Michael B Fabricant Livres

Since the 1980s, strategies for improving public education in America have focused on either competition through voucher programs and charter schools or standardization as enacted into federal law through No Child Left Behind. These reforms, however, have failed to narrow the performance gap between poor urban students and other children. In response, parents have begun to organize local campaigns to strengthen the public schools in their communities. One of the most successful of these has been the Community Collaborative to Improve District 9 (CC9), a consortium of six neighborhood-based groups in the Bronx. The author tells the story of CC9 from its origins in 1995 as a small group of concerned parents to the citywide application of its reform agenda -- concentrating on targeted investment in the development of teacher capacity -- ten years later. He evaluates CC9's innovative approach to organizing and collaboration with other stakeholders, including the United Federation of Teachers, the NYC Department of Education, neighborhood nonprofits, and city colleges and universities. Situating this case within a wider exploration of parent participation in educational reform, he explains why CC9 succeeded and other parent-led movements did not. He also examines the ways in which the movement effectively empowered parents by ensuring a democratic process in making decisions and, more broadly, an inclusive organizational culture