AJE Feature | The Organizational Landscape of Schools: School Employees’ Conceptualizations of Organizations in Their Environment by Andrea Prado Tuma

Full length article “The Organizational Landscape of Schools: School Employees’ Conceptualizations of Organizations in Their Environment” by Prado Tuma published by the American Journal of Education available here.

Education policy and funding increasingly attempt to foster the creation of school–community partnerships as a way to provide enrichment programs for students, offer services for families, and assist schools in achieving state standards (Epstein and Sanders 2006; Henig et al. 2015; James-Burdumy et al. 2005; Sanders 2001). Given a growing body of evidence suggesting that collaboration between schools and community organizations can improve educational outcomes (e.g., Mahoney et al. 2005; Sampson 2012; Scales et al. 2000), it is surprising that few studies have explored how educators conceptualize their interactions with organizations in their environment (Sanders 2001; Hands 2005, 2010). This study examines how school employees across nine schools in three urban neighborhoods with differing availability of organizations make sense of their local organizational landscape. More specifically, I investigate how educators perceive the benefits of their interactions with neighborhood organizations vis-à-vis organizations located outside the neighborhood and how sense-making about the local organizational landscape varies by neighborhood and school type.

While researchers define school–community partnerships as the “connections between schools and community individuals, businesses, organizations, and institutions within or beyond the geographic boundaries of neighborhoods” (Sanders and Galindo 2014, 112), schools’ community partners are often explicitly or implicitly defined in government and foundation documents as organizations located in the school’s neighborhood (Henig et al. 2015). Most notably, the Promise Neighborhoods government initiative funds programs that encourage collaboration between schools and organizations in the school’s neighborhood (U.S. Department of Education 2018). Absent from policy documents and research is an understanding of whether school employees, who play a crucial role in procuring, carrying out, and maintaining school–community partnerships (Davies 2002; Epstein et al. 1995; Freiberg 2000; Hands 2005; Sanders and Harvey 2002), perceive unique benefits from working with organizations located in the school’s neighborhood compared to organizations located elsewhere. Although studies find that educators prefer to work with nearby organizations because geographic proximity facilitates access to partner organizations (Bridwell-Mitchell 2017; Hands 2005, 2010; Sanders 2001; Sanders and Campbell, 2007), no prior work has explicitly compared how school employees conceptualize their interactions with neighborhood versus non-neighborhood organizations.

By interviewing a diverse group of school employees (i.e., teachers, counselors, and school leaders) in different types of schools (i.e., public, charter, and parochial), I examine how they understand the value of their interactions with organizations located both within and outside the school’s neighborhood. Identifying how educators conceptualize external organizations can have important practical implications for identifying the types of organizations that schools partner with to access resources and implement community engagement initiatives.

Past scholarship finds that the availability of geographically proximate organizations shapes how organizational members make sense of their organizational field (Porac et al. 1989; Porac et al. 1995). Relatedly, some neighborhoods have fewer local organizations than others (Bridwell-Mitchell 2017; Sampson 2012) and teachers report that identifying sufficient potential partners in close geographic proximity is a barrier to partnership formation (Hands 2005, 2010; Sanders 2001). By comparing educator sense-making in schools both within the same neighborhood and across three different urban neighborhoods, I use a multiple case, theory building approach (Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 2009) to examine how school employees in neighborhoods with varying degrees of neighborhood nonprofit density conceptualize the local organizational landscape.

