The Community of the School

Sam Redding

The research reported herein was supported in part by the Ofce of

Educational Research and Improvement of the U. S. Department of Educa-
tion through a grant to the Mid-Atlantic Laboratory for Student Success
at the Temple University Center for Research in Human Development
and Education. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reect the
position of the supporting agencies, and no ofcial endorsement should
be inferred.

Introduction
“Community” is a term that is much used and little dened. Because
of this rhetorical abuse, the concept of community is sometimes given
short shrift by educational scholars. But, in addition to its classical roots
in Aristotelian discourse, the idea of community is central to the 150-year
intellectual history of sociology and has enjoyed a surge of popular and
scholarly attention in the past decade. In connection with schools, the
concept of community has been bolstered by a merger with research and
thought on the family’s role in children’s learning (curriculum of the
home). Contemporary writing on “school community” tends to blend
the sociologist’s advocacy of community as an antidote to the managerial
tendencies of mass society with the psychologist’s proposition that school
learning is impacted by factors outside the school, especially those residing
in the family and peer group. Thus, a school community is typically
portrayed as: a) inclusive of families of students and some elements of
the community beyond the school doors, and b) operating on the basis
of shared values, trust, expectations, and obligations rather than tasks,
rules, and hierarchies.
Tracing the intellectual history of community, we nd that value-based,
This article updated from articles originally published in the School Community Journal, Vol. 2,
No. 2, Fall/Winter 1992, and in Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall/Winter 1998

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THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

intimate associations of one kind or another, larger than a kinship group but
sufciently small to allow for personal contact among members, has been
idealized as a counterbalance to: a) excessive individualism, b) the family’s
limiting strictures on the individual, and c) the remote, impersonal, and
inexorable forces of mass society. Problems identied with schooling
in America today certainly fall into these same three categories of
concern. Children and youth are often described as selsh and uncaring,
disadvantaged by family circumstance, and/or alienated and inuenced by
mass culture. Perhaps then, school community, even if idealized, contains
seeds of remedy for problems with school-age children.
Clifford W. Cobb, dening community, wrote:

In a community, people take responsibility for collective

activity and are loyal to each other beyond immediate self-
interest. They work together on the basis of shared values.
They hold each other accountable for commitments. In
earlier centuries, a person was born into a community and
a set of reciprocal obligations. Now, those who seek an
identity as part of a larger whole must invent community by
voluntarily committing themselves to institutions or groups
(Cobb, 1992, p. 2).

Cobb’s denition of community includes the essential aspects of a modern

understanding of the term: responsibility, collective activity, loyalty,
working together, shared values, accountability, commitment, identity,
voluntarism. If we trace sociological thought for the past two centuries, we
nd that Cobb’s components of community are the proffered remedies for a
variety of social ills, put forth by thinkers of various ideological inclinations.
The community—through the eyes of a diverse set of thinkers over the
ages—mediates the numbing intrusion of mass society; checks the barren
isolation of the individual cast against a vast, materialistic machinery;
engenders sentiments of virtue; and lifts the horizons of the one above the
leveling weight of kinship.

Historical Overview

Counterbalance to Industrialism
Edmund Burke, the British statesman, writing from the fount of the
industrial revolution in the 18th century, offered that, “To be attached to
the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the rst
principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the rst link in the

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 The Community of the School

series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind”

(Burke, 1960, p. 44). His statement was an afrmation of community at a
time when larger societal forces seemed to be obliterating traditional social
attachments. A hundred years after Burke, the Frenchman Emile Durkheim
offered a similar complaint and remedy for the condition of anomie, the
ambient rootlessness he related to suicide and other symptoms of the
individual’s sense of diminution in the face of industrial, bureaucratic,
capitalistic society. Durkheim’s remedy was the strengthening of the guild,
a medieval invention to be resurrected anew; attachment to the social unit
of the guild would provide the individual a shield from the overwhelming,
untempered, and unpredictable winds of society, and would offer the
context of expectations and obligations necessary to nurture autonomous
but morally grounded individuals. Just as Durkheim feared the powerful
vagaries of industrial society writ large, he also was suspicious of the
limiting inuences of the family and clan on the individual (Lasch, 1991,
p. 144). The guild, or similar mid-sized social structures, like Burke’s little
platoons (the parish, lodge, neighborhood association, local political entity,
etc.), would lift the individual from the restrictive web of close kin and, at
the same time, buffer him from the larger society.

The Voluntary Association

Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and wrote of his observations in
the 1830s, after Burke but before Durkheim. Tocqueville saw in upstart
America a chance for a new beginning, a disruption of the path of
history; and nothing impressed him more than the abundant voluntary
associations. While Tocqueville promoted human liberty, he feared
unfettered individualism; the voluntary association was a perfect mediating
device—the individual freely chose attachment to a group, and membership
in that group called forth necessary virtues of loyalty, altruism, and
responsibility. “For only freedom can deliver the members of a community
from that isolation which is the lot of the individual left to his own devices
and, compelling them to get in touch with each other, promote an active
sense of fellowship” (Tocqueville, trans. 1955, p. xiv).

