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Community Organizing Portrayed as Plus for City Schools

Grassroots organizing efforts to reform schools in seven urban districts are contributing to myriad improvements that include more-robust parental involvement, more-equitable distribution of funding to underserved schools, and better student-attendance rates and academic achievement, according to researchers from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

In Chicago, the researchers found, community organizers and parents who began pushing for better-qualified teachers in neighborhood schools helped create a new recruitment and training pipeline to prepare more African-American and Latino community members to teach in hard-to-staff schools.

Community organizing in south Los Angeles helped steer more than $150 million in bond money for repairs to high schools in high-need neighborhoods. Such activism also helped spearhead a successful campaign that persuaded leaders of the Los Angeles Unified School District to develop a college-preparatory curriculum for...