The Short-Lived Community School: Limits of Schools as Social Interventions, 1889-2012

Jaclyn Le Undergraduate Honors Thesis School of Education Stanford University May 2012

Stanford University School of Education UNDERGRADUATE HONORS

The Short-Lived Community School: Limits of Schools as Social Interventions, 1889-2012

JACLYN LE MAY 2012

A Thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Undergraduate Honors

APPROVALS:
Honors Program Director: __________________________________ Mitchell L. Stevens, Ph.D., date Honors Advisor: __________________________________ David Labaree, Ph.D., date

THE SHORT-LIVED COMMUNITY SCHOOL: LIMITS OF SCHOOLS AS SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS, 1889-2012

JACLYN LE UNDERGRADUATE HONORS THESIS SCHOOL OF EDUCATION STANFORD UNIVERSITY MAY 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..............................................................................................................III ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................. V INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 1 Contextualizing Social Reform through American Individualism Community Schooling as a Response to Crisis Cultural & Structural Approaches to Reducing Poverty Community Schools as Short-Lived Social Interventions A Clarification of Terms SETTING THE STAGE: UNDERSTANDING NORMS & OUTLIERS OF SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS 1 | THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO SOCIAL REFORM ................................................................ 16 Constitutional Basis Growth of Civil Society & Private Philanthropy Educationalizing Poverty & Other Social Problems Modern Limitations of Civil Society as a Solution to Social Ills 2 | FOUR CASES: RECURRING RISE & FALL OF SCHOOLS AS COMMUNITY CENTERS ............... 28 Case Selection & Methodology Patterns of Industrialization, Immigration & Urbanization Intervening through a Continuum-of-Solutions Eventual Decline & Disintegration DEVIATION FROM THE NORM: A SPECIFIC CONTEXT FOR COMMUNITY SCHOOLING 3 | CRISIS AS A CATALYST FOR SCHOOL-BASED SOCIAL INTERVENTION.................................. 44 Urban Decay: The Creation of Slums & Segregated Neighborhoods An Inadequate State Response A Justification for Radicalism MECHANISMS FOR INTERVENING: CULTURAL & STRUCTURAL VARIATIONS ON REFORM 4 | COMMUNITY SCHOOLS AS CULTURAL REMEDIES ................................................................ 59 Overview of the Culture of Poverty A Focus on Culture in the Continuum-of-Solutions 5 | THE CASE FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE................................................................................. 70 A Structure-Based Response to Cultural Solutions Politics as a Strategy to End Poverty Milwaukee as an Example of Structural Success LESSONS LEARNED: COMMON CONCERNS FOR SCHOOLS AS SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS 6 | TEMPORARY SOLUTIONS TO LONG-TERM PROBLEMS ......................................................... 81 Crisis No More: The Decline of Urgency & Action The Damage of Community Changes to Community Schools Insecurity in Private Philanthropy Loss of a Charismatic Leader CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................ 94 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................ 99

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not be possible without the endless support of incredible people who gave me constant encouragement at every step in this process. I am forever grateful for their inspiration, kindness, and friendship, which I will take with me wherever I go. First, I could not be more thankful for my thesis advisor, David Labaree. His continual support of this project and my academic curiosities made this thesis possible. Throughout this process, I have grown so much as a student and scholar because of his encouragement, and I owe him infinite thanks. Mitchell Stevens guided this project from its inception to the finished product. I am grateful for his mentorship and the humor that he brought to the Education Honors Program each week. This academic endeavor would not be possible without him. I also owe a wealth of appreciation to Jesse Foster for sharing her knowledge, providing helpful feedback and making this overwhelming process not only manageable but also enjoyable. Jennifer Wolf deserves more gratitude than I could express in words. Since the beginning, she welcomed me into the School of Education as a teacher and friend. Over the years, she provided endless positive encouragement whether I was a student in her class, writing a thesis, or just visiting for a chat. I am forever indebted to her for the inspiration, Soup and Support, and general care for my well-being. Additionally, Clayton Hurd provided great insight not only to this project but also to my public service pathway. I am thankful that he challenged me to think about the social impact of my research and reminded me that there is a place for public service in academic research. My fellow members in the Public Service Scholars Program (PSSP) gave me a community of scholars and friends to rely on all year. I am truly humbled to be a part of such an amazing group of women. Mia, Stacey, Caity, Rahael, Tenzin, Lauren and Naomiyou inspire me with your knowledge, generosity, and passion every day. I cannot imagine this year without the Education Honors cohort. This project benefited from their feedback and the diverse perspectives that they brought to seminar every week. I could not have done this without their encouragement. Stephanie, Sonja, Ariana, and DanielI am so grateful for the mutual commiseration, joy, and camaraderie that you brought to our group. As this project consumed much of my time and energy, I must thank my fellow Branner staff and Service Scholars for their understanding and cheer. They were there to lift my spirits, force me to have fun, and provide an endless amount of baked goods to make this process much more enjoyable. I am especially grateful that they listened to and entertained my ideas at all hours of the day.

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I owe so much to all of my friends but especially Sarah Medina for being my tireless cheerleader throughout this project. No one was more willing to bounce around ideas, provide valuable insight, and keep me caffeinated. I am thankful to have such a supportive life coach who shares my passion for education, public service, and excessive ranting. Megan Swezey Fogarty and Jim Murray have been my family away from home. They are my biggest supporters and energetic advocates at Stanford as well as lifelong friends. I am infinitely grateful for their patience, kindness and understanding over the years. Finally, my parents deserve more thanks than I can possibly express in this lifetime. They have made so many sacrifices for me, and I could never repay them for all that they have given. Their unconditional love and belief in me made this project and so much more a reality. I am nothing without them, and this is just a small token of my gratitude for the unending support that they provide in all that I do.

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ABSTRACT
Public schools in the United States often act as community centers, bringing together local social missions with academic interests. Because of the United States penchant for a weak social welfare state, schools act as one way to distribute social services to low-income neighborhoods. During periods of crisis, schools become an integral mechanism for solving social problems and intervening in troubled urban neighborhoods. Though the Harlem Childrens Zone serves as a recent example of a localized, school-based social intervention, it emerges from a longstanding tradition of community schools as cultural responses to community crisis. Community schools integrate a continuum of academic and social services, bridging classrooms and their surrounding communities. This historical study explores four cases of community schooling as a social intervention in the United States including the Hull House in Chicago (1889-1910), Milwaukee public schools (1909-1920), Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem (19341952), and the Harlem Childrens Zone (1997-present). Despite variation in cultural and structural approaches to solving social issues, school-based interventions emerge during times of crisis that demand more comprehensive and coordinated social reform. While specific contexts heighten the role of community schools as social solutions, schools as social interventions are unstable and unsustainable in the context of American individualism and private philanthropy without structural institutionalization. Keywords: community schools, social intervention, social reform, social welfare, continuum-of-solution, wraparound services

INTRODUCTION
Throughout the course of American politics, the tales of urban revitalization and education reform have intertwined. Attempts to alleviate urban poverty often involve public schools as the social centers of communities. The political history of the United States established a limited government and weak welfare state so that civil society and private philanthropy became responsible for the provision of social services. In this context of American individualism, public schooling represents a radical and expensive undertaking, creating a large state mechanism to reach a large mass of the population. But its celebrated values of equal opportunity and self-sufficiency makes education a way for political leaders and community activists to pursue social reforms that would otherwise be politically controversial. Historically, public schools and their surrounding communities have formed partnerships, created inclusive programming, and deconstructed barriers between schooling and society. As deliberately individualized and cultural institutions, schools offer one way to distribute health services, citizenship lessons, and recreational benefits to diverse communities while avoiding more intrusive, socialized welfare reforms. During times of crisis, the role of the school intensifies so that schools not only distribute limited services but also act as a direct intervention in the social fabric of low-income neighborhoods. Social turmoil, economic depression, and political upheaval create exigent conditions calling for a more comprehensive and coordinated solution to poverty and social disorder. Crisis heightens the responsibility of schools to fulfill the academic, health, and social needs of low-income urban communities. Here, the purpose of public schooling expands to compensate for the lack of a strong welfare state, transforming schools into community centers and social interventions. When crisis destabilizes communities and removes resources for self-

sufficiency, schools offer a convenient space to convene children and families around common problems and interests. Without a concurrent increase in resources, expanding both the purposes and responsibilities of schools raises significant concerns about the ability of schools to fulfill the diverse multitude of social functions expected of them. The most recent, and perhaps prominent, example of school-community integration is the Department of Educations Promise Neighborhoods initiative modeled after Geoffrey Canadas Harlem Childrens Zone in New York City. In the fall of 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama highlighted the Harlem Childrens Zonea school-based neighborhood intervention in 97 blocks of New York Citys Harlem community. Praised for its comprehensive and holistic approach to solving urban poverty, the Zone has garnered significant public attention, generating political support as Obama made its replication one of his election promises. When describing the Zones theory of change, President Obama stated, If poverty is a disease that affects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools, and broken homes, then we cant treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal the entire community (Obama, 2008). The Zone reflects a long tradition of school-based social interventions bridging communities and schools as a solution to social crisis. While the Department of Education has rebranded this model of social intervention as a continuum-of-solutions with great schools at the center, the fundamental concept is the same: schools as centers of community activity and educational interventions in urban poverty (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). After the successes of the Harlem Childrens Zone program, President Obama fulfilled his campaign promise to replicate the program in high-need communities across the country. In 2010, the Department of Education announced the Promise Neighborhoods initiativea program providing federal funding to over twenty communities across the country through a competitive

application process. Currently, almost forty communities have received planning and implementation grants to create a continuum of academic and social services in their neighborhoods. With Congresss recent approval of $60 million for the Promise Neighborhoods program in 2012, this continuums model of social and school interventions will likely dominate discussions on urban renewal, poverty alleviation, and education reform in the United States for the foreseeable future. While Promise Neighborhoods and its inspiration, the Harlem Childrens Zone, have received praise for their innovation, the continuum-of-solutions is not a novel approach to addressing urban crises. The expansion of schools as community centers integrating academic and social services emerges within a specific context, making the continuum-of-solutions a recurring pattern during specific moments of American history. Other cases of schools as social interventions in poor, urban neighborhoods complicate the modern story told about innovation in school-community relationships. Though policy often emerges in a historical vacuum, an understanding of the historical context and evolution of community schooling holds valuable implications the future of socio-educational initiatives such as Promise Neighborhoods. The purpose of this study is to explore the specific and short-lived history of the continuum-of-solutions model used as a school-based social intervention in the United States. Ultimately, this study seeks to understand the role of schools as social interventions in lowincome urban neighborhoods and contextualize modern education policy within a broader historical narrative of urban reform and poverty intervention. Given the American context of limited social welfare, how did the continuum-of-solutions model of school and social reform emerge? How do schools act as community centers and solutions to social problems? What factors lead to the success or disintegration of these neighborhood programs? To answer these

questions, this study investigates a few cases of schools as social interventions including Chicagos Hull House (1889-1910), Milwaukee public schools (1909-1920), East Harlems Benjamin Franklin High School (1934-1952), and the Harlem Childrens Zone (1997-present). These cases inform a narrative of community schools as spaces for social reform and how continuums-of-solutions relate to the standard pattern of social welfare in the United States. Past attempts to centralize communities around local public schools hold lessons about the ways in which schools as social interventions can succeed and fail in the American context of individualism and limited social welfare. Though the Harlem Childrens Zone and Promise Neighborhoods are seen as innovative approaches to solving urban poverty, they represent modern iterations of a long-standing, radical narrative of school and social reform emerging in response community crisis. Continuums-of-solutions differ from the sparse patchwork of American social reform by integrating social and academic services in a more coordinated and comprehensive way. While community schools form as a result of crisis, they also vary in their approaches to changing communities. Many continuums-of-solutions approach social reform through a cultural lens, focusing on the attitudes and behaviors of the poor rather than addressing structural barriers to neighborhood transformations. Those that do pursue social change through the public policy often have greater success at institutionalizing reforms. Either way, continuums often act as temporary solutions to larger social problems as their reliance on crisis, stable communities, private philanthropy, and charismatic leaders can change, disintegrating support for comprehensive community schooling. AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM AS A CONTEXT FOR SOCIAL REFORM The origins of Americas weak social welfare state rest in the nations constitutional and political history. Fearful of a tyrannical monarch and despotic state, the colonists established a

limited government to minimize state interventions into the private lives of citizens. Instead, the nation was to be composed of individuals almost exactly alike and unconditionally equal so that the social responsibilities traditionally associated with the state would rest in the hands of the people (Tocqueville, 1945). When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived to the United States in the 1850s, he encountered a liberal democracy comprised of a weak government and a rich civil society of civic and political associations. His classic study of American government and society entitled Democracy in America became an enduring perspective on how civic and political associations form the fabric of American democracy and civil society. Americans essentially opted for a civil society allowing individuals dual freedom from coercive government and freedom of association and expression instead of a powerful state. However, the decision to invest power in the people did not come easily. Early in the days of the Republic, two factions emerged in disagreement over the extent to which political power should be retained by the public rather than government. The powers of the people and a representative government hung in the balance as Federalists wanted to limit the power of the people, electing instead for a stronger federal government comprised of educated elites better prepared to make decisions about the nation. Their opposition, the Democratic-Republicans worried that a strong government would overstep its boundaries and jeopardize individual rights fundamental to democracy. Eventually, the election of 1800 settled the debate between these parties as Thomas Jefferson became president and put the Republicans in office. To maintain a healthy democracy, the Republicans encouraged associations to prevent the despotism of faction or the arbitrary power of a prince (Tocqueville, 1945). Vesting power in the people protected freedom of expression and association so that citizens possessed a check over the powers of the state. In the absence of a dominant government, civic associations served as an

alternative to a strong state. The ability of the public to form associations around their civic and political interests provided opportunity for dissent, advocacy, and diversity from the people. Additionally, the creation of a weak government not only provided individuals with protection from state intervention but also empowered associations to take on quasi-state responsibilities (Prewitt, 2006). Without strong governments to provide public goods, civic associations allow individuals to take on responsibility for the well-being of their communities. With power invested in the people, duties to care for the poor, ill, old, and young become individualized. Skepticism of an extensive government precluded the development of any comprehensive welfare state. Redistributive social services or intrusive government programs incite cries of socialism from critics who want to maximize individual freedom at the expense of a social safety net capable of protecting citizens in times of crisis. Few state-sponsored initiatives come from the federal government as Americans elect to devolve many social programs to local and state governments which theoretically have greater knowledge about local community needs. However, compulsory, state-sponsored public education represents an exception to the American dislike of government handouts. In some ways, public education represents one of the few forms of acceptable and celebrated social benefits provided by the government to the public on a widespread scale. This general acceptance of public schooling relates to education as a deliberately individualized and cultural institution designed to provide opportunity, not guaranteed handouts, to each person. Because public education occupies an important space in American culture and history, schools tend to become convenient spaces to pursue a variety of social missions. The American tendency to educationalize social problems attaches additional responsibilities on schools to not only educate but maintain the social and physical health of their surrounding communities.