Tradition-Directed, Inner-Directed, Other-Directed

Coming forward to the 1960s, we nd in David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd
(1961) a crystallization of accepted wisdom on the contemporary zeitgeist
and its predecessors in Western history. Again, community in its various
forms is the centerpiece of the analysis. Riesman’s book, he explains, is
about social character, and social character is “that part of ‘character’ which
is shared among signicant social groups and which, as most contemporary
social scientists dene it, is the product of the experience of these groups”

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THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

(Riesman, 1961, p.4). Social character is, in large part, the imprint of culture
on the individual. Riesman’s critique of social character traces three
epochs of Western history, insisting that while each era was distinct in its
prevailing social organization, the inuences of all three are present in
contemporary American society.
In a tradition-directed social order, the prevailing mode of social
organization in Western history prior to the Renaissance, the individual
conformed to the patterns of life associated with his clan or caste; behavior
was prescribed by rigid expectations of etiquette; and the individual was
valued because he “belonged.” “The tradition-directed person,” explains
Riesman, “. . . hardly thinks of himself as an individual. Still less does it
occur to him that he might shape his own destiny in terms of personal,
lifelong goals or that the destiny of his children might be separate from that
of the family group” (Riesman, 1961, p. 17). The community consists largely
of family and kin, and the web of values is tight and strong. Shame is the
punishment for violating the community’s behavioral expectations.
Beginning with the Renaissance and extending into the twentieth century,
population growth slowed in advanced cultures, opportunities expanded,
rationalism and science replaced superstition and myth, and people became
increasingly mobile—likely to move in circles beyond their immediate clan.
Tradition remains strong, but is splintered and differentiated; the division
of labor increases; society becomes more stratied; voluntary associations
serve as communities. Behavior could not be controlled by rules of etiquette
because social situations became increasingly complex, so children were
raised to possess inner resources that would guide them beyond the
inuence of the immediate community. In these inner-directed societies,
“the source of direction for the individual is ‘inner’ in the sense that it is
implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized but
nonetheless inescapably destined goals” (Riesman, 1961, p. 15). The internal
gyroscope of ingrained values guides the individual through the course
of life, and the individual is dependent upon parent-like authorities for
setting the gyroscope in motion and keeping it spinning. The consequence
of straying from the “inner pilot” is to feel guilt.
Riesman saw the inner-directed social character reaching its zenith in
the nineteenth century, just as the rst glimpses of other-direction began
to appear. Tocqueville saw other-directedness in the friendly, shallow,
unrooted “new man” in America. The central characteristic of this new
man was a demand for approval by others. Beginning rst in the urban
upper-classes, other-directedness has moved nally into the broad reaches
of modern society. Education, leisure, a service economy, smaller families,
stable population, and more permissive parenting are emblematic of the
other-directed social order. The peer group becomes more important to the
child, the family less. Contemporaries are the source of direction. Children

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 The Community of the School

are increasingly inuenced by friends and the mass media. Behavior is not
patterned by rules and practice (etiquette) or by inner controls, but by close
attention to (and sensitivity to) the actions and wishes of others. Modern
man has an insatiable need for approval. “The family is no longer a closely
knit unit to which [the child] early becomes attentive. In these respects
the other-directed person resembles the tradition-directed person: both
live in a group milieu and lack the inner-directed person’s capacity to go
it alone” (Riesman, 1961, p. 25).
Let us agree with Riesman that the three categories of social character—
tradition-directed, inner-directed, and outer-directed—exist in varying
degrees within each individual and are singularly more prominent among
members of various cultures, sub-cultures and communities today. That
being the case, it is not surprising that contemporary social critics see
evidence of excessive individualism (selshness), familial and cultural
disadvantage, and valueless, rudderless youth.

Communitarianism
In the 1980s, James S. Coleman and his colleagues wrote a series of books
and articles based on an extensive study of public and private schools.
Coleman demonstrated that Catholic schools were more effective than
public schools with children of all socioeconomic backgrounds. The Catholic
schools spent less money per student but achieved higher test scores
and lower drop-out rates. The fact that Catholic schools obtained these
impressive results even in inner-city neighborhoods where students were
typically non-Catholic and from low socioeconomic, black and Hispanic
backgrounds showed that the Catholic school success was due neither to
the religious nor the socioeconomic background of its students. Instead,
the success was due to conditions of the schools. Catholic schools nurtured
a cohesive sense of community that included adults as well as children.
“All these results emphasize the importance of the embeddedness of young
persons in the enclaves of adults most proximate to them, rst and most
prominently the family and second, a surrounding community of adults”
(Coleman & Hoffer, 1987, p. 229).
In a 1982 study of 54 inner-city private schools (mostly Catholic), James
Cibulka, Timothy O’Brien and Donald Zewe attributed success of poor
children (academic and behavioral) to the “sense of community that existed
among faculty, students and parents” (p. 13). They found that successful
schools placed great emphasis on parent-teacher communication, sought
and valued parents’ opinions, and supported parental priorities relative to
children’s intellectual and moral development.
Robert Bellah, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, assembled a research
team and commenced to interview Americans of every stripe before

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THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

publishing their ndings in 1985 in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and

Commitment in American Life. Interspersed with the case-study vignettes of
ordinary Americans, the Bellah team cast a manifesto of communitarianism,
deriving its philosophical perspective largely from Tocqueville. It was
Tocqueville who used the term “habits of the heart” to describe the mores
of family life, religious tradition, and participation in local politics that
contributed to a unique American character (Bellah, 1985, p. vii). It was also
Tocqueville who wrote with a mixture of awe and anxiety about American
individualism, and Bellah captured this Tocquevillian angst to thread
through his treatise a fear of rampant individualism. Bellah’s call for
community is his proposition of a cure for Riesman’s inner-directed,
individualistic, asocial man.
For Amitai Etzioni, the threat of excessive individualism is real, but so
is the predominant other-directedness he sees in our society. Etzioni has
echoed Bellah’s clarion call for community from the perspective of a student
of formal organizations. He has added intellectual muscle to a growing
communitarian movement. Etzioni advocates “responsive communities,”
characterized by non-coercive affirmation of values, approximating
Riesman’s notion of autonomy. A community must be bound by some
coherent set of values, but the community must not impose values (as would
a tradition-directed culture in Riesman’s anaylsis); rather, a community
must form freely around a set of values and include members persuaded of
the validity of those values (Etzioni, 1991).
Thomas Sergiovanni (1994) resurrected the "gemeinschaft and gesellschaft”
interpretation of the nineteenth-century German sociologist, Ferdinand
Tönnies, and applied it to education. Sergiovanni called for a paradigm shift;
schools should be thought of as communities rather than organizations.
The culture of a school, its gemeinschaft, could foster trust, cooperation,
intimacy, and responsibility—all necessary in opposition to the societal
tendency toward gesellschaft, the scientic-managerial model of control
through impersonal rules and hierarchies. Sergiovanni’s view of community
was organic and collective, in contrast to the emphasis on individually-
selected associations advocated by Cobb, Coleman, and others.

