Building Community

The Neglected Element in School Renewal

by Eric Schaps
Developmental Studies Center

This article was submitted in draft form and subsquentily published in NAESP’s Principal magazine in September, 2000.

Download/Save printable version now: building_community.pdf

Draft 5/13/00

A powerful prescription for improving schools has emerged from the past decade of research on school renewal. It has three elements:

• Promote high expectations for the progress of all students—academically, ethically, socially, and emotionally.
• Make sure all students get challenging, engaging opportunities to learn.
• Create opportunities for all students to develop a “sense of community” in school—a sense of connection to adults and peers, and a sense that they contribute to and influence the daily life of the school.

Although easy to describe, the first two elements are quite difficult to put into place for the full range of students served by most schools. Putting them into effect requires concerted, continuing investment of a principal’s and faculty’s thought and effort. 

And it is easy to make mistakes along the way. “High expectations” easily can become vague and empty rhetoric, or can spawn unrealistically lofty standards that do little except punish large numbers of students. Charting the progress of each student is also a major task, involving collection of several kinds of data and careful, periodic analysis of those data.

Trickier still are the intricacies of providing all members of a diverse student body with an appropriately challenging, engaging curriculum. The pedagogical and organizational complexities of accomplishing this are daunting for even accomplished teachers.

In contrast, the third element, building students’ sense of community in school, is relatively easy to put into practice, especially in elementary schools. Elementary teachers work with one group of students for most of the school day, and so are well positioned to build close relationships with their students, to help build positive relationships among classmates, and to reach out to parents to establish home-school connections. Cross-age student relationships are also easily nurtured, through tutoring and ‘buddies’ programs. Student participation and input can be readily gained through cooperative groupings and class meetings.

Still the Poor Sister

Despite the feasibility of community building, it continues to be the focus that gets ignored most often in district-based and school-based priority setting and planning. I believe there are three major reasons that local school improvement plans tend to ignore community building.

The concept has not gotten nearly as much publicity in the mass media or in professional journals as, say, standards or vouchers. The concept doesn’t even have an agreed-upon label or definition as yet. It is often called “belonging in school” or “connectedness to school.” In my Center’s work, we use the term “sense of community” and we define it as having two major dimensions:

• A feeling among students of positive connection to their peers and to adults in the school, and
• a sense that they have a significant voice in at least some of the decision making and problem solving that occur in the ordinary course of classroom life (Battistich et al., 1997).

The second reason community building gets neglected is that few people as yet are aware of its proven, far-ranging benefits. How many superintendents know that high-community schools produce students who are:

• more ethical and caring,
• more socially adept,
• less inclined to engage in misconduct at school,
• and less prone to problem behaviors such as drug use and violence (Battistich et al., in press; Bryk & Driscoll, 1988; Hawkins et al., 1999; Schaps, 1999).

How many school board members know that students in high-community schools are:

• more academically motivated,
• enjoy school more,
• and have higher educational aspirations (Bryk & Driscoll, 1988; Solomon et al., in press)?

How many legislators know that building community helps to level the playing field for low income students and students of color, who typically experience much lower levels of connectedness in school than do their more affluent, Anglo counterparts (Battistich et al., 1995)? At a minimum, building community is a viable alternative to a shelf-full of categorical programs, because it bonds students to the constructive goals and values of the school, and thus promotes their healthy development.

The third reason that building community is neglected is probably the dominant one in these times of high-stakes testing. It is the growing tendency to regard the overriding, if not sole, purpose of schooling as promoting academic achievement, and to hold schools “accountable” via annual high-stakes testing. National, state, and local leaders may still pay some lip service to such educational goals as character formation, citizenship preparation, social and emotional learning, and appreciation of the arts. But what actually gets measured and honored these days is academic achievement, as assessed by norm-referenced tests and reported as a few one-, two-, or three-digit numbers. Most principals will attest—and the behavior of most realtors and homebuyers will confirm—that test scores are what matters in determining a school’s reputation.

 Consequently, in their understandable quest to be judged effective, many educators are narrowing their attention to actions that will produce immediate gains in test scores. They may be spending more time and energy teaching specific academic skills or generic test taking skills. They may be positioning their best teachers at the grade levels where tests are given. They may be exhorting students to try harder on testing day. And they may be working to attract students who are good test takers or to exempt the ones who test poorly.

Building community also can boost achievement, but not as quickly as intensive skills teaching or test preparation. James Comer (1980) found that in his pioneering work in community building in New Haven, dramatic academic gains did not materialize until he had worked intensively with his original schools for seven years. 

DSC’s last major evaluation study showed that, relative to students from comparison schools, students from high-community elementary schools did significantly better on standardized tests and had higher grade point averages. But these effects did not appear until those students were in 6th–8th grade—that is, until after they had gone on to middle school. Their elementary schools served these students well, but the credit may have accrued to the middle schools that inherited them.

So mounting evidence suggests that, in the long run, building community, when coupled with high expectations and an engaging, challenging curriculum, is a feasible and effective school renewal strategy. This strategy should be singularly attractive to educators who are concerned with promoting academic achievement over the long run, and simultaneously preparing students to be healthy, principled, and contributing citizens. Let’s hope that in these times of quick profits and immediate test score gains, there will be genuine opportunities for this strategy to be further tried and tested. If such opportunities can in fact be created, community building may someday receive the recognition that thus far has proven so elusive.

References

Battistich, V., Solomon, D., Kim, D., Watson, M. & Schaps, E. (1995). Schools as communities, poverty levels of student populations, and students’ attitudes, motives, and performance: A multilevel analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 627–658.

Battistich, V., Solomon, D., Watson, M. & Schaps, E. (1997). Caring school communities. Educational Psychologist, 32, 137–151.

Battistich, V., Schaps, E., Watson, M., Solomon, D. & Lewis, C. (in press). Effects of the Child Development Project on students’ drug use and other problem behaviors. Journal of Primary Prevention. [Editor's note: JPP published this paper October 2000, Vol. 21(1), pp. 75–99, and is available at the Journal's web site.]

Bryk, A. & Driscoll, M. (1988). The high school as community: Contextual influences and consequences for students and teachers. Madison: University of Wisconsin, National Center on Effective Secondary Schools.

Comer, J. (1980). School power: Implications of an intervention project. New York: Free Press, 1980. 

Hawkins, J. D., Catalano, R. F., Kosterman, R., Abbott, R., & Hill, K. G. (1999). Preventing adolescent health-risk behaviors by strengthening protection during childhood. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 153, 226–234.

Resnick, M. D., Bearman, P. S., Blum, R. W., Bauman, K. E., Harris, K. M., Jones, J., Tabor, J., Beuhring, T., Sieving, R. E., Shew, M., Ireland, M., Bearinger, L. H., & Udry, J. R. (1997). Protecting adolescents from harm: Findings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health. Journal of the American Medical Association, 278, 823–832.

Schaps, E. (1999). The Child Development Project: In search of synergy. Principal, 79, 22–24.

Solomon, D., Battistich, V., Watson, M., Schaps, E., & Lewis, C. (In press). A six-district study of educational change: Direct and mediated effects of the Child Development Project. Social Psychology of Education.