Because education focuses on changing individuals, public schools offer a politically convenient and uncontroversial way to distribute social goods on a limited basis and scale. The longstanding roots of individualism in history intensify the role of schools as vehicles for social reform. Without formidable government influence in the creation of a durable social welfare state, civil society organizations and schools become responsible for the education, health, and general wellbeing of local communities. COMMUNITY SCHOOLING AS A RESPONSE TO CRISIS Because civil society organizations and schools form the basis of the social welfare state, attempts to distribute social services often occur in a disjointed, unsystematic way. Social services rarely address poverty in an organized or holistic way. Most social programs become distributed through a patchwork of civil society organizations and schools often with conflicting interests. Based on this tradition, a continuum-of-solutions approach to solving poverty represents a departure from the norm of individualizing social issues. The model currently utilized by the Harlem Childrens Zone emphasizes an integration of school and community services by creating a pipeline that serves children from birth to adulthood (The HCZ Project: 100 Blocks, One Bright Future, 2009). By supporting educational programs from early childhood through college with family and health services, the continuum approach is a more comprehensive, perhaps even radical, anti-poverty intervention. These continuums address many symptoms of poverty at once by integrating healthy, family, and educational services across a period of time. This departure from an individualistic treatment of poverty is legitimized only under special circumstances calling for stronger social and educational welfare. The circumstances surrounding the emergence of schools as social interventions are key components to understanding the lifespan of continuums-of-solutions. One possible explanation

for the development of comprehensive wraparound services is the threat of crisis. When the status quo of individualized social reform cannot alleviate social and economic turmoil, citizens of a community may be more willing to tolerate stronger social welfare programs. Schools intervene into the lives of community members by teaching parents how to raise their children, feed their families, and educate themselves into greater socio-economic status. This strong interference with the private lives of individuals seems radical within the context of American individualism and limited government. However, social disorder and economic depression creates a sense of urgency, forcing communities into more organized, widespread reform. Cloward and Piven (1966) suggest that crises are important catalysts for political action because they cause individuals to respond to disruptions to the status quo and pressure politicians into addressing institutional problems rather than averting political controversy. A sense of crisis not only legitimizes but also creates demand for stronger school and social reform. Jane Addams Hull House was founded to address the destitute conditions of Chicagos ghettos at the end of the 19th Century. Milwaukees socialist community schools emerged during the Progressive Era, a time of intense social activism and political reform in response to corrupt governments and corporatization of society. The Great Depression created a need for Benjamin Franklin High Schools community approach to addressing economic and ethnic change in East Harlem. Though the Harlem Childrens Zone first began in the late 1990s, its peak in prominence arguably came during the Great Recession which exacerbated poverty in urban neighborhoods and shifted focus to failing public schools. Without deep social and economic trouble, these community schools would often be labeled too radical, too socialist to function in the United States. The alarm brought about by crisis makes communities more tolerant of stronger reform integrating separate institutions and intervening in private lives.

CULTURAL & STRUCTURAL APPROACHES TO REDUCING POVERTY In the midst of crises, policymakers and social reformers utilize different approaches to alleviating poverty in urban neighborhoods. The 1960s brought about a heated debate over the causes of poverty. While the full complexity of the argument is too nuanced for the scope of this study, the debate can roughly be divided into two perspectivesthose that see poverty as the result of structural policy decisions and others who view poverty as a symptom of cultural deficit. If poverty is a collective social problem, then the solution lies within changes to economic, housing, and social policies. If poverty results from individual choices, then eliminating poverty is a matter of assimilation or attitudinal adjustment. A prominent author within the structural camp, William Julius Wilson, suggests that intentional economic policies are to blame for the intense destitution in poor urban ghettos (Wilson, 1987). Failing schools, unemployment, and poor health conditions may be symptoms of greater problems calling comprehensive policy changes rather than localized treatments. While Wilson demands stronger economic policies ensuring full employment, his structural approach to understanding poverty deviates from the normal tendencies for Americans to individualize social problems. The contrasting perspective on poverty originally stems from the work of Oscar Lewis and was made famous by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. Instead of viewing poverty as a result of insufficient policy, proponents of a "culture of poverty" assign blame to the moral and cultural deficiencies of a community. The concentration of poverty within a specific geographic area can foster negative norms that perpetuate welfare dependency, failing schools, and economic depression. An assumption that poor individuals lack proper work ethic and character characterizes the cultural approach to social reform. This perspective of poverty leads reformers to change individuals rather than institutions. To solve poverty, reform programs need to

encourage greater work ethic and instill mainstream values in the poor so that they are better able to pull themselves out of poverty and into the middle class. Assimilation into middle class culture is vital to eliminating poverty in urban communities. These divergent theories of social intervention shape the way that reformers implement social programs in high-need neighborhoods. Though continuums provide more comprehensive programs than typical reform efforts, they also approach neighborhood and school revitalization through a cultural lens. From the Hull House to the Harlem Childrens Zone, continuums-ofsolutions are often created to raise entire communities from poverty by teaching parents how to raise their children, building employable skills, and instilling values of hard work and eternal optimism in poor communities. Founded to serve Chicagos poor immigrant community, the Hull House provided education, job training, and exposure to art, music, and dance in order to encourage assimilation. Jane Addams and her compatriots used the settlement house to Americanize immigrant youth through comprehensive educational and citizenship services. Similarly, the Harlem Childrens Zones pipeline suggests that a certain trajectory of academic and social preparation needed for prepares children to succeed educationally and economically. Parents must enroll in Baby College to learn how to stimulate, feed, discipline, and nurture their children in a style conducive to long-term success. This parenting style is remarkably similar to the concerted cultivation found in middle to upper class families (Lareau, 2003). Beneath continuums lies a cultural assumption that there is a right set of attitudes, behaviors, and traits associated with socio-economic mobility and success. Ultimately, the cases studied devote energy and resources into changing the attitudes, behaviors, and mindsets of poor students and families in a community. Though these programs do not employ controversial culture of poverty rhetoric, the way in which they describe their

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philosophy and programming indicates a desire to change the individuals in a community rather than the structures that govern it. COMMUNITY SCHOOLS AS SHORT-LIVED SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS The individualization of social welfare and the cultural emphasis of social reform make community schooling an inherently distinctive model of social intervention. Integrating academic institutions with social supports through a continuum-of-solutions, community schools focus outwardly on transforming low-income, urban neighborhoods in an atypical way. However, this comprehensive mode of school and social reform exists as a fleeting solution during specific moments of crisis. Eventually, school-based social interventions fade as crises dissipate, communities change, private funding wanes, and charismatic leaders move on. Because comprehensive continuums-of-solutions develop under specific conditions of social, economic, and political crisis, their legitimacy as a mechanism of reform depends heavily on the neighborhood environment. Once prosperity and stability return to a neighborhood, the impetus for broad school and social reform disappears. Crisis creates a justification for more radical forms of community schooling that integrates academic, social, health, and community services. Resolved social turmoil, economic depressions, and political upheaval indicate that the need for sweeping reform has faded. Social services provided through a sparse patchwork of civil society organizations may once again become sufficient for the needs of the middle and upper class. Additionally, old crises can be replaced by new crises calling for different sets of reforms. Action generated by the conditions of one crisis may become a drain on services needed to address a new crisis in the community. The point is that crises are temporary disruptions in the neighborhood, making community schools a transient solution as well.

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Even without crisis, continuums-of-solutions may wane in impact if the communities they are meant to address undergo demographic and environmental changes. Significant transformations to a community can make it difficult to implement community schools and make important interventions in the neighborhood. For example, Benjamin Franklin High School opened in 1934 to increase civic engagement in a community composed of Italians, Jews, and a smaller number of African Americans. By the time it closed in 1952, East Harlem was predominantly African American and Puerto Rican. The social community for which the high school formed no longer existed, making the justification for community-based schooling difficult. Unless schools can maintain a certain degree of institutional flexibility, adapting to fastpaced changes in their surrounding communities can undermine the school as a community center. The effectiveness and relevance of school-based social interventions vary depending on the social and economic context of the neighborhood. Additionally, continuums-of-solutions experience great instability due to their reliance on private philanthropy. Because continuums exist on the periphery of standard institutions, they often require additional support from private philanthropy. The impetus of crisis alone cannot sustain radical social reform. Private funders who believe in a more sustained and strategic provision of social services play an important role in perpetuating community schools and their continuum-of-solutions. However, the nature of private philanthropy seeks innovation, not longterm sustainability. Philanthropic foundations do not fund programs in perpetuity. Unless schoolbased social interventions become institutionalized with political backing, their private resources will likely be withdrawn, leaving the reforms vulnerable to dissolution. The loss of a charismatic leader also leads to short-lived success for community schools. Because many continuums-of-solutions rely on the influence of one leader, the retirement or

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death of that leader often leaves the program without a sense of direction. Charismatic leaders possess great social networks and abilities to persuade others to support potentially radical reform. They become the spokesperson attached to the name of specific schools and social reforms. The Hull House remains forever intertwined with Jane Addams reputation as does Benjamin Franklin High School and Leonard Covello. Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Childrens Zone also seem to fit this pattern. Without the passionate guidance and fervor of the charismatic founder or leader, community schools often fail to garner the amount of attention and support needed to continue its work. A CLARIFICATION OF TERMS This study uses a variety of terms to describe the dimensions of social and school reform. Many different terms are used synonymously while others have nuanced distinctions. First, this study is concerned about the nature of social reform, which can be defined as efforts to improve, restructure, or transform communal relationships and institutions. Social reform is often used interchangeably with social intervention, though intervention represents a more direct and radical action geared toward creating change in a community. One aspect of social reform may be the expansion or contraction of social welfare which relates to specific benefits and assistance provided to individuals in order to sustain their economic and educational well-being as well as their health. Though community schools generate a diverse body of knowledge related to school-community relationships, this study characterizes community schools as a type of public education focused on the communal, civic, and cultural aspects of a childs life in addition to traditional academic preparation. Some community schools take the form of a traditional public school while others work through settlement houses, nonprofit organizations, and charter schools. These community schools often

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pursue more holistic education through a continuum-of-solutions, which is a comprehensive and coordinated model used to integrate academic and social services in a community school. The term continuum-of-solutions is used by the current Department of Education to explain the theory behind the Promise Neighborhoods initiative (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). However, continuums are also synonymous with a pipeline of services, often used by the Harlem Childrens Zone, and wraparound services, which broadly describes the cohesive integration of social and academic programming.

THE UPCOMING CHAPTERS

tell a story about the role of schools as social interventions in

the United States throughout the Twentieth Century. As an alternative to the welfare state, education offers an opportunity to bridge classrooms and communities, transforming schools into the social core of the neighborhood. Through the study of four prominent cases of community schooling, this study explores how and why schools emerge as social interventions in lowincome urban neighborhoods. The American tendency to educationalize social problems holds significant implications for the role and responsibilities of schools and their relation to the state in the care of societys most marginalized and disenfranchised groups. Understanding the broad narrative of community schools as solutions to urban poverty highlights the values associated with public education and social reform in the United States.

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SETTING THE STAGE: UNDERSTANDING NORMS & OUTLIERS OF SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS

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1 | THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO SOCIAL REFORM

Comprehensive continuums-of-solutions occupy a unique space within the broader context of American social welfare. Todays media rhetoric surrounding the Harlem Childrens Zone praises the program for its radical approach to education reform. Canadas takes a holistic approach to revitalizing Harlem through educational change, poverty intervention, and social reform. The Zone recognizes that schools represent one component of a communitys livelihood. In order to spur widespread neighborhood change, it is necessary to treat manifestations of poverty in civic life, health, and education. Why has Canadas pipeline of services garnered so much public attention? What is unique (if at all) about this approach? Before understanding how the four cases in this study are special examples of social reform, it is important to understand the norms of civil society and social welfare in which they operate. This chapter examines the political and historical nature of American individualism and its impact on social welfare in the United States. Based in the political theory of limited government, the founding of this nation prioritized the protection of individual rights over the establishment of a strong state. American traditions of active civic and political associations act as a substitution for a robust state mechanism, shifting social reform from a public to private sphere. The combination of a highly individualistic society and limited government created opportunities for the flourishing of civil society and private philanthropy. Within this context, nonprofits and philanthropic foundations emerged to provide goods and services that neither the market nor state could fulfill (Prewitt, 2006). With increased democratic control and fewer expectations of accountability, activists and philanthropists with do-gooder mentalities became responsible for the welfare of the poor, the sick, and the young and old. Civil society provided an arena for continuums-of-solutions to address community needs.

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CONSTITUTIONAL BASIS The foundations of limited government and individual rights emerged in the Constitution. After gaining independence from Great Britain, the new republic addressed questions of the role that government should play in the lives of its citizens. The founders fears of tyrannical monarchs and belief in inviolable, individual rights led to a system that vested power in the hands of the people. Within the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment represents the most obvious effort to protect individuals from the strong arm of the state. The first discussions of the new government were rifled with debate about the extent of the governments power as well as the protections of individual rights against state encroachment. Among the most fundamental rights to civil society, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association enjoyed protection in the Constitution as rights vital to the health of a free and flourishing civil society (Sievers, 2010). Widespread acceptance of individuals abilities to speak freely and associate with whomever they chose created power in the public to respond to or counteract their government systems. The public possessed tools to direct and guide government actions to work in their favor rather than intervene unnecessarily in their private affairs. However, disagreement about the degree to which the people (and which class of people) should control state actions created two factions among the nations leaders. The Federalists sought to limit the power of the masses by creating a strong government that made decisions on behalf of the commons while the Jeffersonians, also known as the Democratic-Republicans, wanted to empower people to take direct control of their democracy (Tocqueville, 1945). Tensions abounded throughout the early days of the republic as leaders disagreed on what role federal and state governments should play on a daily basis. This fundamental division over the balance between state intervention and private rights also extended towards civil society. In

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matters regarding private and voluntary associations, Federalists believed that civil society was a vehicle through which the elite as natural leaders could sustain their dominant role and over time steer the new polity on a course that would maintain the elites well-being (Sievers, 2010). The Jeffersonians, on the other hand, worried about the emergence of an aristocracy similar to the one that ruled Britain. Disagreements between the Federalists and Jeffersonians over the extent of public power were eventually settled in the election of 1800 when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams to become president. This put the Jeffersonians in power and significantly weakened the Federalist Party so that the democratic ideals of power in the people and limited government were now national realities. GROWTH OF CIVIL SOCIETY & PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY Without the strong arm of the government, the market and civil society were responsible for meeting the needs of the public. While the state was limited in its coercive abilities, the market possessed a unique set of incentives around profit generation and accumulation. Limited government curbed the ability of the state to provide benefits and address the needs of the public. Often times, the market takes on state responsibilities by providing goods and services but only if a profit motive exists. This leaves the most disenfranchised and marginalized in society with significant needs for social services and benefits that the state and market do not fulfill. Here, civil society, comprised of nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, and civic associations, emerged in order to take on obligations unaddressed by either the state or market. Civil society and the nonprofit sector act as quasi-state and quasi-market actors, relying on charity, voluntarism, and philanthropy to provide goods and services that are in the public interest but are not forthcoming from the normal functioning of the market (Prewitt, 2006). Though the lines between the state, market, and civil society often blur, these three spheres of action complement