Social Capital
James S. Coleman deserves credit for expanding upon our understanding
of social capital through his research and writing, making it a topic of
genuine scholarly inquiry. Looking for the determining ingredients of
an economically healthy society, economists isolated physical capital
and human capital—tools and training—as the engines of economic
vitality. Coleman and others added social capital—the network of norms,
obligations, expectations, and trust that forms among people who associate
with one another and share common values. Applying the concept to

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 The Community of the School

childrearing, Coleman explained: “What I mean by social capital in the

raising of children is the norms, the social networks, and the relationships
between adults and children that are of value for the child’s growing up.
Social capital exists within the family, but also outside the family, in the
community” (Coleman, 1987, p. 36).
Social capital emerged in the 1990s as a philosophical linchpin in
communitarian proposals to solve a range of social, educational, and
economic problems. Robert Putnam’s 1995 article, “Bowling Alone:
America’s Declining Social Capital,” combined a well-stated treatise with
an apt and memorable title, and became a mostly lauded but also highly
debated exposition of the detrimental ripple-effects of declining social
capital in America. Putnam, a Harvard professor of International Affairs,
derived his notions of the efcacy of social capital rst from studies of
regional differences in government effectiveness in Italy. Putnam found
that the effectiveness of government agencies was greater in the north
of Italy than in the south, and he posited that a cause of this difference
was the unequal distribution of social capital evidenced in the north’s
greater propensity for voluntary associations—voter turnout, newspaper
readership, membership in choral societies and football clubs. Because
people were more inclined to associate with one another, face-to-face,
through groups that cut horizontal swaths across social strata, they
developed a greater sense of trust in and obligation to people beyond their
kinship group. Thus, their civic engagement was more active; their ability
to cooperate more advanced.
Applying this analysis to the United States, Putnam found that from
1960 to the mid-1990s (but especially in the rst half of that time span),
voter turnout declined, church attendance dropped, and membership in
voluntary groups such as PTA, Boy Scouts, Red Cross, service organizations,
fraternal societies, and labor unions ebbed sharply. Putnam’s most poignant
example of this reduction in civic engagement (and the concomitant
possibility for developing social capital) was the fact that while the number
of individual bowlers increased 10% between 1980 and 1993, the number
of bowlers in leagues declined by 40%. Thus, the trend was toward a
more individualistic approach to bowling, and “bowling alone” became a
synecdoche for a larger social trend. Putnam pointed to a corresponding
decline in Americans’ level of trust in each other, in government, and in
other institutions as a consequence of (and contributor to) their retreat from
social and civic engagement.
While participation in local, face-to-face associations was in decline,
Americans were more likely to belong to mass organizations, such as AARP
or professional and political-interest groups, that required little personal
connection among members. Asking why Americans were withdrawing
from secondary group association and moving toward tertiary groups

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THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

that were more remote and less demanding of time, Putnam suggested
several causes: 1) the movement of women into the labor force, 2) mobility,
3) fewer marriages, more divorces, fewer children, 4) the replacement
of locally-owned and operated business by multinational corporations,
and 5) the privatization and individualization of entertainment through
technological changes (television replaced the movie theatre which replaced
vaudeville). His most convincing argument may have been his linkage
of new modes of entertainment, which increasingly allow for solitary
experience at the expense of social engagement.
In their report, Becoming an Adult in a Changing Society (1987), James
S. Coleman and Torsten Husén described three phases of family-school
relationships that correspond with three levels of economic development. In
Phase I, the family lives at a subsistence level, relying on children for work.
Phase I families limit the growth of the child, and the school’s role is to free
the child from his family and expand the possibilities for his development.
In Phase II, the industrial economy, the goals of the family and the school
converge, with both institutions seeking the improvement of the child’s
ultimate economic situation. In Phase III, post-industrial afuence, parents
view childrearing as an impediment to the pursuits of their adult lives and
invest little time and energy in the development of their children. They
expect the school to fill the void. This “hiring of professionals” to
provide programmatic and therapeutic surrogates for the nurturing and
educative practices of extended families and close communities is a further
explanation of how social capital can decline, even among the educated
and afuent classes.
Amitai Etzioni (1993) explained how the formation of social capital
within families, traditionally the greatest engine for its formation, is in
jeopardy because of the reduced amount of time many children spend with
parents. Etzioni explained:

The fact is that parenting cannot be carried out over the

phone, however well meaning and loving the calls may be.
It requires physical presence. The notion of ‘quality time’
(not to mention ‘quality phone calls’) is a lame excuse for
parental absence; it presupposes that bonding and education
can take place in brief time bursts, on the run. Quality time
occurs within quantity time. As you spend time with one’s
children—shing, gardening, camping, or ‘just’ eating a
meal—there are unpredictable moments when an opening
occurs and education takes hold (Etzioni, 1993, p. 57).