My study makes contributions to scholarship on school–community partnerships and sense-making about the organizational field. First, I build on the theory of overlapping spheres of influence (Epstein 1987) by asserting that neighborhood organizations are uniquely able to create overlap between the school and the community by brokering educator–community relationships and facilitating the co-creation of new resources that can incorporate community members’ local funds of knowledge. For example, a teacher speaks of working with a member of a neighborhood organization that addresses gang violence in the largely Hispanic Oakville neighborhood:

John grew up in Oakville. He came from a very violent background. He is extremely active as a peace activist in Oakville and he used to be a really prolific tagger… He [is able] to say, I am from here and I believe in peace and I am friends with a bunch of gang members. He can say there’s a way to walk peacefully even on the streets that you grew up in and there’s a way to exist having respect in a community without being a part of that… I was so excited about the program coming because that’s the stuff that I teach that I don’t necessarily have the resources to address… So he is able to come in and so we work together to put a lot of these [literature lessons] together and they are amazing.

The teacher perceives that John has access to local funds of knowledge through his upbringing in the neighborhood. She mentions being excited about working with him because she lacks “the resources to address” the issue of gangs and growing up in a violent neighborhood, a topic that she finds important but is not familiar with. By “working together,” they are able to co-create new lessons that combine John’s local funds of knowledge or experiences in the neighborhood with the teacher’s knowledge of literature.

Second, I extend theory on sense-making about the organizational field by showing that familiarity with geographically proximate organizations cannot be assumed and is related to where service users (i.e., students and families) reside. While schools’ geographic proximity to external organizations can certainly facilitate educators’ access to potential partners, school employees working in neighborhoods with both a greater number and density of nonprofits are not necessarily familiar with these organizations. I argue that school employees in urban schools that serve students who do not live in the immediate neighborhood are especially unfamiliar with neighborhood organizations. My study highlights the importance of understanding organizational fields as enacted rather than preexisting environments by showing that schools’ access to neighborhood organizations cannot be assumed and is related to both the actual and perceived availability of neighborhood organizations. Furthermore, I extend theory on sense-making about the organizational field by asserting that sense-making about the local organizational landscape is associated with a neighborhood’s nonprofit density and where service users (i.e., students and families) reside.

In addition to the study’s theoretical contributions, my findings elucidate the practical challenges and potential consequences associated with procuring (or not being able to procure) neighborhood partnerships. Specifically, educators may not be able to identify nearby organizational partners (due to either a lack of organizations or unfamiliarity with the neighborhood) or they may find nearby neighborhood partners, but their students may not be able to access them if they do not live close to the school. These challenges can have consequences for a school’s ability to provide needed resources and services for students and their families. Further, an inability to interact with neighborhood organizations may also hinder school employees’ ability to connect with students’ families outside of the school context and to draw on the local funds of knowledge that neighborhood organizations can provide. While researchers, policy makers, and practitioners tend to promote programs that encourage schools to work with neighborhood organizations, they need to better account for the fact that schools have differential access to local organizational partners.

My findings have implications for educator preparation, professional development, and leadership practice. As my study suggests, educators’ sense-making about their school’s organizational landscape matters for partnership building. Hence, teacher preparation programs, professional development opportunities, and school leaders may improve educators’ ability to form community partnerships by highlighting the benefits educators and their students gain through them and suggesting different ways in which teachers can become familiar with their school’s neighborhood. For example, Freiberg (2002) recommends that teachers shop in the neighborhoods where they work, attend community events, and borrow books from the local library. My findings suggest that school employees can also become familiar with the neighborhood, its residents, and students’ families by seeking out interactions with local organizations. Future work should investigate the impact that a school’s organizational ties to neighborhood organizations have on family engagement as well as on community members’ perceptions of the school.

Andrea Prado Tuma is an associate social scientist specializing in education policy research at RAND Corporation. She holds a Ph.D. in human development and social policy from Northwestern University.

References

Bridwell-Mitchell, Ebony N. 2017. “Them That’s Got: How Tie Formation in Partnership Networks Gives High Schools Differential Access to Social Capital.” American Educational Research Journal 54(6): 1221–1255.

Davies, Don 2002. “The 10th School Revisited: Are School/Family/Community Partnerships on the Reform Agenda Now?” Phi Delta Kappan 83(5): 388–392.

Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. 1989. “Building Theories from Case Study Research.” Academy of Management Review 14(4): 532–550.