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one another and fulfill the public and private needs of individuals within society. What distinguishes civil society from the state and market is its lack of coercive power and ability to generate profit respectively. The combination of a limited government and profit-driven market leaves ample room for social service organizations to provide goods and services to the poor. As an entirely voluntary sphere, civil society allows individuals to exercise their rights of free expression and association to compensate for perceived state and market deficits. Even while civil society operates at the mercy of volunteers and civic-minded leaders, the work of nonprofit institutions and philanthropic foundations flourished with the sanctioning and support of the state and market. Rather than attempt to overtake functions of civil society, the state has readily allowed nonprofits and foundations to take on work that would otherwise become burdensome obligations for the state. In several instances, the government favored the rights of private associations rather than increased state control over private actions. The nonprofit and philanthropic sectors possess advantages over state-sponsored social programs through the sectors increased flexibility and cost savings for the state. Additionally, the government and courts often favor private associations in politically contentious matters. In 1819, a landmark case contesting the boundaries of private versus public control of educational benefits reached the Supreme Court. Dartmouth College v Woodward came about in a period during which public demands for more secular, practical education threatened the longstanding traditions of religious, private colleges originally chartered by the British Crown. Despite receiving land grants and some monetary aid from the state of New Hampshire, Dartmouth insisted that its Board of Trustees retained final say on the curriculum and college affairs. This system of private control over publically funded institutions distressed the New Hampshire

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governor and legislature who wanted to remodel Dartmouth into a university that would provide broad-based, secular education rather than train a new aristocracy for elite positions of power. Arguing that education represented a public purpose, the state demanded greater control over the colleges affairs while the trustees argued for the sanctity of their original charter and need to honor the original donors wishes (McGarvie, 2003). The tension between the New Hampshire governor and the Dartmouth trustees reached the Supreme Court where Chief Justice John Marshall blocked the state from gaining control over Dartmouth. By ruling in favor of the college, the Supreme Court separated private from public education and limited state interventions in private educational institutions, regardless of public funding or support. This case essentially began a long tradition of courts deferring to individual rights of expression and association rather than state control over the provision of benefits and services. Subsequent examples of the Courts support of private association at the expense of state interests can be found as recently as Boy Scouts of America v. Dale in 2000. Once again, the Supreme Court decided in favor of protecting private associations and their right to limit membership despite the New Jersey governments protest against the Boy Scouts discriminatory standards against homosexuals (Brody, 2006). Ultimately, the Dartmouth and Boy Scouts cases are two examples in a long history of government protection of civil society organizations, creating room for the expansive development of private organizations providing goods and service in the public interest rather than strong state mechanisms. While the government may choose to shift responsibility to nonprofits and philanthropic foundations, the American public generally embraces the influential role of civil society as a way for citizens to exercise democratic control over their communities. The provision of many public goods and services remains private because society prefers reasonable discretion exercised by

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different participants under different conditions to the uniformity of government-directed action (Brody, 2006). Embedded within the context of American individualism, the growth of civil society is a natural expression of the protected rights of individuals to express themselves and assert their values through social service charity, volunteerism, and philanthropy. This third sector provides individuals with opportunities to identify needs in their communities, produce innovative solutions to social issues, and exercise democratic control over the social and cultural landscape of their neighborhoods. Proponents of civil society often argue that state-driven, topdown reforms are too rigid and uniform to address the nuances of individual communities. It is therefore more effective to leave matters such as education and poverty intervention to private associations and individuals with closer local contact. Ultimately, the growth of civil society and private philanthropy empowered individuals to enact changes and perpetuate their values within their own neighborhoods without state interference. EDUCATIONALIZING POVERTY & OTHER SOCIAL PROBLEMS The nature of American individualism and civil society often precludes strong state action around social issues except in the realm of public education. Mass public education is one of the largest, state-sponsored undertakings in American history. Though the public hesitates to support other forms of social programming, public education historically receives a substantial amount of sponsorship and longstanding institutionalization. Not only do public schools remain a fixture in American society but they are also expected to fulfill many other social functions such as providing opportunity, eliminating racism, and enhancing health and economic productivity. As a convergence point for all children, schools carry great potential to bring together communities as well as centralize the dissemination of information and services. While the lack of a robust welfare state results in part from deep-seated notions of individualism, public

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schooling is the most radical form of social welfare in the United States. Its widespread appeal reaches populations in ways that weak healthcare, housing, and employment policies do not. Located at the heart of local communities and protected by public support, schools represent natural solutions to social ills and convenient vehicles for social interventions. Social reforms imposed on schools include creating health clinics, nutrition programs, parenting classes, vocational preparation, citizenship training, and more. The longevity of the public school system extends in part from the educationalization of social issues and the ability of [of schools] to embrace and embody the social missions that have been imposed upon it (Labaree, 2008). Government leaders and public advocates willingly shift responsibility for social reforms onto schools, expanding the public school system to an extraordinary size and function. Because public schools are a celebrated component of American history and democracy, educationalizing social problems can garner acceptance for more comprehensive social welfare services. The tendency to educationalize social problems rests on public schools reputation as the responsible party for the academic, social, and physical well-being of all children. Since the public school system provides ready access to a large number of individuals, it is not only a politically legitimate way but also a convenient opportunity to intervene in low-income communities. The provision of public education not only provides a space for social reform but also reinforces American values of individualism and democracy. At its core, educations central focus is on changing the capacities and motives of individual students so that social reform through the schools maintains an individualized focus on social issues and problems (Labaree, 2008). Ultimately, Americans want institutions that pursue broad-based social goals while maintaining the ideals of individualism and choice in a liberal democracy. The history of educationalization in the United States stems from a desire to solve social problems in a way that

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aligns with cultural values of utility, individualism, and optimism (Labaree, 2008). Americans expect schools to solve all social problems because there is a tendency to individualize poverty and inequality rather than view these problems as consequences of structural issues. Schools are deliberately individualized institutions focused on instilling a certain set of values and behaviors in students. Since schools socialize individual children to become upwardly mobile citizens and workers, it seems natural to make education the solution to social problems. Given the American penchant for individualization and public education, continuums-ofsolutions also adopt educational components in order to legitimize other socio-cultural interventions. Today, the Promise Neighborhoods initiative to replicate the Harlem Childrens Zone is managed by the Department of Education despite the programs heavy emphasis on community change and social support. Perhaps the greatest appeal of wraparound services lie in their integration of social and academic services, but the efforts of organizations such as the Zone or historical models such as the Hull House would receive greater criticism were it not for their educationalization. While schools are an important component in Promise Neighborhoods, much of the literature surrounding the program focuses on about measuring effectiveness in the surrounding community. If the program is skewed towards neighborhood revitalization and community change, would it not be better served in the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Housing and Human Services? The need to educationalize social reform for political and public legitimacy transforms schools into social centers and providers of limited social welfare. Instead of focusing of structural changes, educationalization creates negative consequences in poverty, healthcare, and racial inequality by misusing investments in schools rather than the comprehensive, structural reform needed to solve these problems. Pushing social reforms into schools creates additional

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burdens on over-extended, under-resourced institutions with little capacity to solve widespread social problems (Labaree, 2008). Without broad-based reform and increased resources, schools will fail to live up to the lofty expectations imposed upon them. These failures fuel negative rhetoric about an educational crisis which exists in part because schools are expected to accomplish social reform in addition to providing rigorous academic training to every child in the United States. Education is not a mass-based solution for institutional social problems including hunger, inadequate healthcare, racism, and obesity, but it is a convenient mechanism to pursue limited social welfare and maintain a sense of individualism in civil society. By individualizing and educationalizing, the government and public retain a limited welfare state at the expense of broad-based social and structural reform. MODERN LIMITATIONS OF CIVIL SOCIETY AS A SOLUTION TO SOCIAL ILLS The strength of civil society largely depends upon the degree of interconnectedness within a community and the willingness of individuals to engage in civic life. With a limited welfare state, caring for the poor, reducing crime, and educating citizens becomes a communal responsibility. This duty is often met by a proliferation of nonprofit organizations, civic associations, and philanthropic foundations that provide social benefits and services to those in need. However, recent scholarship suggests that the traditions of civil society once lauded by Tocqueville are in jeopardy as more and more Americans become disengaged from their communities. The breakdown of civil society threatens the health and safety of many individuals who rely on civic organizations for social support. Recently, conservative scholar Charles Murray published a book entitled Coming Apart arguing that the decline of Americas civil society results from class divisions between white professionals and the white working class. Community engagement declines as enclaves formed

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by socio-economic class keep wealthy elites insulated in their gated communities while the working class individuals associate within their own group. This lack of vertical integration is troubling as poorer individuals are less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese (Brooks, 2012). Murray has long argued that the health of civil society depends on the ability of individuals to maintain the founding virtues of civil society which include marriage, industriousness, community and faith (Schuessler, 2012). His controversial book entitled The Bell Curve incited controversy when he argued that crime, broken families, and unemployment were characteristics of the pathologies of the black underclass. Now these problems are also associated with the white working class. With higher rates of children born out of wedlock, single parent families, divorce, and crime in poorer communities, the working class is unable to participate in civil society in the way that Murray sees fit. He worries that civil society cannot survive as long as the founding virtues are not a part of working class culture. Meanwhile whites in the upper classes represent an aristocracy of inherited intelligence as educated Americans have high-paying, professional jobs, marry each other, have more traditional families, and participate in their local communities, epitomizing Murrays virtues of marriage, industriousness, community and faith (Confessore, 2012). As society becomes increasingly disengaged along class lines, Murray argues that civil society is constantly threatened by the subculture of disrepair and poverty which often create societys most pressing social ills. While Murrays views on the state of American civil society are often among the most controversial arguments regarding race, class, and poverty, his perspective is only one of many on the decline the civil society. Another perspective offered by Robert Putnam suggests that the civil society studied by Tocqueville is threatened by the sharp decline in civic engagement since

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the 1960s. Putnam bases the importance of civic associations on theories about social capital which he describes as features of social lifenetworks, norms, and trustthat enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives (Putnam, Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disapperance of Social Capital in America, 1995). Social connections are established with a vibrant civic life in which individuals are engaged in their communities and connect to one another through associations such as their Bible study class, book clubs, and bowling leagues. The more people associate with one another, the more likely they are to trust each other and be able to cooperate in addressing communal needs. However, Americans today are less involved in civic associations as memberships in classic organizations such as the Elks club, the League of Women Voters, the Red Cross, labor unions, and parent-teacher associations (PTA) have decreased by 25% to 50% (Putnam, Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disapperance of Social Capital in America, 1995). The trust and communal bonds characteristic of previous generations have declined as family structures have changed and more time is spent on work-related activities. Neighbors may no longer be friends, and most social interaction may occur within the home or limited social circles. Because the greater the density of associational membership in a society, the more trusting its citizens, a decline in civic associations may erode the basis for communal cooperation vital to the health of local neighborhoods (Putnam, Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital, 1995). The erosion of local, grassroots civic associations is troubling as the social capital produced in these interactions play an important role in the distribution of social welfare in the United States. Perhaps the nature of technological innovation and online social networking is partially responsible for the weakening of civic life. Perhaps Americans just work more and have less time to associate with one another. Either way, threats to civil society jeopardize local

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communities, particularly those of low-income status. Because Americas social welfare system is largely local and voluntary, the lack of community engagement suggests that too much individualism jeopardizes the well-being of societys most disenfranchised. Though the roots of civil society lie in exceptional individualism and limited government, civic associations form an important component of a civil society able to address social needs on a local level. If local communities are no longer taking responsibility for the poor, ailed, old and young in their neighborhoods, then who is?

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2 | FOUR CASES: RECURRING RISE & FALL OF SCHOOLS AS COMMUNITY CENTERS

Over the course of the Twentieth Century, reformers have attempted to transform public schools into community centers, creating continuums-of-solutions that integrate schools and society. Continuums involve individuals and community organizations who engage with one another to solve local needs. From urban centers such as New York and Chicago to mid-size cities in the Midwest, local neighborhood organizations built a net of social services around their public schools in response to their communitys needs. The breadth and diversity in communities and continuums cannot be fully explained in this study. Across the time and space, neighborhoods often respond to local need by creating programs to strengthen school-community ties. It is difficult to predict how many community schools exist in one form or another. This common pattern of civic engagement in American culture makes a comprehensive study of school-community wraparound services challenging and perhaps unfeasible. While this paper cannot detail every instance of community schooling, it can draw upon a few specific instances of communities building comprehensive networks of social services to explain the broader patterns associated with continuums-of-solutions. Examining case studies empowers historians to locate social change in its immediate, local context and to examine particular reforms from their genesis as ideas to their actual implementation (Reese, 2002). In order to explore the broad patterns and trajectories of schools as social interventions, this study focuses on four prominent examples of urban community schools. Starting with Jane Addams iconic settlement house, the Hull House in Chicago is an early example of how the city responded to poverty and a growing immigrant population with educational, citizenship, and recreational services. In Milwaukee, a large German community with Socialist values redefined

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local public schools by introducing school lunches, health clinics, and playgrounds, making education more responsive to local needs. Between the World Wars, East Harlems Benjamin Franklin High School was led by the neighborhoods Italian leader, Leonard Covello. The longtime educator envisioned a comprehensive high school open to the community over twelve hours per day, providing not only a space for the neighborhood to convene but also citizenship, vocational, and extracurricular classes for immigrants to assimilate to new surroundings. Finally, the same Harlem community became home to Geoffrey Canadas Harlem Childrens Zone in the late 1990s. Though Harlem underwent vast changes between Covello and Canada, the Zones pipeline of services ranging from parenting classes to health initiatives and after-school education once again calls national attention to community schooling as a model of reform. CASE SELECTION & METHODOLOGY Among the range of options, these cases were chosen based on the breadth of the services provided. While many schools and community organizations partner around specific programs, continuums are unique in their comprehensiveness and assortment of services. The chosen cases attempted to provide a diverse range of academic, social, health, and cultural services to their communities. They did not create one particular program but provided all educational, health, citizenship, and recreational services to their neighborhoods. Additionally, the four cases presented a range of locations, leadership, and time periods that would complicate and deepen understanding of continuums-of-solutions as neighborhood reform. Though a few of the cases overlap in time, each emerged in response to a different set of needs, under diverse forms of leadership, and through a variety of support mechanisms. Bookending the Twentieth Century, the cases provide an interesting context for community schooling at both the beginning and ends of an eventful time in American history.