Dana Mack (1997) provided a cogent analysis of changes in family life

that parallel the trends in society, diminishing the social capital even within

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 The Community of the School

the most basic primary group. Mack’s critique varied from that of Putnam
and others in that it found fault with a cloying insistence on articial and
externally-imposed allegiance to the group. Mack’s perspective harkened
back to Riesman, showing alarm at the educationist’s disregard for inner-
directedness. This approach varied from the Coleman-Putnam emphasis
on social capital, but it did not contradict it. Coleman wrote of the benets
of social capital as an asset to the individual within the context of rational
choice theory. Putnam stressed the voluntary selection of associations
rather than the contrived imposition of social bonds as the threshold to the
accumulation of social capital.
Mack challenged education’s mimicry of corporate models, as had
Sergiovanni, but Mack was more concerned with the imposition of other-
directedness than with the remoteness of an organizational mentality.
Mack wrote:

It is no accident that the way schools manage kids is

becoming increasingly difcult to distinguish from the way
corporations manage employees. . . . But there is a far more
widespread and spurious connection between educational
and industrial psychology today—the tendency of both to
rest on the assumption that human productivity is greatest
where the needs and interests of individuals are submerged
to the needs and interests of groups, and where the individual
is manipulated to adapt to the demands of group solidarity.
. . . In schools, the increasing preoccupation with group
psychodynamics and their ostensible relationship to personal
motivation and productivity is troubling” (Mack, 1997,
p. 143).

For children, social capital is a mediating variable, a consequence of

institutional (family, neighborhood, community, church) structures and
arrangements, and an asset banked and withdrawn in varying amounts.
In the end, the wealth of social capital available to an individual child, and
that child’s ability to take advantage of this potential benet, contribute to
that child’s success in school and in life.

Families and Schools: The Curriculum of the Home

Herbert J. Walberg (1984) summarized the research on the family’s impact
on learning. Walberg justied changes in education practices by asserting
education’s connection to national economic development, and he did more
than ask parents for their cooperation; he contended that schools should
take the initiative in establishing partnerships with the home. “Research

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THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

shows that both home conditions that are conducive to learning and
the relationship of the home to the school have deteriorated in recent
decades, but school/home partnership programs can bring about dramatic
improvements,” Walberg stated (1984, p. 400). Walberg claimed not only
that the home environment strongly affects a child’s learning; he proclaimed
that schools could influence the home environment by establishing
partnerships with families.
A quarter-century of research has convinced most educators that
inuences of the home weigh heavily on a child’s achievement in school.
Dissection of family life has produced various laundry lists of characteristics
of an optimal home environment. Schools and other organizations are
teaching parents to put into practice the components of family life that
we call the “curriculum of the home.” This curriculum does not consist of
subject matter but of patterns of habit formation and attitude development
that prepare a child for academic learning and sustain the child through the
years of schooling. The curriculum of the home “predicts academic learning
twice as well as the socioeconomic status of families. This curriculum
includes informed parent/child conversations about everyday events,
encouragement and discussion of leisure reading, monitoring and joint
analysis of televiewing, deferral of immediate gratications to accomplish
long-term goals, expressions of affection and interest in children’s academic
and personal growth . . . .” (Walberg, 1984, p. 400).
Joyce L. Epstein (1987) reiterated the idea that schools should take the
initiative in procuring parent participation in the child’s schooling. Epstein
masterfully summarized the research connecting parent involvement to
effective education. She then set down specic actions that administrators,
particularly principals, could take to enhance parent participation.
“Administrators can help teachers successfully involve parents by
coordinating, managing, supporting, funding, and recognizing parent
involvement” (Epstein, 1987, p. 133).
Programs to “involve” parents proliferated during the 1980s, seeking to
improve student learning by bolstering the curriculum of the home, and
engaging parents in the educational development of their children. James
Comer, Dorothy Rich, and Joyce Epstein were among the education leaders
who provided practical transitions from research to implementation. A
meta-analysis by Wang, Haertel, and Walberg (1993) found home and
community influences among the strongest contributors to academic
attainment. Especially powerful were the inuences of the family—the
daily patterns of family life that encouraged learning and schoolwork.
Various studies amplied this message by asserting its validity in particular
settings and for specific school populations. Yap and Enoki (1995),
for example, studied the effects of parental involvement efforts on the

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 The Community of the School

academic achievement of Chapter 1 students in Hawaii and concluded

that parent programs that focused on involvement in the instructional
process, increased home-based parental activities to reinforce student
learning, and raised literacy skills of parents most directly impacted
learning outcomes.
The particular family behaviors that contribute to school learning can
be neatly summarized; they surround the activities of reading (including
parent-child discussion of reading), parent-child discussions of school and
learning, homework and other study at home, and expectations, structures
and routines regarding work, punctuality, and daily living (Davé, 1963).
For some families, these behaviors come naturally; for others, they may
be learned and adopted. The school, properly perceived as a community,
can take the lead in making clear the kind of home environment that best
supports school learning and providing support for parents who wish
to align their family life with these behavioral correlates with school
success.
Despite a plethora of evidence that the home environment directly and
powerfully affects school performance, and substantial, research-based
programmatic efforts to improve home environments in ways that will
benet children’s learning, results have often been disappointing. Recent
studies and hypotheses have pointed to mutations in traditional family
structures as a reason for the intractability of home environments. David
Blankenhorn (1995), for example, specically targets the absence of fathers
from family life—through higher divorce rates, dramatically increased
numbers of out-of-wedlock births, and neglect—as a change in family
make-up that has produced a number of social ills, including greater
challenges to schools.
Dana Mack draws upon the societal critique to explain pressures on
families that make their attention to the advantageous patterns of behavior
difcult: “. . . parents see the decline of social supports and the breakdown
of families as symptoms of a larger phenomenon: the sudden and rapid
decay of those stable social values that once fostered a protective culture of
childhood” (Mack, 1997, p. 17). This unhinging of culture is reminiscent of
Reisman’s description of the shift away from a tradition-directed context
for childrearing.
Thomas Lickona sees the same hamstringing of the family by larger forces
at work in society, and singles out the school as the institution most likely
to rectify the resulting loss to children. “Escalating moral problems in soci-

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THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

ety—ranging from greed and dishonesty to violent crime to self-destructive

behaviors such as drug abuse and suicide—are bringing about a new
consensus. Now, from all across the country, from private citizens and public
organizations, from liberals and conservatives alike, comes a summons to the
schools: Take up the role of moral teachers of our children” (Lickona, 1991,
p. 4-5). The school, then, is charged not only with the task of improving
the home environment by inuencing and educating parents, but with
supplanting (or at least heavily supplementing) the home as a purveyor
of morality and civil behavior.

