The Massachusetts Coalition was created as a vehicle for reformulating teacher training and increasing community involvement. The Coalition develops a wide variety of innovative practices that place future teachers in school and community settings in order to explore the interaction of theory and practice, and to test out dialogue-based models of institutional transformation. Its work has helped struggling urban schools, community organizations, colleges and universities to overcome their limitations and develop joint strategies for improving their campuses, their financing models and the quality of their teachers.
Higher education institutions in the United States are increasingly driven by market forces such as the amount of external grants raised by faculty and prestige maximization based on scholarly productivity and visibility. In spite of these pressures, higher education faculty can use external funding sources to build civic capacity by linking their activities with community-based organizations struggling to improve schools, health facilities, and employment prospects for historically disenfranchised populations. In this particular case, university-based teacher educators developed a state-wide coalition to reinvent teacher preparation by making it more school and community-based and more participatory for parents and community members. Such activities can make manifest the latent potential of universities to strengthen democratic participation and further social justice.
The Massachusetts Coalition developed a wide range of innovative practices that placed future teachers in school and community-settings to explore the interaction of theory and practice, test out dialogical models of institutional transformation, and develop teaching efficacy. The Coalition comprised seven colleges and universities (Boston College, Clark University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Lesley University, Northeastern University, and Wheelock College), eighteen urban schools in the cities of Boston, Springfield, and Worcester, and a dozen community-based organizations. Funded by a $7.2 million United States Department of Education grant, the Coalition enabled struggling urban schools, community-based organizations, and colleges and universities to overcome traditional boundaries and turf issues to develop conjoint strategies for improving schools and the quality of teachers who work within them.
Prepare future teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse populations.
Communicate effective strategies to future teachers for engaging with parents and other community stakeholders.
Develop collaborative and participatory teaching practices.
Transform teacher education by making it school and community-based
Transform teacher education by making it school and community-based. What has been done:
The Massachusetts Coalition held a wide range of conferences, workshops, and Summer Institutes to bring together a large number of school and community stakeholders to improve urban education and teacher quality.
With our funding lines, we hired teachers and parents to team-teach our college and university courses.
We also provided funding for professors to teach their courses on school sites and in community settings to increase their own knowledge about the real conditions in urban schools and neighborhoods.
As our knowledge base about urban schools expanded, the faculty found themselves developing greater solidarity with urban pupils and parents and began mapping out inventories of school and community assets that can improve education.
Some of the stronger urban schools in our networks became effective mentor schools for others and helped those schools to raise their test scores and to prepare and send more of their pupils on to colleges and universities.
Other schools found that their combined political clout helped them to try out new innovations and to develop practices that could be embedded in the teacher preparatory programs of colleges and universities.
Many of the parents and other community members in the Massachusetts Coalition developed their leadership ability and have decided to become teachers and to take on new leadership roles in their cities and in their educational systems.
Through their interactions with parents and higher education faculty, teachers began inquiring more purposefully into their teaching practices and asking more incisive questions about school practices that had always been "taken for granted" but in many ways did not seem to be in the best interests of the pupils.
Out of those teacher inquiry sessions teachers have assumed new leadership roles in their schools and in their partnerships with community-based organizations and higher education institutions.
The Massachusetts Coalition became a critical coalition for improving education by making it more responsive to urban communities that traditionally have been poorly served by our public school system. In a modest way, the Massachusetts Coalition radicalized our universities by making them more responsive to the needs of poor and working class citizens and immigrants who traditionally have been poorly served by our public schools.
The external evaluator, Abt Associates of Cambridge (Massachusetts) conducted a survey of 610 teachers in our 18 urban schools and asked those teachers to compare student teachers from the seven colleges and universities of the Massachusetts Coalition with student teachers educated in other colleges and universities. The results were the following:
The Abt report indicated that 44% of Coalition student teachers versus 34% of non-Coalition student teachers "took the initiative to communicate frequently with parents."
45% of Coalition student teachers versus 34% of non-Coalition student teachers were judged to be familiar with their pupils' neighborhoods.
46% of Coalition student teachers versus 30% of non-Coalition student teachers were found to be "very effective or effective" at "working with community members to support school and classroom learning."
Student achievement in all 18 of the Coalition schools went up in the time period from 1999 to 2005.