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Selection of the four cases was made with a broad intent to explore the breadth of community schools as social interventions in low-income, urban communities. This study employed a qualitative grounded theory approach to allow for the development of themes from the material rather than the author. The diversity in time, location, and form of the cases made imposing predetermined measures difficult. Instead, a loose framework around the development, character, and decline of the cases was applied, allowing for flexibility in analysis. The cases were closely examined for common patterns and variations regarding the emergence of community schools and how they functioned within urban neighborhoods. Furthermore, a grounded theory approach allowed both similarities and variations in successes and declines of community schools to arise organically from the cases. Sources used to construct this study include a variety of histories regarding the cases, government documents, recent news media, and theoretical literature about poverty, social reform, and civil society. The main themes of community schools as a response to crisis, cultural versus structural approaches to solving poverty, and the temporary nature of community schools evolved during analysis of the cases, forming the backbone of this studys findings. Overall, the cases demonstrate that continuums-of-solutions can take several forms ranging from settlement homes to nonprofit organizations and charter schools. The stories bring together local communities and leaders changing the status quo in their communities. Each case enhances understanding about why and how continuums-of-solutions emerge and what factors determine the success or failure when integrating social services with community schooling. PATTERNS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION, IMMIGRATION, & URBANIZATION One of the earliest forms of comprehensive social service provision developed from middle and upper class women who founded settlement homes for the benefit of the poor. The

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womens movement closely intertwined with the growth of social service organizations and social welfare during the Progressive Era. Elite women drove the settlement house movement by seeking ways to make urban and industrial cities less bureaucratized and more humanistic. As city life became associated with greater distractions and decreased familial control over children, women felt the need to fill the maternal void by advancing social service reforms such as vacation schools, playgrounds, breakfasts and lunches, social centers, medical inspections, and other forms of state intervention (Reese, 2002). Settlement homes offered one way by which privileged women could engage directly with poor, immigrant population in urban slums. By creating a communal space within the neighborhood, women could live with their clients and facilitate the education and social refinement of slum dwellers. Established in 1889, Chicagos Hull House was spearheaded by Jane Addams in response to the destitute conditions in the citys South Side neighborhoods. Coming from a privileged background, Addams was educated at elite institutions such as the Rockford Female Seminary and traveled extensively through the United States and Europe. Moved by the poverty she encountered, Addams felt obligated to address the dire conditions in Chicagos slums. These neighborhoods were largely occupied by newly arrived immigrants from Southern and Eastern European countries. Located in the Nineteenth Ward, the Hull House catered to densely populated communities of Greek, Italian, Russian, German, and Sicilian immigrants who comprised over seventy-five percent of the citys population (Scott, 1971). Urbanization and industrialization attracted large numbers of immigrants and workers from farms to the cities. However, discriminatory policies and practices restricted poor workers to shabby streets brimming with intense squalor and unsanitary conditions. Treated as cogs within larger corporations and businesses, unskilled workers received little support in cities and were instead

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exploited for their labor. The political and social service systems surrounding these workers also became highly bureaucratized, detaching the poor from the institutions in which they lived and worked. Within this context of segregation, poverty, and inequality, Addams created the Hull House, a social center in the slums providing more holistic, humanistic treatment of the poor. At the same time that Addams and womens organizations in Chicago led reform efforts in the slums, Milwaukee experienced similar neighborhood revitalization during the Progressive Era. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Milwaukee underwent exponential industrial and population growth that transformed the city into a bustling center for the beer, tanning, and manufacturing industries. The amount of financial investment in manufacturing industries grew to $110 million by 1900 so that expanding industry created new jobs which attracted poor, unskilled workers to the city (Reese, 2002). Within twenty years, Milwaukees population grew two hundred and forty seven percent, expanding more rapidly than the citys housing, education, and social infrastructures could accommodate (Reese, 2002). A large portion of this population increase consisted of immigrants from Germany and later Ireland, Italy, and Poland. The immigrants presence permeated the city as they inhabited the poorer parts of the urban center and spread their foreign cultural and religious practices. Mirroring broader national trends, the patterns of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in Milwaukee and Chicago aligned with the waves of European immigration that transformed the countrys urban landscape. Women also played a key role in focusing the citys attention on poverty, especially in slums inhabited by immigrants. As in Chicago, womens clubs in Milwaukee advocated broad and comprehensive social welfare reforms such as vacation schools, playgrounds, parent teacher associations, school breakfasts and lunches, and vocational training (Reese, 2002). However, Milwaukee social reform was unique in its political nature and primary focus on school reform.

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Grassroots efforts to make community schools the centerpiece of social change distinguished Milwaukee from Chicago, where social reform was more broadly centered on poverty and run by voluntary womens associations. In 1893, the Womens School Alliance formed in order to address the depression as well as subsequent unemployment and poverty through changes to urban public schooling. Lizzie Black Kander, considered the Jane Addams of Milwaukee, took advantage of her position as a school board member to promote school reforms that would adapt centralized, bureaucratic public schools to the communitys needs (Reese, 2002). Community members, both men and women, often appealed to the school board to make policy changes, replacing rigid school curriculum focused on rote memorization and discipline with a more holistic approach to a childs education and health. Dedicated to making changes within public schools, German immigrants and the Socialist Party in Milwaukee felt uncomfortable with growing inequality and recognized the potential in schools to create significant changes in the community. Though the women in Chicago focused on providing charity to the poor, the radicals in Milwaukee sought greater state intervention in social welfare and targeted schools as the means to pursue social justice. These radicals consisted of not only of white liberal reformers but also immigrants who came to the city with a different political orientation. While proponents of capitalism thought schools should prepare youth to accept the existing industrial system, Milwaukees grassroots reformers and radicals believed public schools could be more democratic and responsive institutions (Reese, 2002).Capturing public schools would provide radical Milwaukee Socialists with the power and means to enact structural changes to the communitys needs. Grassroots efforts, as opposed to elite philanthropy, would bring schools closer to the people and protect against political corruption and power

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centralization in the hands of a few. Ultimately, Milwaukee public schools became contentious arenas for which different ideologies competed for control and influence. The quest to utilize public schools as centers for social reform continued into the Twentieth Century as schools offered a convenient space in which the community could intervene. Amidst the Great Depression, Leonard Covello spearheaded a campaign to open a comprehensive high school serving East Harlems young men. A prominent community activist and educator, Covello grew up in the Italian immigrant community and wanted to integrate public schooling with the communitys culture. Italian immigrants established a home for themselves in the tenements of East Harlem early in the century, creating Harlems Little Italy which not only resembled rural Italian villages in culture but also poverty. Less prosperous than other parts of New York City, East Harlem transitioned into a slum during the periods between the two World Wars. The Depression aggravated the conditions of slum life as East Harlems immense population growth before and during World War I exceeded employment opportunities by the 1930s. Additionally, the neighborhoods diversification brought Italians in contact with African Americans and Puerto Ricans so that racial and ethnic tensions pervaded East Harlems blocks for years. Vying for limited educational resources and social benefits, the immigrants and migrants in East Harlem lacked a common space for community cooperation. Covello, who taught in Harlem public schools after graduating from Teachers College at Columbia University, envisioned a high school that would advance cultural pluralism and intergroup harmony as well as mobilize East Harlems splintered ethnic groups in cooperative efforts (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). After convincing the city to relocate Benjamin Franklin High School to a newly constructed building on East 108th Street, Covello became the principal of the citys only community-centered school. Keeping the school open into the night, Covello

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created a social space for community organizations to convene with the hope that the neighborhoods diverse population would come together and form solutions to common social problems. The high school not only provided meeting spaces but also established an adult school, community action council, and street units to clean up the tenements and slums (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Covello also created an innovative school curriculum that emphasized extracurricular activities and leadership training in addition to academics. By keeping youth off of the streets, Covello hoped to diminish illicit activities and teach cooperation and compassion to his students. For years, Covello aimed to assimilate East Harlems poor immigrants and unskilled migrants into a culture of community cooperation and positive citizenship. Separated by over forty years, Covellos Benjamin Franklin High School and Geoffrey Canadas Harlem Childrens Zone possess many similarities in their efforts to transform the Harlem community. The period between the end of World War II and the 1990s were marked with significant change and intense violence and poverty in Harlem. By the time that Canada began his work with the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, Harlem was marked by poverty and instability. Unemployment, segregation, and familial discord were prominent in Harlem, one of the most iconic neighborhoods in New York City. Children living in the urban center lived with one or fewer parents, received inadequate education, and turned to violence and drugs (Gill, 2011). The neighborhood carried a reputation for intense poverty, discord, and violence and lacked comprehensive, institutional care for residents in need. Canada managed Rheedlen, a local nonprofit catering to children and youth in the city with afterschool programming. Similar to many nonprofits in the area, Rheedlen wanted to stop Harlem children from falling into a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty but had limited results in the neighborhood as a whole (Tough, 2008). Harlem was too entrenched in historical, social, and economic barriers

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to be improved by a diffuse provision of social services. Canada recognized the need for more comprehensive social reform, establishing the Harlem Childrens Zone to provide a pipeline of academic and social services to the community. By the end of the 1990s, Canada created a new organization called the Harlem Childrens Zone which served twenty four blocks of Harlem with integrated social, health, and academic services. The Zone opened to all children living within the targeted area so that the services did not include one group at the expense of another. Canada envisioned a support system that would be a comprehensive, continuous, linked series of programs, forming a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood couldnt slip through (Tough, 2008). Starting while children were still in the womb, the Zones services intervened in every part of a childs life so that no lack of educational, social and health services existed within the targeted blocks. Rather than leave the childrens futures to chance, Canada created an integrated continuum-of-solutions that cared for the community from infancy through adulthood. Though Canada originally partnered with Harlem public schools, he eventually founded his own charter school in order to control the provision of education as well as the social programs run by the Zone (Tough, 2008). With this comprehensive strategy of care, Canada hoped that the Zone would stop the cycle of poverty in Harlem and change the trajectory for children in the community. INTERVENING THROUGH A CONTINUUM-OF-SOLUTIONS While each neighborhood experienced unique circumstances, the reforms and programs implemented were remarkably related across time and geographic space. The common thread between the Hull House, Milwaukee public schools, Benjamin Franklin High School, and the Harlem Childrens Zone was the pursuit of comprehensive social reform with education as a central piece of the continuum-of-solutions. Each case created a series of poverty interventions

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and community reforms that integrated social, health, and educational services. The overall impact of these continuums shifted neighborhood revitalization from diffuse, uncoordinated programming to a holistic, strategic set of cultural, health, and school interventions. In Chicago, Jane Addams created a social center in the midst of the citys slums so that volunteers could live among their clients. The services implemented by Addams were direct responses to community needs. For example, the Hull House operated a coffee house and an open kitchen providing food and nutritional advice to immigrants with little access to fresh produce (Addams, 1910). The coffee house and gymnasium also provided new spaces for community members to host social gatherings and organization meetings. Additionally, the Hull House established cooperative associations and rented out a small number of apartments as alternatives to tenements. Addams often formed partnerships with workers and advocated for policy changes that would improve the working and housing conditions of immigrants on the South Side. Working closely with the clients with whom she lived, Addams, along with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, created a series of classes that imparted both practical skills and cultural knowledge to immigrants. Gates and Addams taught classes ranging from English language to cooking, sewing, and American government (UIC College of Architecture and Arts, 2009). The Hull House also responded to urban disintegration of traditional family life by providing childcare, kindergarten, housing, food, and recreational spaces and services. The radical reformers of Milwaukee also sought ways to fill the void of familial support by creating school reforms to provide meals, safe playgrounds, and communal spaces. With parents working longer hours, children were often left to their own accord and engaged in illicit activities. Womens associations and Socialists in Milwaukee sought ways to keep children off of the streets and create safer conditions in the urban center. They advocated heavily for vacation

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schools, which provided extended learning time during the summer months by engaging students in field trips to the country, excursions to outlying parks, manual training and domestic science, museum visits, storytelling, plays, kindergarten work, and visits to local points of historical interest (Reese, 2002). Vacation schools provided enrichment, not remediation, to the poorest and most densely populated sections of the city. In addition to summer enrichment, playgrounds also became an important issue in Milwaukee as urban development created few safe and desirable places to play. Reformers advocated for the construction of playgrounds not only in neighborhoods but also in schools, providing children with healthy recreation time during the day. Finally, school reform in Milwaukee revolved around transforming public schools into social community centers, extending the accessibility of schools to students and community members alike. Breaking barriers between public schools and their neighborhoods, social centers encouraged parents to be more involved in their childs schooling and support students through a more holistic theory of education. Wanting to create stronger bonds between schools and the communities they serve, Leonard Covello also advocated for more democratic control of local public schools. As principal of Benjamin Franklin High School, Covello kept the school building open for an extended amount of time in hopes that the facility would become more accessible to community organizations. Covello believed in the citizen-centered community schools potential to bring together East Harlems diverse population around central social issues. He merged school and community through the creation of a community advisory council (CAC), street units, and adult education program (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Comprised of multiple community organizations and leaders, the CAC acted as the means by which the school and its constituents could share information and resources with one another to solve community problems. Additionally, street

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units extended the school into converted storefronts and communal spaces within the neighborhood. Street units ranged from parent-teacher associations to groups formed in order to clean and repair dilapidated buildings around the high school. Covello also took advantage of New Deal resources such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to create an adult school supervised by WPA workers that provided additional training and education to workers in the community (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Broader WPA projects also provided the high school with resources for extracurricular activities and experimental community programming aimed at eliminating violence and destitution in the city streets. The potential influence of street life amidst urban decay also sparked Geoffrey Canada and the creation of the Harlem Childrens Zone in 1997. Wanting to remove social, health, and educational barriers to a students success, Canada established a pipeline of services coupling rigorous academic preparation with a base of family, social service, and health programs as well as broader community-building initiatives (Harlem Children's Zone, 2009). The pipeline provides services available to all children and families living within the now ninety seven blocks targeted by the organization. Beginning with Baby College, a workshop for expecting parents, children continue through early childhood education and the Promise Academy Charter Schools while also receiving academic case management services, employment training, college preparation, and continued support through college (Harlem Children's Zone, 2009). At the same time, students obtain services in fitness, nutrition, and leadership development, and families receive services including mental health counseling, access to public benefits, housing support, and recreation programs. The provision of comprehensive social services around an educational centerpiece allows the Zone to intervene in every aspect of the communitys well-being and alleviate persistent poverty that plagued Harlem for decades.