Building Community In Schools

We return to Clifford W. Cobb to make the case for community in schools:
“An effective school has to be a community in which personal relationships
based on trust outweigh impersonal rules. A community based on shared
vision and close personal interactions is not a frill; it is a necessity”
(Cobb, 1991, p. 23). Cobb’s placement of community in opposition to
“impersonal rules” is a slap at the managerial and bureaucratic operation
of public schools.
Sergiovanni amplies Putnam’s condemnation of the corrosive effects of
social norms that emphasize individualism at the expense of more altruistic
commitments. He also echoes Cobb’s assertion that school must be a
place of community (without, however, endorsing Cobb’s insistence that
effective associations must be voluntary—an argument that supports school
vouchers). Sergiovanni’s school community is bound by shared values,
requiring that its constituents engage in processes to articulate, dene, and
rene their educational values.
A special contribution of a school community from Coleman’s perspective
is the possibility of achieving intergenerational closure (1990). When the
adults who care about a group of children are themselves not in association
with one another, as is typically the occasion in modern society, the
children’s inuence on one another is heightened and intergenerational
transmission of the culture is stymied. As a practical example, it is common
for children to sit next to each other in a classroom each day for several
hours, week after week, and month after month, and for the parents of those
children to have no association with one another apart from the school and
little contact with one another in connection with the school. In fact, these
adults may not know one another, even though their children are growing
up together and strongly impacting each other’s lives. A school community
would draw parents into greater contact with each other, achieving an
intergenerational closure. The benets are twofold: 1) children are known
by, cared for, and watched out for by a larger number of adults, and 2)
parents of a group of children maintain communication among themselves,

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 The Community of the School

sharing standards, norms, and experiences of childrearing.

Paul J. Baker (1991) sees a school community as a microcosm of the
community at large, incorporating four familiar institutions: a) the rm
(the discipline of a production system with highly-skilled workers), b) the
family (a caring and supportive group of adults who care about the children
and children who respect the adults), c) the fair (members of the school
community coming together to celebrate their best work), and d) the forum
(a public meeting place encouraging informed dialogue and intellectual
inquiry). Along with this reection of familiar institutions is a broadening of
the context of learning beyond the schoolhouse doors. “Reading should not
be limited to individual pursuits of students performing daily assignments
according to routine classroom schedules. Reading needs a broader social
context offering endless opportunities for shared learning among students,
parents, and teachers” (Baker & Moss, 1993, p. 24).

Academic and Social Competence

Research has identied key competencies of resilient children, including
social and intellectual competence, realistic goal setting, planning, and
resourcefulness. These are not innate traits, nor are they acquired only
inferentially. They are abilities that can be taught and learned within the
contexts of family, school, and community (Wang, Haertel & Walberg, 1997).
The Alliance for Achievement process for building school communities
(Redding, 1990) was developed rst in inner-city Chicago schools to provide
a larger context for children to acquire academic and social skills. This
larger context was described as a school community, where the people
intimately attached to a school—teachers, staff, students, and families of
students—share goals for the academic and social learning of children,
and communicate and associate with one another in furtherance of their
shared educational goals (Redding, 1996). The inclusion in Alliance for
Achievement of social learning (or character development) alongside a
focus on the building blocks of academic learning, such as reading and
study habits, relied upon research demonstrating especially the inuence of
the home on school learning (Davé, 1963; Walberg, 1984; Kellaghan, Sloane,
Alvarez & Bloom, 1993) and the necessity of including social learning as a
goal of the school-home nexus (Weissberg, et al., 1991, 1997).
To enhance academic and social learning within a “community”
context, the school rst identies specic, alterable behaviors by parents,
teachers and students that affect learning and then seeks to use the
attributes of community—face-to-face association, trust, obligations, and
expectations—to encourage members of the community to behave in
the desired manner. Etzioni (1991) and Sergiovanni (1994) have written

13
THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

Common Experience
When we think back to childhood, recalling experiences that best dene
our family, we most likely conjure up images of dinner-table conversation;
the nudging, squirming, laughing, and bickering in a vacation-bound car;
Sunday mornings linked together in a church pew; dark hours huddled
around a sick-bed; holiday routines; or Friday nights with popcorn and
television and dim lights in a warm room. We think of the ritualistic
experiences that drew all members of the family together. We think of
our common experiences.
Every group of people denes itself in much the same way, through
junctures in time and place that are overlaid with special purpose. Groups
are dened by what they hold in common and are strengthened by shared
memories.
In the one-room, country schoolhouse, the entire educational experience
was “common.” One teacher taught one curriculum, and students
progressed through the curriculum by virtue of mastering its content.
Older children tutored younger children in the work they had themselves
previously mastered. Everyone paused for lunch at the same time and
sledded together at recess on the slope outside the back door. As rooms
were added to the school, children were divided by age and moved by
lock-step progression through the grade levels. The common experience
of the school was replaced by the common experience of the classroom.
Unlike the one-room school, the class was segregated by age and sometimes
by gender or ability.
To the extent that the teachers of various grade levels remained in touch
with one another, the curriculum remained “common,” even if students
were now divided. When enrollments grew and each grade level required
more than one teacher, another level of disconnection resulted. The third-
grade teacher now needed to be in communication with the second- and
fourth-grade teachers as well as other third-grade teachers. Then some
teachers began to specialize in subject areas, so that one teacher now
taught science and another taught reading. Further separation. As schools
recognized that some children were falling behind the lock-step, they
created multi-track systems that lowered standards for slow children. The
slowest children were often “pulled out” of the regular classroom for work
with a remedial teacher. When schools noticed that brighter students sat
bored much of the time, these students were “pulled out” for enrichment
courses that often had little to do with a child’s progression through the basic
curriculum. So, instead of moving the bright third-grader into fourth-grade
mathematics, the gifted program taught the child to make papier-maché
dinosaurs or solve brain-teasers, adding yet another dimension to the
curriculum. Rather than charting individual paths through a common

14
 The Community of the School

curriculum, the curriculum and its tests of mastery were fractured.