Epstein, Joyce L. 1987. “Toward a Theory of Family-School Connections: Teacher Practices and Parent Involvement.” In Social intervention: Potential and constraints, edited by Klaus Hurrelmann; Franz-Xaver Kaufmann; and Friedrich Losel, eds. New York: DeGruyter.

Epstein, Joyce L., Lucretia Coates, Karen Salinas, Mavis G. Sanders, and Beth Simon. 1995. “A Comprehensive Framework for School, Family, and Community Partnerships.” Phi Delta Kappan 77(9): 701–712.

Epstein, Joyce L. and Mavis G. Sanders. 2006. “Prospects for Change: Preparing Educators for School, Family, and Community Partnerships.” Peabody Journal of Education 81(2): 81–120.

Freiberg, Jerome H. and Amy Driscoll. 2000. Universal Teaching Strategies (3^rd edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Freiberg, Jerome H. 2002. “Essential Skills for New Teachers.” Educational Leadership 59(6): 56–60.

Hands, Catherine M. 2005. “‘It’s Who You Know’ and ‘What You Know’: The Process of Creating Partnerships between Schools and Communities.” School Community Journal 15(2): 63–84.

Hands, Catherine M. 2010. “Why Collaborate? The Differing Reasons for Secondary School Educators’ Establishment of School-Community Partnerships.” School Effectiveness and School Improvement 21(2): 189–207.

Henig, Jeff, Carolyn Riehl, Michael Rebell, and Jessica Wolff. 2015. “Putting Collective Impact in Context: A Review of the Literature on Local Cross-sector Collaboration to Improve Education.” New York, NY: Teachers College, Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis.

James-Burdumy, Susanne; Mark Dynarski, Mary Moore, John Deke, Wendy Mansfield, and Carol Pistorino. 2005. “When Schools Stay Open Late: The national Evaluation of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program. Final report.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

Mahoney, Joseph L., Reed W. Larson, and Jacquelynne S. Eccles. 2005. Organized activities as contexts of development: Extracurricular activities, after school and community programs. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Porac, Joseph F.; Howard Thomas, and Charles Baden-Fuller. 1989. “Competitive Groups as Cognitive Communities: The Case of Scottish Knitwear Manufacturers.” Journal of Management Studies 26(4): 397–416.

Porac, Joseph F., Howard Thomas, Fiona Wilson, Douglas Paton, and Alaina Kanfer. 1995. “Rivalry and the Industry Model of Scottish Knitwear Producers.” Administrative Science Quarterly. 203–227.

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sanders, Mavis G. 2001. “The Role of ‘Community’ in Comprehensive School, Family, and Community Partnership Programs.” The Elementary School Journal 102(1): 19–34.

Sanders, Mavis G. and Adia Harvey. 2002. “Beyond the School Walls: A Case Study of Principal Leadership for School-Community Collaboration.” Teachers College Record 104(7): 1345–1368.

Sanders, Mavis G. and Tamitha F. Campbell. 2007. “Securing the Ties that Bind: Community Involvement and the Educational Success of African-American Children and Adolescents.” In Strengthening the African American Educational Pipeline: Informing Research, Policy and Practice, edited by Jerlando F.L. Jackson. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Sanders, Mavis G. and Claudia Galindo. 2014. “Communities, Schools, and Teachers.” In Handbook of Professional Development in Education: Successful Models and Practices, PreK-12. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Scales, Peter C., Dale A. Blyth, Thomas H. Berkas, and James C. Kielsmeier. 2000. “The Effects of Service-Learning on Middle School Students’ Social Responsibility and Academic Success.” The Journal of Early Adolescence 20(3): 332–358.

U.S. Department of Education. 2018. “Promise Neighborhoods.” Ed.gov, https://www2.ed.gov/programs/promiseneighborhoods/index.html

Yin, Robert K. 2009. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.