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EVENTUAL DECLINE AND DISINTEGRATION Though each of the cases enjoyed great prominence and success in their respective communities, community schooling (with the exception of the Harlem Childrens Zone) also proved to be temporary. After Jane Addamss death in 1935, the Hull moved from its original building and eventually became rebranded as the Jane Addams Hull House Association, a nonprofit rather than settlement house. The Hull House maintained unusual longevity for a social service organization, but its original form as a comprehensive care center and settlement house came to an end shortly after Addamss passing. Leadership change often leads to the disintegration of continuums-of-care. Without the presence of its original founder and advocate, the Hull House experienced its peak in historical and social prominence in its first twenty years while Addams ran the settlement house. Addams had an influential social network comprised of individuals including Eleanor Roosevelt to assist in her mission to aid the poor. As time passed, the novelty of the settlement house faded while the lack of a prominent spokesperson made it more difficult for the Hull House to attract funding and maintain its former standards. Even today, the Hull House name remains closely associated with Jane Addams while her successors did not enjoy the same level of national and historical preeminence. Though the Jane Addams Hull House Association provided services until 2012, the settlement tradition was lost without Addams. The Hull House spent its post-Addams years being shuffled around Chicago, merged with other umbrella organizations, and struggled to maintain financial stability. While Benjamin Franklin High Schools end as a community-centered school resulted from several factors, its own leadership change also contributed heavily to its decline in the community. Covello officially retired as the principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in 1956. Unable to integrate school and community in the ways that he had hoped, Covello spent

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his last few years trying to salvage parts of his community curriculum before retiring early and moving on the be an educational consultant (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). In his absence, Benjamin Franklin High School became an ordinary, co-educational comprehensive high school, no longer focused on becoming a community center for East Harlem. The school suffered from low enrollment and garnered a reputation for being one of the worst schools in the city after Covellos retirement. Johanek and Puckett (2007) claim that Covellos idea of a communitycentered school faced challenges from the start as there was little governmental infrastructure to support such a time-consuming, resource-driven undertaking. Other voluntary associations and institutions such as Columbia and NYU did not provide enough support to sustain the schools efforts. Additionally, the lack of policy reform around housing and social services made Benjamin Franklin High School the only source of community-centered reforms in the neighborhood. Finally, Covellos efforts failed as diverse ethnic and cultural groups could not find common ground for building community. East Harlem underwent vast cultural change throughout Covellos tenure as principal when the original Italian neighborhood became increasingly African American and Puerto Rican. The racial and ethnic tensions could not be overcome, undermining the purpose of the community-centered school. But not all continuums-of-solutions fail because of leadership change. In Milwaukee, the explicit efforts to enact school reform did not fail but instead became adopted and integrated into the public schooling system. Reformers in Milwaukee were able to implement vacation schools, create playgrounds, and convert schools into social centers because there was an impetus for grassroots action. An alliance between womens organizations, immigrants, and the Socialist Party allowed radical reformers to gain political power in Milwaukee and change educational institutions through the system. Unlike Addams in Chicago and Covello in East Harlem,

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reformers in Milwaukee changed schools by institutionalizing their reforms. Furthermore, action in Milwaukee emerged from grassroots, community-led efforts rather than the elitist, individually led reform spearheaded by Addams and Covello. Despite the radical reformers successes, the advent of World War I curbed Socialist attempts to reinvent public schools as Americans were less tolerant of dissonant voices overall (Reese, 2002). During the war, the coalition between the womens movement and the Socialist Party fractured as the Socialists deeply opposed the use of schools for antiwar messaging while women generally supported antiwar propaganda. Opposition to the war from Socialists created intense backlash and conflict in the community, ending the political and ethnic harmony that made school reform possible during the Progressive Era. The Socialists who opposed antiwar activities in public schools garnered little support from other community leaders and school board members. It is perhaps too early to predict the trajectory of the Harlem Childrens Zone. Geoffrey Canada and his elaborate continuum-of-solutions currently enjoy a great deal of prominence within the media and with the Obama administration. In many ways, Canada seems similar to Addams and Covello who were charismatic leaders with extensive social networks and an ability to endlessly champion their organizations and schools. Whether or not the Zone follows the previous patterns of decline is still an open question, but the historical nature of comprehensive social reform suggests that the political, social, and economic forces of the neighborhoods deeply affect the lifespan of community schools as social interventions.

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DEVIATION FROM THE NORM: A SPECIFIC CONTEXT FOR COMMUNITY SCHOOLING

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3 | CRISIS AS A CATALYST FOR SCHOOL-BASED SOCIAL INTERVENTION

The norms of social welfare in the United States revolve around a sense of exceptional individualism and equal opportunity. Given these standards of civil society, most social reform operates in silos and results from the efforts of non-state, non-market actors. Social service programs started by well-meaning individuals or grassroots communities address specific needs such as temporary shelter, immediate hunger, and emergent health conditions rather than treat the root causes of poverty. Government actors move slowly or not at all around issues of social reform, poverty intervention, and the provision of benefits. The state possesses neither unlimited financial resources nor political incentives to take on controversial social issues that divide the public by ideology and values. Often, issues of education reform, universal healthcare, and expanding public benefits create deep divisions among proponents of limited welfare and advocates of greater government responsibility for the poor. This tension ensures gridlock and blocks significant social reform efforts on a widespread scale. It is important to distinguish between the diffuse social reform efforts created by most civil society organizations and comprehensive structural change that addresses the root causes of poverty. The distinction between radical programs realistically geared towards the eradication of poverty and programs that take a localized, individualized approach to the poverty problem is evidenced by the scale and leadership behind a social program. Comprehensive social welfare reform is rare in a society that is wholly and self-righteously oriented toward getting people off the welfare rolls (Cloward & Piven, 1966). There is a tendency for most Americans to approach poverty relief from the perspective of advancing "individual mobility and empowering people to be economically competitive (Cloward & Piven, 1966). After all, the founding virtues of this nation espoused individualism and opportunity, not guaranteed insurance against poverty 44

and crises. The individualization of poverty creates extraordinary burdens on the states limited welfare system, which is ill-equipped to accommodate all of the individuals in need of income support. In fact, Cloward and Piven (1966) suggest that there are self-protective mechanisms within the welfare system to discourage and demoralize the poor from the dole so that the number eligible beneficiaries far exceeds the number of individuals actually receiving benefits. Efforts to expand the welfare state are often met with cries of socialism, marking comprehensive support of the poor as an anti-American. It is no wonder then that social welfare in the United States is distributed in a localized, sporadic manner by diverse groups in civil society. With ideological conflicts and robust individualism abounding, comprehensive social services rarely emerge. Therefore, it is important to note the special circumstances surrounding the advent and success of a model such as Jane Addamss Hull House or Geoffrey Canadas Harlem Childrens Zone. While born within American civil society, these cases are unique within the context of American social reform so that the circumstances surrounding their establishment warrant special attention. If Americans are normally content to rely on the patchwork of social services provided by civil society, then what causes them to not only tolerate but also embrace a more radical approach to social reform? Under extreme duress and exigent circumstances, social reformers may turn to more comprehensive social reform in order to address a wide range of neighborhood needs. The emergence of high unemployment, racial and ethnic tension, and unaffordable housing creates a high-need environment that cannot be ameliorated by uncoordinated reform efforts. It takes a deep sense of crisis in order to justify creating a comprehensive continuum-of-solutions. Cloward and Piven (1966) point to a crisis threat theory as one possible catalyst for major legislative reform. Defined as a "disruption in some institutional sphere," a crisis can pressure

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politicians into responding to the growing needs of their constituents or move citizens to take action for themselves (Cloward & Piven, 1966). Crises pressure politicians and communities to pursue more comprehensive reform, spurring politicians to address poverty through legislation or community leaders to attack root causes rather than avert the issue. However, Cloward and Piven also caution that political responses to crises are likely to be minimalist unless there is a massbased movement demanding specific resolutions from the political sphere. Politicians favor resolutions that support the status quo or changes that will strengthen their power in office, but there is opportunity for significant legislation reform if the masses are affected by a sense of crisis and apply political pressure to their elected officials. When neighborhoods conditions deteriorate, patchwork social reform becomes insufficient to meet the basic needs of the people. Then, holistic social interventions develop as appropriate solutions to poverty. URBAN DECAY: THE CREATION OF SLUMS & SEGREGATED NEIGHBORHOODS Among each of the four cases studied, common themes of crisis emerge as catalysts for the creation of comprehensive social reform. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, urban cities became inundated with new waves of Southern and Eastern European immigrants seeking opportunity in the nations booming manufacturing industries. The combination of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization of the late 19th Century created densely populated urban neighborhoods brimming with recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe. Intense growth in population crowded urban centers with poor, unskilled workers who arrived with large families that could not be accommodated by outdated housing and social infrastructure. Densely populated neighborhoods packed tens of thousands of recent immigrants into cramped, unsanitary spaces, creating hazardous slums overflowing with people, disease, and poverty. These dramatic changes to cities coupled with the lack of a strong state response created a need

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for dramatic social interventions from the citys elite as well as grassroots community organizations. Due to the onslaught of industry and immigrants, the changing urban landscape created an unavoidable need for radical reforms integrating comprehensive social and educational services for the cities new residents. In 1889, Jane Addams founded the Hull House in response to a changing environment in Chicagos urban center. Seeking refuge from the poor conditions in their home countries, Russian Jews, Italians, and Greeks sought economic opportunities in growing industries such as clothes manufacturing (Addams, 1910). This new wave of immigrants replaced the Irish and German families who moved away from the southern and eastern parts of the city in search of greater prosperity and distance from the new foreigners. Western European immigrants experienced similar discrimination and destitution earlier in the 19th Century; however, subsequent generations of Irishmen and Germans assimilated into mainstream culture and gained both monetary and social resources. No longer trapped within old tenements, prosperous Irish and German immigrants could afford to move to newer, more developed neighborhoods, leaving their run-down homes to the new wave of immigrants. This new wave was tagged as foreign and uncouth, creating ethnic discrimination and residential segregation in Chicagos slums. Seeking employment in the citys large clothing industry, unskilled workers flocked to south and east sides of Chicago and packed their large families into the small tenement houses that once sheltered foreigners with different family structures. Tending towards larger families, the Southern and Eastern Europeans lived in close quarters since the old tenements accommodated smaller families. Population density quickly became a health hazard as manufacturing workers brought home dust and dirt while the lack of sanitation and food created a toxic health environment. Describing the neighborhood surrounding the Hull House, Addams

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(1910) expressed frustration with the communitys state of disarray and lack of state attention towards the needs of the poor: The policy of the public authorities of never taking an initiative, and always waiting to be urged to do their duty, is obviously fatal in a neighborhood where there is little initiative among the citizens. The idea underlying our self-government breaks down in such a ward. The streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer. The older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford it. (p. 98) The conditions resembled the poverty in Londons slums which Addams encountered as a young woman traveling through Europe. Londons premier settlement house, named Toynbee Hall, became the model after which Addams would construct her own social reform efforts. As a member of Chicagos privileged class, Addams now had the means and inspiration necessary to transform her passion for social justice to reality for the residents on Halstead Street. The extreme destitution that moved Addams to action in Chicago resembled the environment that sparked Leonard Covellos interest in forming a community-centered high school in East Harlem. At the end of the 19th Century, Harlem was an attractive neighborhood for upper and middle class families. As Manhattan became more densely populated, Harlem represented an undeveloped marsh land with ample space for economic and housing development. Lots of land ready for construction allowed developers to build larger apartments, pave cleaner streets, and develop a safer neighborhood that provided a contrasting alternative to congested parts of Manhattan. For these reasons, Harlem in the late 19th Century was home to

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prosperous immigrants and political bosses of the Tweed Ring, who built their spacious mansions in this new section of New York City (Gill, 2011). Harlem became associated with a sense of aristocracy and wealth that differentiated this neighborhood from the other boroughs. However, the allure of Harlem and its artistic flourishing during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s quickly faded away as immigrants and African American migrants moved from other parts of Manhattan to Harlem. Prosperous white residents sought ways to distinguish their sections of the neighborhood from areas where poor migrants lived. While West Harlem represented the old money and political power of the 19th Century, East Harlem transformed into a diverse area for both Southern and Eastern Europeans and blacks. Like other New Yorkers and black migrants, Jewish and Italian immigrants were similarly attracted to Harlem for its wide, leafy boulevards and spacious, clean parks (Gill, 2011). Jews seeking escape from anti-Semitic Europe and Italians looking for greater economic opportunity descended upon Harlem early in the Twentieth Century only to experience a very different New York than the successful German immigrants and Tweed Ring bosses. While aristocrats enjoyed the large mansions and recreational parks of West Harlem, high rents and ethnic discrimination forced newly arrived immigrants to settle in the less developed areas of East Harlem. Older white immigrants clung to their luxurious lifestyle in West Harlem while new immigrants moved in next door only to find very different conditions and less economic opportunity than expected. Confined to the blocks of East Harlem, Italian immigrants coped with unhealthy tenement life and built a strong community that resembled their old villages in Italy. They were viewed as especially foreign and poor compared to previous generations of Western European immigrants, who had generally assimilated into the mainstream white culture by the early decades of the century. Harlems Little Italy became the first sign of poverty in a

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neighborhood previously known for its cleanliness and riches (Osofsky, 1966). Poor Italians congregated in dilapidated tenements and turned East Harlem into one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Harlemites often viewed the Jews and Italians as uncultured and filthy foreigners. Their neighborhoods were characterized by overcrowded tenements, infectious disease, and overflowing garbage, which created a public health crisis in Harlem (Gill, 2011). The congregation of poor Jewish and Italian immigrants in East Harlem began to tarnish Harlems reputation as the thriving aristocratic and cultural center of New York. By the 1930s, East Harlem was home to a sizable Italian immigrant population comprised of the poor, working class employed in the citys construction trade and garment industry (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). These unskilled workers were especially vulnerable to the Great Depression, which intensified the poverty experienced by the Italian community. Unemployment in the construction industries rose, leaving many Italian families without a reliable source of income. Additionally, the Italian immigrants performed poorly in school, partially due to their unfamiliarity with a system of compulsory mass education. The children and youth of East Harlem did not engage in their schooling and spent much of their time playing on the dirty streets rather than participating in the communitys civic life. These conditions worried Leonard Covello, a prominent Italian American educator and activist who grew up in Harlem and earned his degree at Columbia College. After teaching for almost twenty years at DeWitt Clinton High School, Covellos concern about the youth in his community and the ability of Italian immigrants to respond positively to the neighborhoods changing conditions grew. Wanting to elevate the status and condition of the Italian community, Covello advocated for a community-centered high school where he could advance citizenship and cultural cooperation as the principal. Responding to the high level of need in his

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surroundings, Covello established a model of education that would address the immense poverty and cultural tensions between Italians, African Americans, and a growing population of Puerto Ricans (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Covello hoped that his cultural competence and years of leadership would be able to reverse the tide for East Harlem, creating a stronger community of civically engaged children and adults. AN INADEQUATE STATE RESPONSE The population boom, industrial expansion, and urban growth that created cities with immense poverty and need accompanied an equally damaging lack of government response to the cities growing needs. Before the Great Depression, the government did little to address widespread social issues that plagued urban communities in any strategic or comprehensive way. As expressed by Jane Addams, the massive demographic changes and entrenchment of slums in Chicago occurred partially due to a lack of state and citizen initiative to clean up the streets, build better housing, and treat the neighborhoods health problems (Addams, 1910). The gap between state programs and community need provided an impetus for leaders such as Addams in Chicago and Covello in Harlem to take social reform into their own hands. In no place was this political motivation as strong as within the community of women and Socialists in Milwaukee. While Milwaukee, like Chicago and New York, experienced a similar industrial boom and population growth, the primary motivation behind their social agenda was to democratize education, changing the system to address community needs rather than educate the elite class. In 1900, Milwaukees manufacturing industries grew at a rapid pace with over $110 million invested in the citys beer, tanning, and heavy manufacturing industries, reflecting the prominence of the German immigrant community in the citys culture and economy (Reese, 2002). The level of industrial investment in 1900 outpaced the amount of investment in 1880