But how can a school maintain the same standards for all children when
children vary markedly in their ability to learn? Doesn’t the school, in
fact, need more individualization, more differentiation of curricula, more
tracking of students into homogeneous groups? The answer to these
questions is twofold: (1) There is little evidence that tracking results in
greater learning (see Oakes, 1985); and (2) Differences in student ability
are best addressed, not by varying standards, but by varying levels of
support and amounts of time devoted to meeting the standards (see
Bloom, 1976).

Restoring Connections in the Modern School

Many schools are now seeking ways to reconnect elements of the school
that have grown apart. Instructional alignment and criterion-based tests
are two of the tools they are using. Instructional alignment is an effort to
align desired outcomes with measures of prociency, curricular content,
and methods of instruction; in aligning instruction, schools weave together
webs of connection from class to class and grade level to grade level.
Criterion-based tests help by establishing benchmarks for mastery. At their
best, criterion-based tests establish a common curriculum—each tested
criterion is a learning objective. But tests of mastery are the third step in
unifying a curriculum. The rst step is to ask the difcult question, “What
do we expect children to know and do?” This is the question of value
in education. Once we have determined what we value, what we want
children to know and do, we order these elements of knowledge and skill
into logical sequences. Then we move to the second step—planning various
instructional routes to enable children to come to know and do. And nally,
we ask the question, “How do we know when the child has mastered the
objective?” At this step, a test is created, linking each test item to an original
“know” or “do” objective.
By test, we need not think only in terms of pencil and paper exams.
Especially, we need not think only in terms of the typical multiple-choice
tests that assess a child’s ability to recall facts. A criterion-based test
could be a portfolio of work that demonstrates a child’s mastery. It could
be an oral examination or recitation. It could be a project. But it must
be explicitly connected to the original element of “knowing” or “doing”
that we value.
Studies of productivity in education seek to “identify variables in the
learning process that have the highest potential pay-off for improving
student achievement” (Parkerson, et al., 1984, p. 638). Productivity is the
ratio of cost to outcome, and outcome is usually measured with achievement
tests. Productivity analyses presume that knowledge and skill measured

15
THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

by achievement tests are the most valuable aims of schooling. Questions of

productivity address the efciencies of a system of education. They do not
necessarily probe matters of educational value. Questions of educational
value seek assurance that we are efciently teaching children to know
and do the right things. Arriving at a consensus on the “right things”
for students to know and do is a vital part of reconnecting disparate
components of the school experience.

School-Wide Instructional Strategies

In the “stand and deliver” days, the teacher directly taught children to
know something, then each child stood before the class to demonstrate that
he or she had indeed mastered this bit of learning. The teacher received
an immediate understanding of how well each student had mastered the
material. Classroom recitation, in its most primitive form, was a brutal
way to expose slower students to embarrassment. But modications of this
approach, combined with Socratic inquiry, bring a classroom alive with a
think-learn-show cycle. THINK: The teacher asks probing questions or sets
up a line of inquiry by piquing the students’ curiosity. LEARN: Then a new
set of facts or concepts is introduced or is distilled from the conversation.
SHOW: Next children are asked to demonstrate their grasp of these new
facts or concepts. Their rst demonstration of mastery comes by way of
their participation in the dialogue of the classroom, which also gives the
teacher immediate feedback on the success of her approach. If children are
not grasping the information, a new tack can be taken.
One new tack is to introduce a cooperative learning exercise. Children
can be grouped to help one another learn. This form of heterogenous
grouping places children of differing learning speeds together, so that the
faster students can assist the slower students and have their own learning
reinforced in the process. Some children may require additional time with
the concept; children learn at different speeds. Ultimately, each child must
demonstrate his or her understanding through verbal response, written
response, or completion of a project or assignment. This nal demonstration
is the test of the child’s mastery of the objective (criterion) to which the
test was originally linked.
The think-learn-show cycle incorporates the value-based, teacher-
directed approach of direct instruction. It allows for cooperative learning
experiences. It provides varied paths to understanding and flexible
amounts of time that are the key principles of mastery learning. When
this instructional process is matched to a coherent, connected curriculum
and criterion-referenced tests, the school’s learning experience becomes
one giant common experience for its students. Grade level to grade level,
classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher, a consistent instructional

16
 The Community of the School

strategy, such as think-learn-show, forms a unifying, school-wide common

experience. Much that was good about the one-room schoolhouse is
reconstructed by adopting a school-wide instructional strategy and training
teachers in its application.
Most teachers would read this description of think-learn-show and
this rudimentary explication of direct instruction, cooperative learning, and
mastery learning and conclude that this is what every teacher does every day.
So where’s the beef? What more is needed to make everyday instruction an
effective common experience? What is needed is coordination, integration,
and alignment of the curriculum, instruction, and assessment across grade
levels and from classroom to classroom. This requires time for planning
and coordination that most school schedules do not allow. It also requires
a great deal of organization and information processing that computers
only now make feasible.
Computers can reconnect the school in ways that make the one-room
schoolhouse an apt analogy. They make instructional alignment and
criterion-based testing manageable. They also help individualize learning
paths and analyze student-learning data. Placing computers in schools,
however, has little effect in unifying the curriculum if more time is not
provided for teachers to meet. Placing computers in schools is of little
constructive consequence if the computers merely divide students further
by sorting them into isolated workstations within classrooms that have
already sorted children by age and possibly by ability. The more computers
are able to bring coherence to the curriculum, the more teachers will need
time together and students will need cooperative experiences. Association
of people is the counterbalance to the isolating tendencies that come with
computer efciencies.