Coalition higher education institutions secured an additional $11 million in grant funding to build on and expand on the initial $7.2 million grant.
Other considerations:
The lead institution of the Coalition, Boston College, has been nominated for a "Best Practices Award for Effective Partnerships" with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education."
The Lynch School of Education at Boston College jumped in the US News and World Report Rankings from 22nd to 16th best school of education in the nation.
Massachusetts Coalition parents, teachers, and higher education leaders have secured increasingly visible roles as educational change agents.
The United States Congress is debating ways to continue and expand funding sources to continue to promote teacher quality and student achievement.
Supporting the faculty is fundametnal:
It is critical for upper-level university administrators and professors to conduct themselves like "civic professionals" and "public intellectuals" who want to improving pressing human service problems related to the education, health, and welfare of poor and working-class citizens and immigrants. These university officials need to support faculty who are engaging themselves in popular and democratic intiatives. This support must go in the following direction:
Upper-level administrators should be responsive to the aspirations of faculty with popular and democratic commitments to use the culture of the university to promote positive social changes.
Upper-level administrators should take calculated risks and provide seed money to faculty to hold broad-based "needs assessment" conferences and to develop grant proposals to launch popular and democratic initiatives. In our case, it was critical that Boston College allocated $10,000 of funding initially to help us to hire student assistants, to host "needs assessment" conferences, and to cover travel to "bidders' conferences" hosted by the donor.
Upper-level administrators and faculty need to understand that building broadbased social change coalitions requires faculty to engage in extensive political work with leaders from community-based organizations and public school leaders. They will need to develop a culture which values such civic engagement and does not view it as a distraction from a narrow definition of the research university.
Faculty need extensive material and cultural support when writing grants and when launching grant-funded initiatives.
Faculty need considerable support when modifying their courses to make them more popular and democratic in nature.
Faculty should be provided with opportunities to meet with colleagues from other colleges and universities to develop professional networks that promote transformational kinds of learning and teaching.
A new perspective is necessary:
Higher education faculty and administrators need to view the development of the leadership capacity of teachers, parents, and community-based activitists as part of the civic responsibility of the university. Just as higher education faculty become "boundary spanners" and "border crossers" who work in school and community settings, so should teachers and community activists have access to college and university classrooms and conferences to develop their own leadership skills.
Explicitly advocating more democratic and culturally responsive universities must be viewed as a core leadership attribute, especially in times of political and fiscal conservatism.
Other considerations:
Only higher education faculty who are already tenured should undertake such experimental reform initiatives because they are labor-intensive and it is very difficult to sustain one's scholarship when engaged in such ambitious undertakings.
Getting buy-in from upper-level administrators is absolutely critical. The lure of financial capital helps, but it is no guarantee of continued support. Some university leaders will want to accept funding but will try to block the broader institutional transformation entailed with external grants.
Leadership is critical to sustain popular reforms such as those of the Massachusetts Coalition. Those higher education institutions which went through multiple leadership transitions were generally less efficacious than those which had stability of leadership over time and whose leaders were explicit advocates of the Coalition's work.
There is some tension that exists between the popular community-based approach of the Massachusetts Coalition and the elitist aspirations of many higher education faculty. External funding helps to contain the elitist part of higher education culture and to enable broad-based democratic reforms.
The development of a cadre of popular-based teacher and parent leaders was a key outcome from Coalition activities thus far.
In spite of the gains experienced by the Massachusetts Coalition, the current "accountability movement" in schools that focuses solely on testing outcomes is threatening to eclipse the importance of developing schools as sites of civic engagement.
Advantages to develop Culturally Responsive Teachers Through Community- Based Collaborative:
If colleges and universities are willing to transcend traditional boundary lines and to build broad-based coalitions with school and community partners they can become far more efficacious in preparing high quality teachers and raising student achievement.
External grants can provide critical catalysts for improving higher educational practices and can help universities to become more responsive to linguistically and culturally diverse populations in urban schools and communities.
External funding sources, if well deployed, can transform the practices of higher education faculty and also attract additional resources so that initial momentum can be developed and sustained on a long-term basis.
Faculty in universities with a social justice mission (like Boston College, which is a Jesuit university), can use that mission to instantiate core ethical principles and to mitigate "academic capitalism."
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