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over five times. The citys quick growth in economic opportunities was matched by a corresponding population boom with the city growing over 247% within twenty years (Reese, 2002). Reflecting national trends in immigration, Milwaukee also welcomed new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe including Italians and Poles who brought Roman Catholicism to the Midwest. Like their counterparts in other major urban cities, Milwaukees newest arrivals were poor, unskilled workers who ended up in the citys shoddier areas. Milwaukees slums experienced similar growth and generated comparable concerns as those of Chicago and New York. Poverty rose parallel to economic expansion, creating intense inequality in a rapidly changing urban center. The growth of industry created a culture of economic efficiency and depersonalization that trickled down to the citys public education system. Public education became a means to an end as the citys capitalists and industrial tycoons viewed schools as breeding ground for future workers in their factories. Citizens and taxpayers thought the purpose of schooling was to prepare students for their place within the citys new economic structure. In addition to the dehumanization of schooling, the citys industry also changed familial dynamics by removing parents from the home and placing them in time-consuming jobs in factories. Parents were less available to raise their children, leaving somewhat of a parental void in the culture of the urban neighborhoods (Reese, 2002). With new economic opportunities and a greater need to provide for their families, both men and women spent more time working in the factories, leaving the provision of food, shelter, and education to a bureaucratic school system. With the belief that schools should fill this parental void, womens organizations and the Socialist Party wanted schools to become more nurturing, safe spaces for their children to learn and play (Reese, 2002). Reformers thought schools should care for children while their parents

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worked, teach them how to be engaged citizens, and nurture youth from childhood to adulthood. Advocating for an enhanced parenting role for the state in social welfare, Milwaukees social reformers complained of the schools emphasis on rigid discipline and rote memorization while championing reforms such as better sanitary methods, the adoption of manual training and domestic science, nature study, and the abolishment of corporal punishment (Reese, 2002). Community activists wanted schools to stop treating their children as cogs in an industrial machine and as young children and adults in need of social support. The conversion of public schools to social centers was done with the purpose of adapting schools to community needs and blending the traditional boundaries between schools and home. Because the state did not provide safe recreational spaces for children after school or during the summer months, Milwaukee activists sought construction of playgrounds and recreational spaces as well as the creation of vacation schools in order to keep children off of the unsanitary, hot streets. Ultimately, the alliance between the womens organizations and Socialist Party could no longer leave the fate of their children in the hands of an incompetent state. Worried that the system would convert children to manufacturing robots, reformers created an agenda to enhance community control through extended learning opportunities, playgrounds, school lunches, social centers, direct election of the school board, and full funding for schools (Reese, 2002). The dissatisfaction of parents and community leaders with the governments inadequate schools moved a grassroots coalition to action, gaining political power on the school board and implementing a series of changes that moved schools closer to community ideals. While less documentation about the origins of the Harlem Childrens Zone exists in academic literature, Paul Tough (2008) characterized Geoffrey Canadas founding of the program as a response to the failing schools and social system in Harlem. Canada originally

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managed the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, a nonprofit organization that worked to reverse the cycle of poverty that led Harlems children into the achievement gap. Canadas work began in a period of crisis in Harlem, which had one of the highest mortality and murder rates in the country (Tough, 2008). Guns, drugs, and crime became a common way of life in the Harlem ghetto throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Burglaries and murders as well as the crack cocaine epidemic made Harlem one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the nation. Children in poverty and homelessness faced challenges in both their homes and schools that made academic success less likely than for students whose basic needs for survival were not in question on a daily basis. Starting with after-school programming, Canada did his best to keep children off of the streets, providing basic after-school programming, truancy prevention, and anti-violence training (Tough, The Harlem Project, 2004). But his scattered and diffuse efforts could not ensure that the children who passed through Rheedlens programs would have longterm academic and social success. After the passage of welfare reform in 1996, national attention shifted away from poverty even though Canadas work in Harlem and others like him country was far from done. The Harlem Childrens Zone comprehensive pipeline of academic and social services emerged as a way for Canada to take control of Harlem rather than waiting for the state to step in and improve its educational and social systems. Canada founded the Promise Academy, the charter school at the center of the Zone, because the public schools were unable to create student gains in achievement. Canadas attempts to supplement the public schools were futile because many of his efforts were negated by a lack of progress in the schools. His attempts to partner with local public schools failed as some principals even refused Canadas support (Tough, 2008). New York City chancellor Joel Klein suggested that forming a charter school would allow

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Canada to circumvent the bureaucracy that made his previous experiences with public schools unsuccessful. Because the public school system moves slowly and inefficiently, it was more productive for Canada to sidestep the public school system entirely, form his own charter school, and control the curriculum and outcomes of his programs. The failures of the public schools in addition to the lack of federal attention on poverty created an impetus for Canada to create his own social safety net in Harlem, providing comprehensive social, health, and educational care for ninety seven blocks of the most impoverished communities in the country. A JUSTIFICATION FOR RADICALISM As poverty intensifies and jeopardizes basic survival, this sense of crisis moves people to pursue radical social reform, departing from the norms of the limited social welfare state. Often times, radical reform involves the pursuit of more comprehensive and holistic social services as evidenced by Addams Hull House. The poverty in Chicago was so intense and the conditions of the slums so unbearable that a dispersed effort to care for the poor resulted in inadequate outcomes. Addams therefore brought the settlement house tradition to Chicago, where she transformed the worst urban slums through educational classes, civic engagement, childcare, and social benefits. Similarly, Canada established a continuum-of-solutions with the Harlem Childrens Zone to ensure that all facets of a childs life would be addressed through academic, familial, and communal programming. Comprehensive reform efforts often blur the boundaries between school and home as community schooling acts as a hybrid of the two. For example, Covello advocated for Benjamin Franklin High School to be open to the community twenty four hours a day so that the school formed a central part of the community and vice versa. With such great need and so little state support, Addams, Canada, and Covello essentially created their own social safety nets within Chicago and Harlem respectively. They provided the welfare benefits,

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food, shelter, education, and civic life for their residents and clients. By deviating from patchwork social services and intermittent reform, these cases created radical interventions in their communities. Radicalism also occurs when reformers choose to act as a political collective rather than individually. The sense of American individualism encourages citizens to care for their local communities instead of receiving state-sponsored, top-down benefits. Rather than rely on traditional state systems to provide social welfare, communities feel empowered to change the status quo once the state is ill-equipped to respond to the magnitude of need. In Milwaukee, a political alliance between womens organizations and the Socialist Party formed to pressure local school officials to adapt public schools to community needs. The schools no longer provided the education and support that children needed in the absence of their parents. Reformers wanted to protect against undemocratic systems and address the deeper causes of poverty and inequality in the neighborhood. To make schools extend into parenthood, the reformers adopted a radical approach by pressuring traditional institutions to change. The fact that these reforms were heavily supported by the Socialist Democratic Party suggests that a certain degree of radicalism was necessary in order to change the status quo in Milwaukee. European immigrants arrived with certain expectations that their government should respond to the communitys most pressing needs. It was unacceptable for the state to be detached from and ignorant of poor children and families living in squalor throughout the nations urban cities. Another form of radical social intervention occurs in the circumvention of inadequate government policies and programs. The Harlem Childrens Zone operates primarily from private funds and runs its own charter school rather than rely on existing public schools and resources. The crisis in Harlem exceeded the ability of the public school system to change or the federal

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government to reprioritize poverty on the political agenda. The ability to circumvent the state is one of the defining characteristics of civil society, which provides citizens with more freedom and democratic control over their neighborhoods. What the state and market cannot provide (or cannot provide well) is left to civic organizations and individuals to pursue alternative routes of reform. Charter schools and nonprofit organizations are a part of this alternative tradition and even encouraged by the state as ways to produce more democratic, locally controlled institutions to meet needs that the federal bureaucracy cannot. These departures from limited social welfare are precipitated by a sense of urgency and desperation in the community.

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MECHANISMS FOR INTERVENING: CULTURAL & STRUCTURAL VARIATIONS ON REFORM

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4 | COMMUNITY SCHOOLS AS CULTURAL REMEDIES

As stated in the previous chapter, overwhelming crises move reformers to pursue more radical approaches to solving poverty. Social reforms vary by scope, ranging from single-service organizations to comprehensive continuums-of-solutions. Depending on the sense of urgency and need in a community, social support can have short time horizons such as food pantries and homeless shelters or long-term effect through education and community building. However, social reform also diverges by theories of change. Reformers must answer questions not only related to the scale of their agendas but also the content of their programming. In the case of poverty intervention and neighborhood transformation, a central question emerges: what makes people poor? Over the past fifty years, questions regarding the causes of poverty created two contrasting camps within academic discourse. One set of scholars attribute poverty to the cultural behaviors and mindsets of those with low-income status. The other group views poverty as the result of historical, political, and institutional barriers constructed to disadvantage a group of people, usually poor immigrants and communities of color. Most of this debate began in the 1960s with release of the Moynihan and Coleman reports. While the distinctions between the two categories are not definite, this categorization captures the general contrast between scholars studying poverty and its origins. The heated debated between these conservative and liberal scholars generated a long and complex lineage of literature focused on the causes of poverty. Though the overall discussion warrants greater discussion that this paper can provide, the basic division between cultural and structural theorists informs the approaches that reformers take to solve community issues.

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More importantly, the perspectives also lend themselves to contrasting reforms. Depending on ones belief in a culture of poverty or discriminatory policies, the social reforms pursued may attempt to change the behaviors and attitudes of the poor or pressure legislators to provide more inclusive social welfare programs. The questions originally generated in 1965 by the Moynihan Report resonate with social reform across time. Ultimately, the way reformers view poverty contributes to their understanding of how to solve problems in urban neighborhoods. Professor of Sociology Sudhir Venkatesh at Columbia University described the dilemma facing social scientists and reformers in a 2010 National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast: And the tangle for social scientists is to try to figure out how to act. Where do you go in these neighborhoods? And this is a question that came, started with Moynihan and hasn't really left us. Do you put money into these neighborhoods and try to bring programs like Head Start or improve the education system? Is it job training? Or is it something that's more fuzzy, which is that do you act in some ways to change the people themselves, improve their work ethic, improve their optimism or their ability to follow the rules? This is a classic question. (Conan, 2010) This discussion regarding the causes of poverty provides a framework to understand the continuums-of-solutions implemented by social activists wanting to revitalize poor urban neighborhoods. While these continuums represent somewhat radical departures from the norms of American civil society, they also approach poverty intervention from a cultural perspective. The scope of these reforms, particularly in the four cases studied, is often more concentrated and strategic than the average social service program. These programs created integrated pipelines of social and academic services to meet local needs and transform communities; however, they do so by focusing attention on changing the people and culture of the neighborhoods. Ultimately,

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these continuums provide training and services that make poor individuals more academically and economically competitive. Rather than pursue institutional changes through policy, this model of social reform seeks to solve poverty from within the neighborhood, changing the attitudes and behaviors of the poor to match those of wealthier professionals. OVERVIEW OF THE CULTURE OF POVERTY In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned a report from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prominent sociologist then employed by the Department of Labor. The purpose of the report was to study the root causes of poverty, particularly within the African American community. This study was meant to trace the progress of African Americans post de jure segregation and identify the reasons why they were disproportionately represented in the poor and working class. Though the report was never meant to be published, its leak to the public and media incited heated controversy about whether or not poverty resulted from deficient attitudes and behaviors among the poor. In the report, Moynihan states, At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family (Moynihan, 1965). As the fundamental building block of society, the family maintains responsibility for the socialization of children and young adults. The values, behaviors, and mindsets of individuals often develop from their parents and their childhood environment. Moynihan argues that African American families were highly unstable in comparison to their white counterparts, as more black children grew up in households run by single mothers (Moynihan, 1965). Additionally, the instability of black families manifested in high divorce rates, out of wedlock births, matriarchal households, and higher rates of welfare dependency. Moynihan believed that this disintegration of the African American family structure had roots in slavery, which set African Americans on a path of extraordinary hardship and cruelty at

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the hands of the white public. Even after emancipation, African Americans experienced more racial discrimination through Jim Crow laws and state-mandated segregation. Ultimately, the historical forces against African Americans created a community with what Moynihan described as a tangle of pathology, which perpetuated broken homes and poverty (Moynihan, 1965). The reports conclusions detailed the lack of progress made in desegregation since the 1954 Brown v. Board decision and emphasized the significance of family disorganization in extending persistent poverty. The Moynihan Report shifted attention, and perhaps blame, to the poor for their own circumstances. Though Moynihan did assign historical and political discrimination against blacks as a contributing cause, many readers interpreted his findings to characterize African American families and culture as deficient. The controversy started in 1965 received greater fuel with the Coleman Report, formally titled The Concept of Equality of Educational Opportunity. Commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, sociologist of education James Coleman published a report in 1966 detailing the level of educational resources available to African American children. Coleman bases his analysis of equality of educational opportunity based on two distinct influencesthe school and the home environment. His analysis finds that the educational backgrounds of students were not only the most contrasting factors between white and black children but also the most influential determinants of their educational success (Coleman, 1967). While the differences in facilities, curriculum, and teacher quality between black and white schools were minimal, the achievement gap was primarily a result of contrasts in educational and familial backgrounds. Students came to school with a different set of norms about education and schooling. Coleman hoped that his findings would expand the definition of equality of educational opportunity to not only include school resources but to also take into

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account the educational and social capital with which children entered schools. Though he assigned responsibility to the schools to equalize these differences, the overall conclusions of the report suggested that schools were not unequalit was family and culture that created the academic achievement gap. Though Moynihan and Coleman did not intend to blame the victims, their reports were misconstrued as evidence of deficient cultural characteristics associated with poor, African American families. Their work opened the floodgates for conservative scholars who built the culture of poverty theory, blaming the behaviors and attitudes of the poor for their condition in life. Charles Murray, one of the leading conservative authors, believed that the expansion of government-sponsored welfare was the cause of family disintegration. Murrays book entitled Losing Ground claimed that the expansion of social welfare through President Johnsons Great Society programs incentivized people to stay poor in order to receive benefits (Tough, 2008). Essentially, programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, Food Stamps, subsidized housing, and unemployment insurance encouraged the growth of Moynihans tangle of pathology, claimed Murray. The federal welfare system and social safety net provided support for unmarried, poor people who were unemployed and had illegitimate children. Thanks to government support, the culture of poverty flourished with state endorsement. Therefore, Murray advocated for the dissolution of all federal welfare programs and the elimination of the social reforms implemented during Johnsons War on Poverty. Unconcerned with the plight of the poor, Murray believed that hard-working, deserving individuals would be rewarded by market forces. He thought that supporting the poor was not the states responsibility, claiming, Government cannot identify the worthy, but it can protect a society in which the worthy can identify themselves (Murray, 1984). If poverty was a

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consequence of culture, then Murray was clearly unsympathetic to the needs of those in broken homes, failing schools, and urban slums. A FOCUS ON CULTURE IN THE CONTINUUM-OF-SOLUTIONS While the nuances of the culture of poverty argument are beyond the scope of this study, questions regarding the root causes of poverty generated discussion among academics, policymakers, and social reformers for decades. Even before this literature was published in the 1960s, social welfare programs identified potential origins of poverty in the community and targeted interventions to address those issues. Jane Addams operated the Hull House with a theory about how to alleviate poverty for slum-dwelling immigrants by teaching them English and instilling cultural values associated with genteel society. While Hull House did develop many programs based on community needs such as an open bakery, childcare, and job training, other initiatives focused on communal and recreational socialization. The leisure activities provided for residents on Halstead Street included clay modeling, embroidery, dancing and dramatic clubs, and monthly lectures about history, art, and even social science (Moore, 1969). At night, residents and visitors gathered in the theater or assembly room for classes covering art history, Shakespeare, beginning Latin, German needlework, and Parliamentary Law. For entertainment, Hull House clients could learn to dance, join the Hull-House glee club, sing, or attend holiday parties hosted by the settlement house staff. The Hull House addressed a variety of community needs, some more directly related to immediate survival while others geared towards intellectual enlightenment. By providing services that focused on the attitudes and behaviors of its clients, the Hull House stood not so much for a solution of problems as a place of exchange (Moore, 1969). This multitude of artistic and cultural classes was not provided at the expense of more substantive poverty reforms. Many Hull House staff and residents engaged

