January/February 2003

Abstracts

For Discussion
The Power—and Limits—of 'Civic Capacity'
By Alexander Russo

Collaborations between schools and civic groups have shaped the course of Chicago's extensive school reform over the past decade. Such influence was seen in the $50 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which developed numerous networks providing support to schools, as well as in the role businesses and other groups have played in creating programs like PENCIL, a principal recruitment initiative that helps local schools screen candidates.

When such partnerships work well, they can give schools more than the obvious material benefits: they can be morale-building as schools share responsibility for improvement with community, business, and research groups. But not every collaboration goes smoothly or successfully, of course, nor is there always agreement about how much credit—or blame—the groups are due for their efforts. In this article Russo examines the benefits and drawbacks of the remarkable history of partnerships among Chicago schools and civic organizations.

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Insights
Do Working Mothers Hurt Their Children's Ability to Learn?
By Andrew Hrycyna

It was, as one NPR commentator put it, the kind of research finding that "drives working moms berserk." Last summer, respected researchers at Columbia University published a study in the journal Child Development linking the scores of three-year-olds on measures of cognitive and verbal development to whether their mothers had worked full-time work during the children's first nine months of life. Though the researchers discouraged simplistic conclusions from the findings, popular press coverage muddied the waters.

Hrycyna's conversations with scholars reveal that the complexities are not the result of any flaw in this study, but the result of what happens when you try to tease out the implications of any study that isolates the effect of one variable among many related variables on a given outcome. Thinking through the complexity holds lessons for the kinds of questions we—educators, policy makers, citizens, and parents—should always ask, and connections we should and should not make, as non-scholarly consumers of studies like this one.

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