School-Level Decision-Making
Common experience for a school presupposes school-level decision-
making. Two complementary traditions in American education run
contrary to school-level decision-making: a political bureaucracy that
emanates from the state and projects downward through the school district
to the school, and the insular autonomy of each classroom cell within
the school. These traditions are complementary because by robbing
teachers of a strong voice in the operation of the school, the centralized
bureaucracy encourages teachers to hang on to the sole province of their
authority—the classroom.
Teachers are not the only ones deprived of school-level power in the
centralized system; parents are given little formal function in school-level
decision-making and thus demonstrate the behavior of a disenfranchised
constituency. They are either completely detached from the school

17
THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

or frantically agitated in protest. The most optimistic among them

cling jealously to the small corner of inuence found in parent-teacher
organizations and fund-raising committees. Both detachment and
agitation are the results of frustration with formal structures that allow
parents little signicant role in a
system dominated by certied experts and bureaucratic regulation.
Lest we assume that the principal holds the reins of authority in the
traditional school system, we must consider the drastically proscribed
turf of decision-making reserved for the principal. The principal is the
bureaucracy’s functionary in the school, the rule-keeper, bean-counter,
and master of protocol. Without mechanisms for shared, school-level
decision-making, a principal can only break from the mundane tasks
of mid-management by donning the armor of rogue knight, a position
ultimately as futile as that of the bureaucratic headdrone.
With school-level decision-making, everyone in the school gains in
power and inuence. To achieve this new power, however, everyone in the
school must rst sacrice smaller but more secure efdoms. The teachers
must give up autonomy of their classrooms; the parents must disavow
the comfort of detachment and the self-gratifying rancor of complaint
unfettered by responsibility; and the principal must relinquish the mantle of
bureaucracy’s low priest or the silver bullet of education’s lone ranger.
Shared decision-making does not mean that everyone shares in every
decision. Expertise rightfully carries its privilege, and authority must be
assigned in equal proportion to responsibility. The art of shared decision-
making is in designing internal structures and procedures that include the
right people in the right decisions, provide for representation of signicant
constituencies, and foster a sense of ownership on the part of administrators,
staff, teachers, parents, and students.
Edward B. Fiske, in his book, Smart Schools, Smart Kids, says that
“decentralization brings a sea change” (1991, p. 51). Old ways, the habits
of a lifetime, and manners of thinking are overturned. Filling the void
requires training, talking, planning, and patience. “Shared decision-making
is clearly no panacea. . . . Its signicance for the overhauling of American
public education lies not in what it guarantees but in what it makes possible”
(Fiske, 1991, p. 61). Among the possibilities created by shared decision-
making are common educational experiences, the dening touchstones
of effective schooling.

School-Wide Ritual and Tradition

When we think of school tradition, we usually think of team nicknames,
mascots, team colors, ght songs, pep rallies, cheerleaders, pom pons, and
marching bands. Athletic events come to mind because they are among

18
 The Community of the School

the very few experiences that students in a school hold in common. All
students, regardless of age, grade level, gender, or academic performance, rise
to sing the same ght song, call the same colors their own, and cheer for the
same team. Can we say the same for any element of the academic program?
Probably not. It would be healthy to infuse the academic program with the
enthusiasm that ritual and tradition generate in the athletic sphere. Certain
experiences rooted in the educational values of a school community could
be common to all students in a school.
Raster Elementary School in Chicago has attempted to wed tradition to
the school community’s educational value of reading. The school holds
an annual “reading pep rally” with cheerleaders ring up the assembled
student body with chants attesting to the virtues of reading. Students
perform skits from their favorite books. The rally launches a school-wide
reading frenzy with awards presented to students for reading certain
numbers of books. The halls are decorated with book reports and drawings
of themes from books.
At Kingston School in Kingston, Illinois, every student in the school
learns the principles of debate. The students then attend an assembly at
which members of the Northern Illinois University debate team engage in
an intramural contest, explaining the techniques of debating. Finally, the
students enter into debates with one another, leading to winning debaters.
But the process does not stop there. The winning debaters take on parents
before an all-school assembly. The topics of the debate with parents are
typical areas of family disagreement, such as bedtime hours. In this debate,
the students argue the side that parents would usually take and parents
argue the side that students would typically argue. The fervor generated
over this school-wide exercise in communication and critical thinking is
similar to that found at homecoming football games.
At Peirce Elementary School in Chicago, every student in the school
is expected to complete homework, to arrive for school on time, and
to attend school regularly. When students meet these high standards,
they are awarded Peirce Bucks—play money exchangeable for goodies
at the school store. Harris Bank supports the common experience with
plenty of goodies.
All students at Northwest Elementary School in LaSalle, Illinois, receive
and use assignment notebooks to record their daily assignments. Students
at each grade level read a common set of books that are incorporated into the
lessons of every teacher. These are traditional, school-wide, value-based
common experiences.
Every school has a name, and every school name provides opportunities
for common educational experiences. One would expect that the students
at Lincoln School would be experts on the life of Abraham Lincoln and that
Lincoln themes would run through their every activity. Davis Elementary

19
THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

School in Chicago was named for the founder of the American Medical
Association, and Davis’s school community council has selected “a healthy
mind and body” as one of its goals for every student. The school ties this
goal to the special identity of its namesake, promoting school-wide activities
on health and the medical profession.
Riverton Middle School in Riverton, Illinois, organizes all of its students
and teachers and parent volunteers into a community clean-up corps on
Responsibility Day. Students comb the town for debris, lling garbage
bags and scrubbing the town clean. Townspeople watch in appreciation as
young people share this common experience while learning the meaning
of environmental responsibility.
At Alcott Elementary School in Chicago, students decorate the hall with
their own versions of what Michael Jordan might say about decency. They
practice courteous behavior, demonstrating their respect for each other in
a week-long celebration of good manners and thoughtfulness. A rousing
assembly caps the week.
At Chicago’s Darwin Elementary School, one day each year is given
to guest readers. Celebrities, parents, and community members come to
school to read their favorite books to students. The entire school participates
in this traditional celebration of reading.
Every school team can be identied by its colors, its nickname, and
its mascot. Every school also holds the seeds of exciting traditions and
rituals related to its educational values. A little imagination is all that
is required.