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in political campaigns on behalf of the poor, conducting detailed social science research on the conditions of poverty in the slums. Jane Addams spearheaded many political projects including factory strikes to end sweatshops, organized labor to gain workers rights, and child labor laws to protect children from industry; however, a significant portion of the Hull House was devoted to socializing poor residents in the ways of the aristocratic society in which Jane Addams and other women volunteers were raised (Scott, 1971). The cultural pieces of the Hull Houses interventions aimed to inculcate a set of cultural norms in poor immigrants commonly known to possess foreign, uncivilized mannerisms and attitudes. By providing classes on art and poetry as well as training in dance and embroidery, the Hull House served as a center for socialization where foreign immigrants could learn the culture and behaviors associated with upper class Americans. Knowledge about how wealthy elites lived, what they studied, and how they behaved adjusted the mindsets of the working class, encouraging them to strive for the enjoyment of intellectual and material luxury on a daily basis. While the Hull House provided food, childcare, and vocational training to meet immediate needs, introductory Latin and readings of Dante seem like cultural interventions, not structural solutions to poverty. Many of these classes intended to change the intellectual and cultural scope of the poor working class so that they could behave similarly to the American aristocracy and appreciate the same things as the wealthy elite. By changing the culture in the neighborhood, the Hull House hoped to keep the poor off the streets and in class where they could be distracted by art, history, foreign languages, and poetry rather than drugs, crime, and hunger. Attempting to change community culture by encouraging civic engagement, Leonard Covello led Benjamin Franklin High School with the goal of expanding cultural democracy, quelling ethnic tensions, and developing a leadership curriculum for East Harlem boys (Johanek

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& Puckett, 2007). One of Covellos overarching hopes for the community school was the revival of civic life in the community through which Italians, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans could cooperate around social issues. He tasked the schools teachers with the building of a better society by inspiring students to be more civically engaged and active in public service. Benjamin Franklin High School was a democratic project [meant] to foster tolerance, respect, and mutual adjustment across racial, ethnic, and social class lines (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). The school accomplished these goals by establishing the Community Advisory Council (CAC) which served as a bridge between civil society organizations and the school. Within the community, street units were social clubs that connected the schools work to the surrounding neighborhood, providing data on the communitys needs and problems. In the classroom, Covello developed a curriculum that encouraged discussion of intercultural tensions as well as extracurricular activities that fostered cooperation among a diverse student body. The pursuit of intercultural democracy occurred in a simultaneous extension of the school into the community through various action committees as well as the reframing of school curriculum to encourage student interaction beyond academics. By hosting community-building events and creating a school environment that celebrated pluralism and ethnic diversity, Covello hoped that Benjamin Franklin High School would transform the values and priorities of East Harlem. Before the founding of the high school, crime, squalor, and ethnic violence characterized the East Harlem streets. The diversity in ethnicities, races, and nationalities found in the community created tensions among groups of different people who competed for the same manufacturing jobs and limited resources. Without any hope of interethnic cooperation, the broader social needs of the community could not be met. Tenement residents could not agree long enough to gain traction in affordable housing, healthcare, and childcare. Benjamin Franklin

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High Schools tried to reverse the negative associations and relationships in the community by providing a safe, neutral space for communities to convene with schools. Covello attempted to instill civic virtue in his students to increase cooperation in the community, reducing violence and ethnic hostility. The holistic curriculum established extracurricular activities such as team sports requiring individuals who often came from different familial backgrounds to interact with one another. Additionally, the schools attempt to convene community organizations and leaders sought to change East Harlems culture of violence and ethnic tension. Ultimately, Covello was concerned about teaching a set of civic virtues that would encourage not only students but community members to be more civically engaged for the well-being of the neighborhood. His curriculum and social programs installed a new set of values including tolerance, cooperation, and respect to replace hostility and racism in East Harlem. With more civic-minded citizens, Covello hoped that diverse individuals and groups would convene around pressing social issues. Shifting the attitudes of the community would allow for greater cooperation and subsequently more effective social reform. Over sixty years later, Geoffrey Canada approached his community reforms from a similar cultural stance as Addams and Covello. Canadas interwoven pipeline of academic and social services addresses discrepancies in familial knowledge and resources. The first step in his series of programs is called Baby College, a preparation program for expecting and new parents about how to raise their children to be healthy and successful adults. One distinguishing unit in Baby College is the discipline class, where Zone instructors teach parents how to discipline their children correctly. While almost every parent at Baby College arrived believing that some form of corporal punishment was necessary to keep children in line, the program is geared towards eliminating the use of corporal punishment in childrearing (Tough, 2008). Canada acknowledges

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that discipline practices are closely tied with cultural notions of how to raise children and expectations of how children should behave; however, Baby College insists on replacing those cultural norms with a set of parenting practices that foster talk and negotiation. Regardless of the merits of corporal punishment, Baby College essentially tries to reverse cultural practices common to poor families from communities of color. The Zone assumes that a common set of cultural practices and behaviors, usually those exhibited by the educated, upper class, are normatively good and necessary for future social and academic success. By adopting the same attitudes toward childrearing as parents from upper and middle class backgrounds, the Baby College participants can also prepare their children for greater achievement. In addition to the Baby College, the Harlem Children Zone operates other programs which approach social change through cultural interventions and the development of a certain set of values and behaviors. For example, middle school students participate in A Cut Above, an after-school program where students participate in weekly discussions and activities around subjects such as lifetime decision making, identifying values, communication and critical thinking, resume building and interview techniques, social etiquette,[and] conflict resolution and community service (Middle School, 2009). The bulk of the activities associated with A Cut Above center on changing anti-productive behaviors in poor children and embedding a set of values around how to behave and act in order to be successful students and citizens. By changing the behaviors of students who come from disadvantaged educational backgrounds, the Zone intends to create an environment associated with high academic achievement, even if it means contradicting or entirely replacing the norms children have learned at home. Addressing poverty by changing social behavior is a common theme among continuumsof-solutions. While the cases studied have a diverse range of programs that address both cultural

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and political aspects of poverty, their emphasis on behavioral change suggests that certain attitudes are associated with poverty. Embedded within a long and contested debate around the causes of poverty, these programs suggest that at least a portion of poverty interventions must be dedicated to changing the culture, including mindsets and practices, of the poor.

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5 | THE CASE FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE

Though the nature of American individualism, limited government, and civil society lend themselves to cultural poverty responses, structural interventions often have more long-lasting success in urban neighborhoods. Recognizing the political failures of the public school system and social welfare state, reformers may also approach social change from a structural point of view. This perspective assumes that poverty results from institutional barriers created by inequitable policies and deliberate discrimination against poor communities of color. Residential racial segregation, under-resourced schools, and a lack of social services may be the consequences of conscious choices made by the governing elite to create disadvantages for economic and ethnic minorities. If these policies create persistent poverty among a certain group of people, then lasting social solutions must be made through the political system as well. Without a robust welfare state, the responsibility to care for the poor and the ill, the old and the young rests with civic and political associations staffed by the same professional class that operates the governing structures of society. Individuals with low socio-economic status must rely on a patchwork of social service organizations for healthcare, education, shelter and food. In order to create sustainable solutions in neighborhood reform, politics cannot be ignored. At some point, the hodgepodge of civil society organizations cannot compensate for the lack of universal healthcare, affordable housing, and adequate education needed to lift people out of poverty. Nonprofits lack sufficient resources to sustain social services for an entire community over a long period of time while the incentives for philanthropic foundations to be innovative make top-down funding transitory at best. Furthermore, social service organizations operate around a limited number of causes and a specific population in a targeted geographic region. Limited by resources and time horizons, the sector cannot create the comprehensive, sustainable

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social safety net required to fundamentally change poor neighborhoods and provide lasting support for the impoverished. Systems change must be considered in sustainable interventions. The challenges of creating changes in systems and structures ironically lie in the lack of a strong state mechanism. Limited government provides ample room not only for individual freedom but also rampant inequality. While the political process can be manipulated to unfairly disadvantage the poor, the government is also incapable of righting those wrongs. The nature of political institutions within the United States makes any significant policy change, especially related to poverty, education, and social class, a contentious battle. Political institutions contain a multitude of checks and balances within and between branches so that political action remains an almost impossible feat. Comprehensive social and educational reform often encounters obstacles from warring political parties, subcommittees, committees, and interest groups. Yet interventions adopted through the political process and integrated into existing systems can have long-term impact. Working through the political process incorporates innovative reforms into the public school system, normalizing once exceptional examples of social change. A STRUCTURE-BASED RESPONSE TO CULTURAL SOLUTIONS In response to the culture of poverty argument, liberal academics published their own books and reports claiming that poverty is a consequence of a long history of social, economic, and political discrimination which erected institutional barriers to the success of African Americans and other poor minorities. The leading voice for this structural argument was William Julius Wilson, who sought to diversify the literature regarding poverty and the underclass. Wilsons book was arguably a direct response to the Moynihan Report and Murrays work, which dominated discussions on poverty for years. Citing historic discrimination and migration patterns, Wilson believed that the extraordinary rate of rural black migration to northern cities

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kept the average age of the black community young, which created a disadvantage in a job market shifting towards skilled workers and service industries (Wilson, 1987). Unskilled urban youth were unable to attain employment in the changing economy and were paid lower wages than their older, white counterparts. While earlier generations of southerners found work in the manufacturing and labor-intensive industries, the economy during the 1970s and 1980s became more service-oriented, requiring a higher degree of education and skill from workers. The cities changing economic structure also exacerbated problems of deliberate residential segregation which pushed poor blacks into slums while allowing the professional class to flee to suburbs. Redlining and discriminatory housing policies created urban ghettos that became home to persistent poverty and violence. With joblessness abounding in an area of concentrated poverty, the inner city lost its social buffer comprised of middle and working class families who kept the social institutions of the neighborhood intact (Wilson, 1987). Professionals who could afford to leave the inner city moved to the suburbs or outer boroughs with safer, more developed neighborhoods. This absence of professional families deprived inner city children of role models demonstrating the connections between education and meaningful employment (Wilson, 1987). Furthermore, the exodus of black professionals from the inner cities dissolved social networks that allowed individuals to learn of new employment opportunities or receive recommendations to enter new industries. Perpetual joblessness among black males also decreased the marriageable (employed) pool of men, leading to symptoms of social dislocation such as crime, out-of-wedlock births, single motherhood, and welfare dependency described by conservative scholars (Wilson, 1987). Wilson argued that the lack of vertical integration caused by economic changes and housing discrimination created inner-city social isolation which many mistook as a culture of poverty. Explaining the distinction, Wilson states:

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Culture of poverty implies that basic values and attitudes of the ghetto subculture have been internalized and thereby influence behaviorSocial isolation, on the other hand, not only implies that contact between groups of different class and/or racial backgrounds is either lacking or has become increasingly intermittent but that the nature of this contact enhances the effects of living in a highly concentrated poverty area. These concentration effects include the constraints and opportunities in neighborhoods in which the population is overwhelmingly socially disadvantagedconstraints and opportunities that include the kinds of ecological niches that the residents of these neighborhoods occupy in terms of access to jobs and job networks, availability of marriageable partners, involvement in quality schools, and exposure to conventional role models. (p.61) Because poverty was a consequence of changing economic structures, constrained opportunities, and deliberate discrimination, the proposed solutions to poverty must be pursued through changes in public policy. Wilson argued that policymakers needed to ensure affordable housing for low-income residents by prohibiting discriminatory zoning laws and practices that barred poor residents from attaining stable, safe housing in the city. Additionally, employment policies requiring welfare recipients to participate in job training and education programs would keep the poor active and competitive in the workforce (Wilson, 1987). Rather than eliminate social welfare programs as Murray suggested, Wilson championed the establishment of a more progressive and comprehensive welfare state not only increasing employment opportunities but also bolstering inner city families with child care, family allowances, and affordable housing. Since culture is a response to social structural constraints and opportunities, poverty intervention and social reform should be focused on changing the institutions that manage these constraints and opportunities for the inner city poor (Wilson, 1987).

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POLITICS AS A STRATEGY TO END POVERTY The tendency for social reform to individualize poverty and address cultural behaviors and attitudes stems from American individualism, limited government, and a weak welfare state. Because American society is wholly and self-righteously oriented toward getting people off the welfare role, attempts to support the poor, ill, and unemployed are sparse and dependent on the coordination of local and state governments (Cloward & Piven, 1966). Social welfare has always been an uncoordinated endeavor in the United States, leaving many qualified individuals unable to attain welfare benefits. The historical and political traditions of the welfare state indicate that interventions made by the federal government in matters pertaining to class, race, and income incite skepticism and hostility. Without national support for a strong welfare state as well as a lack of coordination from states, much of the American social safety net is provided by local civil society organizations. These associations are presumably better suited to caring for those most in need because of their proximity to the community and knowledge of the local environment. Embedded within strong notions of individualism and a weak state, the social services and limited welfare provided enable people to become economically competitive or enhance individual mobility rather than redistribute income or address discriminatory institutions (Cloward & Piven, 1966). The tendency to individualize poverty will never lead to a widespread solution for persistent poverty in poor urban neighborhoods. Ending poverty requires efforts to build a stronger welfare state through the political process. In order to create long-term interventions in poverty, Cloward and Piven (1966) suggest that political mobilization must be activated for a stronger welfare system, including basic assistance for food and rent, guaranteed income, and high-quality education. This mobilization is most likely to occur in times of crisis, which they define as a publicly visible disruption in some

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institutional sphere (Cloward & Piven, 1966). Social unrest among the people will pressure political leaders to respond and take action to soothe the masses. Without broad-based discontent and political organization, politicians have little incentive to take on controversial issues such as social welfare and education reform. Even when legislators must respond to their constituents, they tend to proffer only the minimum action required to quell disturbances without risking existing electoral support (Cloward & Piven, 1966). Political institutions and the people who comprise them are incentivized only to seek reelection, making a large-scale movement for social welfare reform the responsibility of local community leaders to activate. Demanding specific school and social reforms while building coalitions to support the changes is one effective way of shaking up the existing welfare state. There is a distinct difference between social reform geared towards correcting individual behavior and political mobilization for a stronger welfare state. The former will preserve the patchwork system of social services and civil society organizations geared towards the assimilation of poor individuals into the main social and economic structures of society. The latter, if successful, will create lasting changes in the political system, institutionalizing social reforms into a welfare state with enough strength to create comprehensive impact on poor communities. MILWAUKEE AS AN EXAMPLE OF STRUCTURAL SUCCESS Unlike the cases in Chicago during the 1890s and Harlem during the Great Depression and 2000s, the efforts to bridge schools and community in Milwaukee made lasting impact on the citys public school system. The school reforms that Milwaukee Socialists and women adopted became integrated into the existing public school system and normalized in the ways that school functioned in the community. While Addams Hull House and Covellos Benjamin Franklin High School operated at the periphery or with little state support, the adoption of social

