Abstract
At the beginning of April 2000, parents whose children attended five of the then worst performing schools in New York City voted to defeat an attempt to convert the schools to charter status. New York State’s 1998 charter school legislation allowed for the conversion of existing public schools to charter schools with the approval of a majority of the parents of children attending the school.1 Proposed by School Chancellor Howard Levy with the urgings of his boss, New York City’s then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a supporter of privatization as a reform strategy, the plan would allow the private, for-profit Edison Schools to enter into a partnership with the city to direct the conversion process and, if successful, to become the educational management organization (EMO) responsible for administering these new charter schools.2 The ultimate failure of this proposal, occurring in the midst of the greater success of another venture, the Annenberg Challenge, raises the question of the role that partnerships have come to play at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first as a vehicle of urban school reform.
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Notes
Barry M. Franklin, Marianne N. Bloch, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Educational Partnerships: An Introductory Framework,” in Educational Partnerships and the State: The Paradoxes of Governing Schools, Children, and Families, ed. Barry M. Franklin, Marianne N. Bloch, and Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 4–5.
New York Times, March 20, 2001; New York City Board of Education, “Request for Proposal #1B434-SURR to Charter School Services,” August 8, 2000, 1; Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, “Introduction,” in City Schools: Lessons from New York, ed. Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 3–4.
Ibid.; Aida Rodriguez, Joseph A. Pereira, and Shana Brodnax, “Latino Nonprofits: The Role of Intermediaries in Organizational Capacity Building,” in A Future for Everyone: Innovative Social Responsibility and Community Partnerships, ed. David Maurrasse with Cynthia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2004), 79–100
Meredith I. Honig, “The New Middle Management: Intermediary Organizations in Educational Policy Implementation,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 26 (Spring, 2004), 66–68
Annenberg Institute for School Reform, The Annenberg Challenge: Lessons and Reflections on Public School Reform (Providence: Annenberg Institute for School Reform, 2002), 32
Robert Rotham, “‘Intermediary Organizations’ Help Bring Reform to Scale,” Challenge Journal 6 (Winter, 2002/03), 1–7.
NYNSR Research Collaborative, New York Networks for School Renewal (NYNSR): An Implementation Study (New York: Institute for Education and Social Policy, New York University, 2001), 4
Deborah Meier, The Power of their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 15–38
Seymour Fliegel with James MacGuire, Miracle in East Harlem: The Fight for Choice in Public Education (New York: Time Books, 1993), 31–44
Pearl Rock Kane, “The Difference between Charter Schools and Charterlike Schools,” in Ravitch and Viteritti, 65–68; Leanna Stiefel, Robert Berne, Patrice Iatarola, and Norm Fruchter, “High School Size: Effects on budgets and Performance in New York City,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 22 (Spring, 2000), 28–29.
Institute for Education and Social Policy, Final Report of the Evaluation of New York Networks for School Renewal, 1996–2001 (New York: Institute for Education and Social Policy, New York University, 2001), 6, 28–32
NYNSR Research Collaborative, Progress Report on the Evaluation of the New York Networks for School Renewal from July 2000 through January 2001 (New York: Institute for Education and Social Policy, New York University, 2001), 8–12.
Larry Cuban, The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can’t Be Businesses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 160.
I have drawn this account from the following sources: Alex Molnar, Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America’s Schools (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 1–20
Alex Molnar, “Commercial Culture and the Assault on Children’s Character,” in The Construction of Children’s Character. Ninety-Sixth Yearbook for the National Study for the Study of Education, Part 2, ed. Alex Molnar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 163–173
Kenneth J. Saltman, Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—A Threat to Democracy (Latham: Bowman & Littlefield, 2000), xxi–xxv
Kenneth J. Saltman, The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2005), 183–184
Melissa K. Lickteig, “Brand-Name Schools: The Deceptive Lure of Corporate-School Partnerships,” The Educational Forum 68 (Fall, 2003), 44–51
Deron R. Boyles, “The Exploiting Business: School-Business Partnerships, Commercialization, and Students as Critically Transitive Citizens,” in Schools or Markets: Commercialism, Privatization, and School Business Partnerships, ed. Deron R. Boyles (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 217–240.
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© 2010 Barry M. Franklin
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Franklin, B.M. (2010). Educational Partnerships, Urban School Reform, and the Building of Community. In: Curriculum, Community, and Urban School Reform. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105744_5
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