Common Experience and Association

A school community, as opposed to a school operating with the traditional
structures of administrative hierarchy, teacher autonomy, and parental
detachment, is ideally poised to establish a cohesive, unied curriculum
and to employ teaching methods that are conducive to common experience.
Schools in the Alliance for Achievement Network build school communities
through a process that includes six components. Two of these components
are “common experience” and “association.” Common experience, in
the Alliance model, is achieved by connecting the elements of the school
program. Common experience is a bias against the tendencies in schools
to divide and separate children, to lower standards and expectations for
some students, and to tolerate a curriculum that is disjointed—unattached to
values of education, practices of instruction, or the measures of outcome. Of
course some division and separation is necessary, but a school community
is cautious in dividing children, seeking instead to nd programs, policies,
and activities that are inclusive. Common educational experience is a
tendency toward connection rather than separation; it is a predilection for

20
 The Community of the School

common standards, common curriculum, and common expectations for all

students. It is the glue of school community, the central, unifying core that
denes the character of a specic school community.
The concepts of association and common experience are easily confused
because both deal with connections. In association, people are connected; in
a common experience, elements of school policy or program are connected
and made applicable to all students. Association means face-to-face
interaction of people for purposes related to the educational values of the
school community. Common experience means unity of policies, standards,
practices, programs, or activities for all students. Common experience
also means explicit connection of the intentions, practices, and outcomes
of the school program.
A school may adopt a policy that all students will read aloud each school
day. This common educational experience may be achieved in a variety
of ways, some of which may lend themselves to associations of otherwise
unconnected school community members. Perhaps the students in one
class read to each other; in another class students may read to surrogate
parents; at another time, older students may read to students in a lower
grade. Each of these applications of a common policy is an opportunity
for association.
Not all common experiences produce associations. One school in the
Alliance for Achievement Network implemented a Homework Honor Roll,
a policy whose standards applied to all children in the school. All students,
regardless of grade level or ability, received homework assignments.
All students who completed all of their homework assignments were
recognized on the Homework Honor Roll. Their names were displayed on
a bulletin board in the central hallway. This common policy involved no
association but it dened a special feature of this particular school—home-
work was important, everybody received homework assignments, and
every student who completed all of his or her assignments for the week was
recognized on the Homework Honor Roll.
Another Alliance school, Bell Elementary School in Chicago, serves as
an attendance center for deaf children, a magnet school for gifted children,
and a neighborhood school for all children who reside within its proximity.
The school community council at Bell decided that all children in the school
should learn sign language. The teachers of the deaf children developed a
curriculum to teach sign language to all children in the school, a common
experience that unied a diverse student body and helped dene the special
character of the school. In learning sign language, new associations were
also encouraged. Deaf children now conversed with children from the
gifted program and children in the neighborhood school using the common
language they had acquired. Teachers of hearing children learned the

21
THE COMMUNITY OF THE SCHOOL

special communication tool of their colleagues who taught hearing-impaired

children. At Bell School, a common experience fostered association of
children who otherwise were often separated.

Types of Common Experience

A common experience includes or involves all students in a school and
is related to one or more educational values of the school community. The
common experience may be the result of a policy, a program, an event, an
instructional strategy, or a curricular thread. Examples include:

Common Experience as Policy

♦ At our school, all students receive homework assignments.
♦ At our school, everyone “drops everything” to read a book at 10:00 every
Tuesday and Thursday.

Common Experience as Event

♦ At our school, all students participate in Courtesy Week.
♦ At our school, all students participate in Guest Reader Day.

Common Experience as School-wide Instructional Strategy

♦ At our school, all teachers are trained in and use the think-learn-show
method.
♦ At our school, all teachers assist students with their assignment
notebooks.

Common Experience as Curricular Thread

♦ At our school, all students read the same body of books and every teacher
incorporates these books into their lessons.
♦ At our school, all students progress through a common math curriculum,
moving at individual paces determined by their mastery.

The common experience component of the Alliance for Achievement

model is one way to make connections in a school community. Making
connections in schools also includes:

1. Greater school-level decision-making,

2. Mechanisms to arrive at a consensus as to educational values, the
specic aims of education—what children should know and do,
3. Time for teachers to meet to articulate curricular and instructional
strategies,
4. Replacing the lock-step progression of students through grade levels
with progression based on mastery,

22
 The Community of the School

5. Integrating students across age and ability levels,

6. Employing cooperative learning and other strategies that bring
students together,
7. Adopting school-wide instructional strategies, and
8. Creating school-wide ritual and tradition related to educational
values and themes.

School improvement initiatives invariably begin with a process through

which the school seeks common ground and a sense of central purpose.
Someone adopts a mission statement. Or a vision statement. Then a plan
is developed that ows from the statement of central purpose. Promoting
common experience in a school is a behavioral extension of the verbal task
of adopting mission statements. Common experiences dene the meaning,
the distinct character, and the central purpose of a school community.
They also become the memories that dene for adults what it meant to be
a student at a particular school.

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