Quality of School Life and Friends in School. In all of her work, she is interested in the connections of research, policy, and practice.

Dr. Epstein serves on the editorial boards of Phi Delta Kappan, Education and Urban Society, The Urban Review, and Social Psychology of Education, and in numerous advisory roles concerning parent involvement, middle grades education, and school improvement. She is a recipient of the Academy for Educational Development's 1991 Alvin C. Eurich Education Award and the 1997 Working Mother Magazine special award for her work on school, family, and community partnerships.

Ernesto Cortes Jr. is the southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a nonprofit organization founded in Chicago by the late Saul Alinsky. In 1974, Mr. Cortes organized Communities Organized for Public Services (COPS), a well-known and successful church-based grassroots organization of San Antonio's west- and south-side communities. He later founded a network of 14 other organizations in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico that act as agents of change, working for poor people's issues.

The successful efforts of the Southwest IAF network have been recognized and funded by foundations such as The Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is presently at work on IAF projects in Omaha and New Orleans. Mr. Cortes's work has been highlighted in books such as William Greider's Who Will Tell the People?, Ray Marshall's The State of Families, and Ray Marshall's and Marc Tucker's Thinking for a Living, as well as in Bill Moyers's PBS series, "A World of Ideas II." Cold Anger, by Mary Beth Rogers, provides a history of the IAF and of Mr. Cortes's development as an organizer and leader in the Southwest.

Mr. Cortes was named a fellow by the MacArthur Foundation, and has completed a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. He is a member of the Pew Forum for K-12 Education Reform and the Aspen Institute Domestic Strategy Group.

Related Harvard Education Letter issues and articles:

• September/October 1997 issue on Family Involvement
• July/August 1998 Issue: Full-Service Schools Respond to Families' Needs - Abstract

Related Web Sites:

• Industrial Areas Foundation
  
• Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships
  
• Learning to Survive: Interview with Ernie Cortes
  PBS interview with Cortes about Zavalla school