Long-Term & Far-Reaching Change: Lessons from the Oakland Community Schools Initiative

A Q&A with Kendra Fehrer

A new book by Gardner Center researchers focuses on a nearly ten-year effort to transform all eighty-six district schools in Oakland, California into community schools. Kendra Fehrer, one of the book’s co-authors, shares her perspective on this research.

Can you tell us a bit about the city of Oakland? What role might the city’s history have had in the development of the community schools initiative?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this innovative, equity-focused model of community schools occurred in a place with a long, rich history of civic engagement, community activism, and attention to social justice. Prior to the community schools initiative, many community organizations and public partners were active in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), providing school-based mental health supports, afterschool programs, and medical services in Oakland’s under-resourced neighborhoods. The community schools initiative, led by Superintendent Tony Smith and a team of skilled community leaders, leveraged and expanded these disparate efforts into a common vision for systems-change.

Smith facilitated a highly inclusive participatory planning process that brought a wide array of stakeholders into a shared conversation. This included grassroots leaders, public agencies, educators, parents, and youth. Fourteen task forces spent a year developing strategies around key priority areas, such as core curriculum, teaching, literacy, and school leadership. The superintendent and his team made sure that those who were most impacted were involved in developing goals and strategies. For example, students were a strong constituency in the task forces on secondary education and school culture/climate. This wide and deep planning process helped generate enduring engagement and started the process of culture shift in the district.

What happened at the district level to pave the way for an initiative of this magnitude?

From the beginning, district leaders were firmly committed to long-term and far-reaching change. They didn’t want community schools to be simply an “add on” or special project for OUSD.

Several key factors supported this.

First, the strategic planning process itself created shared vision, language, and values across community and district stakeholders. From the get-go, the initiative was framed as a district-wide strategy for equity.

The district understood that if they truly wanted all students to access high quality education and college/career success, they had to recognize that students would need an array of supports to get there. Community schools was a model of providing targeted supports to reach universal goals.

Second, district leaders knew that for these changes to be widely implemented and enduring, they would have to be binding. So, they linked the implementation process with existing accountability measures. School and district community school plans were articulated within state LCAP plans. The district’s school culture/climate work was written into their voluntary resolution plan with the Office of Civil Rights. The district’s internal school quality review process provided structured feedback to schools on key community school elements, like family engagement and culture/climate.

Lastly, a major change was consolidating two distinct administrative departments into a single department, Community Schools and Student Services (CSSS). CSSS created the infrastructure, collaboration, and leadership needed to bring alignment across all community schools components at both district and school levels.

How different do school sites look and feel now? What are some of the transformative changes you found in your research?

Over the five years of our research in OUSD, we saw remarkable shifts at the school-site level across the district.We saw positive trends in high school graduation rates, decreases in disciplinary action and in-class disruptions, lower chronic absence, increased participation in student services, and higher levels of meaningful family engagement.

We heard from principals and teachers that they were relieved to wear fewer hats, and that they knew where to go when they had a concern about a student. The community schools initiative has created wide-scale culture shift, where teachers habitually use restorative practices like Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and restorative circles. They regularly communicate with students’ families, and have a deeper understanding of students’ lives outside of school.

A lynchpin of this site-level work is the community school manager (CSM). In Oakland, the CSM is a high-level administrator who often functions like an assistant principal. In many community school models the CSM is a case manager and coordinator of services; in Oakland the CSM is a builder of systems and culture change.

CSMs train teachers on restorative practices. They lead Coordination of Service Teams meetings, tracking and navigating student referrals, as well as looking at school-wide trends. They manage partnership relationships, including holding annual and quarterly partner meetings. They set up the infrastructure for parent leadership and committees, often engaging parents in school improvement efforts. CSMs from across the district come together monthly as a professional learning community to share stories, solve problems, provide feedback to district leadership, and learn about district resources available to help their sites.

Of course, none of this work would be possible without the critical underpinnings of community partners. Partners are frequently referred to as both the “heart” of the community schools work, as well as the “legs.”

Community partners were active co-constructors of the community schools vision, and responsible for re-writing the typical relationship between school and community.

Our book has some wonderful resources designed by Oakland partners and district staff that help scaffold this relationship.

And, I would be remiss not to talk about the pivotal role of principals. Relatively early on in the initiative, district staff realized that they were not adequately engaging with principals to implement full service community schools, so for the last three to four years, this has been a priority area. We have seen skeptical principals become adamant supporters of this work, to the extent that they dedicate resources from their own school budget to fund the CSM position.

Lastly, a major accomplishment of this initiative has been the work with families. Family engagement or parent involvement has become a bit of a buzz phrase in education. At a systematic level, OUSD has fostered a culture of meaningful family engagement, creating spaces for parents to actively participate in their children’s learning, as well as school and district improvement.

Many community schools are implementing practices like parent home visits and innovative approaches to parent-teacher conferences like Academic Parent Teacher Teams. The district runs a parent leadership program at school sites to train parents as leaders and advocates, equipping them to participate in school site councils. They actively collaborate with parent organizing groups in the community.

Nearly every established community school site we visited had at least one active parent committee (for example, the school site council or African American Parents Committee) that engaged in core school decisions, such as goal-setting, budgeting, or school culture.

Essentially, OUSD has built the capacity of schools to leverage the power of diverse parents — especially those who historically have been underrepresented — as active and vital contributors.

How and why are community schools well-suited to supporting students and families in times of crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic?

Schools across the state and country are facing unprecedented challenges right now, as they struggle to deliver basic instruction, let alone student support services, in a time of physical distancing. As we continued our research in Oakland over the last few months, we have heard repeatedly, from both district- and site-level staff, that community schools are “built for this.”

Community schools already have trusting relationships with families where they can ask about and respond to families’ needs. They have partnerships at the ready to step in and support. They are nimble and creative and able to set up systems to ensure students are accessing the support services they need.

Coordination of Service Teams haven’t skipped a beat — they continue to meet regularly to ensure that students are accessing their medical and mental health supports, and any other resources needed. Principals and teachers are not on their own to navigate this dramatic shift. There is a whole team available to support the wide range of needs children and families may be experiencing.

As we think about schooling going forward — especially considering that the pandemic is likely to exacerbate existing disparities — I believe community schools offer an important model of schooling that can interrupt inequalities.

Oakland’s community schools in particular show the power of a system-wide approach.

Tell us a bit about how you three reconvened to write this book? Did the perspectives of your current roles come into play as you wrote about your shared work in Oakland?

This book project has truly been a labor of love and combined effort, not only from Milbrey, Jake, myself, and the Gardner Center team, but also the incredible educators and administrators at OUSD whose efforts and insights very much shaped the substance of this book.

Milbrey began her community schools research in Oakland at the very beginning of the initiative, at the request of then-superintendent Tony Smith as he wanted someone to help document the process. She continued to track early implementation and system-level process over the subsequent years.

Jake and I came into the picture in 2014, when OUSD engaged the Gardner Center to support their community schools evaluation research. Over the next five years, Jake and I led the Gardner Center team in site-level research to capture best practices and school implementation trends to help inform scale-up. We talk more about our research partnership with OUSD in the book.

We started work on the book a couple years ago, when Milbrey, Jake and I realized that our combined vantage points would allow us to tell a comprehensive story of Oakland’s community schools.

We believe the community schools work in Oakland is a truly unique example of systems-change.

As community schools become more well-known and established as an evidence-based strategy for school improvement, we think that OUSD offers important lessons for other districts and policy-makers committed to educational equity.

Kendra Fehrer is a senior research associate at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities at Stanford University.