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centers, playgrounds, school lunches, and vacation schools went through political institutions such as the school board and city council. Even long after the original proponents of school reform lost political support and left office, the changes they proposed remained an integral part of Milwaukees school-community relationships. The reasons why the Milwaukee reforms experienced long-term legitimacy vary. Perhaps geographic location, local political leaders, time period, and community demographics contribute to unique environments that determine the longevity of a social program or school change. However, one distinguishing characteristic of Milwaukee at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was its structural approach to social reform through political channels. Unlike social reformers who viewed poverty as a result of cultural behavior and attitudes, Milwaukee progressives were more concerned with eliminating the causes of those and similar social defects in order to root out the sources of poverty and undemocratic government (Reese, 2002). Rather than develop social reform on the outskirts of public support, Milwaukees womens organizations as well as an alliance between labor unions and the Socialist Democratic Party set lofty goals of changing public schools. The conditions of rapid industrialization and urbanization created extreme poverty, health concerns, and civic decay in the city. Like Chicago and Harlem, Milwaukee faced a social crisis requiring more broad-based reform efforts. More and more Southern and Eastern Europeans joined the citys significant German population for employment opportunities in manufacturing and the beer industry. This new economic structure required adults to work longer hours, leaving their children at home without regular supervision and safe places to play. The Womens School Alliance operated on theories of expansive motherhood, calling for new forms of municipal intervention in the lives of youth to compensate for changing economic and familial dynamics (Reese, 2002). Alliance members

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petitioned the school board to create extracurricular activities, provide better sanitation, and increase teacher pay. The women applied constant pressure to the all-male school board, which eventually appointed a woman to the school board. Though the position was largely ceremonial, women fought for a voice on the citys governing bodies. They advocated for reform through political activities such as petitioning, attending school board meetings, and organizing campaigns for cleaner schools. While Milwaukee women also participated in the settlement house movement, they maintained a political focus in order to pressure schools to change on a wider scale. Lizzie Black Kander, considered the Jane Addams of Milwaukee, not only started the settlement movement in Milwaukee but also advocated for specialized education for girls. She led the movement for progressive social reforms such as school lunches and supervised playgrounds from her seat on the Board of School Directors of Milwaukee from 1907 to 1919 (Fritz, 2004).The ability of reformers to infiltrate the political system played an integral role in the durability of school and social reform in Milwaukee. Political alliances established between Milwaukees strong labor unions and sizable Socialist Party also furthered progressive reform in Milwaukee. While women made inroads in Milwaukees welfare state, their progressive reforms only gained significant traction with the support of the citys labor coalitions and Socialist Party. The support of men in the community bolstered the pressure applied on the school board and city council for progressive school reform. Concerned about the contradictions of a society that produced paupers and millionaires, street urchins and children of privilege, both reformers and elites recognized the child as an object of reform and the potential of public schools to change or perpetuate the status quo (Reese, 2002). Dissatisfaction with the vast inequality created by industrialism and capitalism motivated labor groups and Socialists to join the movement for school reform with the purpose

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of strengthening social welfare for the citys poor, unskilled workers and immigrants. Womens clubs, labor unions, and Socialists agreed on the need for reforms that would make schools into social centers and extend the role of schools into home and community life. This coalition of reformers wanted schools to directly address community needs by providing school lunches, safe recreational spaces, and medical and dental health services for poor children. Many of these welfare reforms were implemented by representatives of the coalition elected to the citys school board and leadership positions in municipal government. Milwaukees grassroots progressivism distinguished the city from other major urban centers such as New York City and Chicago because of the complex integration of womens, labor, and radical interests. Reese (2002) defines the differences in social reform between Milwaukee and its urban counterparts: Compared with the Milwaukee Socialists, these associations were less powerful, less aggressive, less successful politically, and less willing to entertain explicitly noncapitalist ideology. In most cities after the turn of the century, when the majority of Progressive reforms in education were implemented, radicals were on the fringe of organized labor movements. In Milwaukee, they occupied its center. (p.68) Though the alliance between women, laborers, and Socialists garnered enough support to implement social welfare reform through schools, the separate groups did not agree on the extent and purpose of all the goals. While Socialists supported school reform with more radical end goal of uprooting capitalism, women wanted to extend parental responsibilities to schools. Laborers also approached the alliance with their own purposes of improving neighborhood social and health conditions for their poor families. Grassroots progressivism brought together a diverse group of personalities with various motivations for reform. Milwaukee reformers differed from their counterparts in Chicago and New York not only in their political, structural methods but

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also for their grassroots coalitions rather than top-down change from one or two charismatic leaders. The coalition between women, labor groups, and Socialists truly was a community effort to restructure existing public school systems to be responsive to community needs. School lunches, clinics in schools, playgrounds, and summer learning time have all become traditions in public schooling not only in Milwaukee but also nationwide. Though structural changes to the social welfare state require political maneuvering and broad-based support, grassroots progressivism can have long-term impact on schools and social welfare.

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LESSONS LEARNED: COMMON CONCERNS FOR SCHOOLS AS SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS

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6 | TEMPORARY SOLUTIONS TO LONG-TERM PROBLEMS

Despite the popularity and impact of comprehensive continuums-of-solutions as a model of social welfare, it is important to note that these holistic reforms represent temporary fixes to larger social problems entangled in a complex historical tradition of individualism and limited government. Todays public interest in the Harlem Childrens Zone (and its replication through Promise Neighborhoods) suggests that the close integration of academics and social services is novel. While these comprehensive attempts to revitalize poor urban neighborhoods represent departures from tradition, they are also unexceptional as comprehensive continuums emerge in particular circumstances of crisis and approach social reform from cultural perspectives. Comprehensive social reforms like the Harlem Childrens Zone enjoy temporary success but ultimately fade away or fail to create lasting changes. The fact that a Harlem Childrens Zone exists at all indicates that the work of Jane Addams, Leonard Covello, and to a lesser extent, Milwaukee progressives, could only be temporary solutions. If settlement homes or communitycentered schools were the solution to persistent poverty, then conditions of class warfare, civil discontent, and communal uprising would be less prevalent in 2012. For a variety of reasons, comprehensive continuums-of-solutions fade away or fail as long-term solutions to neighborhood problems. The fleeting nature of comprehensive social reform can be attributed to a decreased sense of crisis, rapid demographic change in a neighborhood, the transitory nature of private philanthropy, and the disappearance of a charismatic leader who advocated for the programs in the first place. These factors all contribute to the disintegration of holistic social and school reforms that form on the fringe of state institutions and defy the normal individualized interventions.

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CRISIS NO MORE: THE DECLINE OF URGENCY & ACTION Though precipitated by a deep sense of social, economic or political crisis, radical social reform eventually loses legitimacy as the sense of urgency and threat dissipates. In times of crises, limited state action no longer satisfies the concerns of the majority of citizens. The lack of strong state response to the needs of the poor, ill, or unemployed during a crisis leaves an inordinate amount of people without social benefits. Under these conditions, more radical action which defies the norms of individualizing poverty, limited state involvement, and single-service programs seem like more legitimate ways of addressing immense social need. Demand for more communal and comprehensive social welfare increases when the capability of individuals to care for themselves becomes jeopardized by dire circumstances. Crises confer temporary legitimacy on programs that extend a social safety net for those most in need. Eventually, crises fade as wars end, economic depressions improve, and social unrest fades away. The sense of exigency for robust social welfare dwindles as more individuals experience better living conditions and refocus on their personal well-being rather than communal health. Normal conditions reinstate individualism as the operating norm within the social welfare system as the middle and upper classes experience prosperity once again. Comprehensive continuums-of-solutions no longer seem legitimate once poverty only affects a small minority of the population. This loss of support for radical social reform causes many programs established during crises to fail once public support and philanthropic resources are withdrawn. Unless social reforms become normalized during periods of crises, as did the progressive school reforms in Milwaukee, sustained support for radical social programs on the periphery of the state will disappear in favor of more limited social welfare focusing on changing individuals and shifting attitudes or behaviors.

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The end of the Great Depression, the emergence of World War II, and the prosperity of the 1950s led to significant changes at Benjamin Franklin High School including the retirement of Leonard Covello as principal and the rebranding of the school as a comprehensive high school, not a community-centered social experiment. Covellos plan for a community school focused on increasing civic engagement and ethnic harmony in East Harlem began during the 1930s with the school opening in the fall of 1934. The conception of a community-centered high school grew in the aftermath of Teachers Colleges Harold Ruggs 1932 speech to the World Conference on the Educational Fellowship in which he stated, The world is on fire, and the youth of the world must be equipped to combat the conflagration (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Benjamin Franklin High School worked with the purpose of increasing civic democracy within a community experiencing intense poverty, violence, and social disengagement. While Covello remained principal until 1956, Benjamin Franklin High School no longer successfully integrated the needs of East Harlem with the schools community-centered purpose. World War II called upon a nation of young men to join the army, leading to an alarmingly low enrollment at the allboys school during the 1940s. With so few students to educate, Covello had difficulty justifying the new, expensive building that he demanded from the New York board of education. The war also removed important bases of support for the community-centered school as resources for the high schools street units and funding for WPA workers dissipated in the midst of low enrollment and school consolidations across the city. World War II created a broader national crisis that shifted attention away from the East Harlem community, leaving the comprehensive high school without the enthusiasm and support on which it was founded. Covello managed to keep Benjamin Franklin High School afloat during the war years despite the lack of funding and changing demographics of the neighborhood, which now

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included more Puerto Ricans and African Americans than Italian immigrants. Without his original support, Covello adjusted his civic leadership and community engagement curriculum to a less involved version without as much community outreach and emphasis on academics (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). In the years after the war, the public became more concerned about providing East Harlem children with a life adjustment education that lowered academic rigor and placed many students in basic, remedial courses (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). This reflected a national trend associated with low academic expectations for students. Covellos curriculum emphasizing high standards of leadership, academic achievement, and community service seemed wasteful in a system unconcerned with academic rigor and civic engagement. Finally, the 1950s brought not only a greater sense of prosperity to the country but also Cold War skepticism of socialism and communism. Widely known as a period of great social and economic affluence in the United States, the 1950s provided a different context for community schooling than the Great Depression. The need for communal services and a wider social safety net expanded during the Depression when intense destitution and unrest characterized the entire nation. Twenty years later, individuals could afford homes, appliances, and cars. Evidenced by the boom of suburbanization and commercialism, the abundance and luxury of the 1950s masked any concerns for the deeply impoverished. While the ghettoization of Harlem also occurred in the 1950s, the national success and Americas status as the wealthy world power replaced discontent with fortune. There was no longer a visible crisis to solve. Additionally, this period of prosperity returned Americans to their values of individualism and self-responsibility. The Cold War intensified the publics skepticism of a strong welfare state and socialism. Covellos focus on the community could be construed as too socialist for a country experiencing the pinnacle of capitalism and democracy.

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THE DAMAGE OF COMMUNITY CHANGES TO COMMUNITY SCHOOLS In addition to a diminishing sense of crisis, demographic changes in a neighborhood can also lead to the dissipation of community reform. Based within specific geographic locations, continuums-of-solutions emerge to serve a specific population within a specific set of circumstances. When the demographic makeup of a neighborhood changes, the original needs of that community can also change, leaving social welfare programs in need of restructuring. The original purposes for which a Hull House or Benjamin Franklin High School are established may no longer be relevant once the community changes, bringing a new set of needs and circumstances to the neighborhood for which existing social programs may be ill-equipped to address. Continuums-of-solutions come into existence in order to serve specific needs and localities. When these needs and contexts change, social programs must adjust but often have less flexibility and resources to do so while still maintaining its original character. Jane Addams established the Hull House in 1890 with the specific purpose of educating and assimilating poor immigrants into mainstream society. Chicagos South Side presented particular needs that settlement house women attempted to address through an open food pantry, temporary shelter, and educational classes on a variety of topics ranging from cooking to dancing. As the Hull House staff based its programs on the communitys needs, their work required constant adjustment to changing demands. These demands pulled the Hull House in numerous directions as the women attempted to provide services perhaps beyond the scope of their resources. Furthermore, working to assimilate immigrants theoretically meant that turnover in the communitys population, and therefore needs, occurred often. Once immigrants attain a certain amount of educational and economic resources to move away from tenements and slums, they leave the neighborhood, removing the prosperous professionals from the community

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(Wilson, 1987). Each change in the neighborhood requires a refocus in efforts to address community needs as the community changes with the constant ebbs and flows of immigrants in the neighborhood. The Hull Houses attempts to assimilate Jews and Italians may have required a different set of programs for Russian and Polish immigrants. Addressing community needs as the community constantly changes requires extensive effort, time, and resources to close outdated programs and create new resources for the neighborhoods new residents. While the Hull House managed to adjust successfully over the period of several decades, it too underwent significant changes, particularly after the death of Jane Addams. Under the guidance of Addams, the first twenty years at the Hull House differed from the rest of the programs existence. In the 1890s, a settlement house seemed like an effective model of social reform for Chicagos slums. The Hull House, in its original incarnation, experienced unusual longevity in its ability to provide a large variety of services to the citys poor. Perhaps the programs ability to adjust to changing circumstances as well as its historical importance allowed it to withstand significant neighborhood change. However, neighborhood redevelopment and the expansion of the University of Chicago displaced the original Hull House in the 1960s. The modern history of the Hull House has been less illustrious as the settlement house moved from its original location, became a large nonprofit rather than settlement house, and rebranded itself as the Jane Addams Hull House Association. Shuffled from one location and organization to another, the Hull House in its later years fell victim to various demands and changes in Chicago. The prominence that the settlement house once enjoyed at the helm of Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr slowly dissipated as the communitys needs required Hull House to adjust. In January 2012, the Hull House officially closed its door to the public after experiencing years of financial difficulties.

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Shifts in community demographics similarly eroded support for Benjamin Franklin High School as Harlem underwent rapid ghettoization between the World Wars. Covello began his campaign for a community-centered high school in the 1920s and 1930s when Italian and Jewish immigrants dominated East Harlem. Concerned about the next generation of Italian Americans, Covello became an educator in order to work with youth in his own community. When he became principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in 1934, a mixture of Italians, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans attended local public schools. One of the community schools primary purposes was to increase interethnic cooperation among these groups in the neighborhood. Different ethnic groups settled within specific blocks of Harlem, creating residential boundaries that discouraged intercultural mixing. Students living on different sides of social borders assembled (non-violently) in one placeBenjamin Franklin High School. Though the vast diversity in students presented significant challenges for teachers, the constant shifts in population created the greatest difficulties in establishing the high school as a beacon in the community. East Harlems changing composition generated concern as racial and ethnic tensions placed the community on the verge of rioting and violence at all times. In 1938, conflict between Italians and Puerto Ricans erupted as one riot involved residents tossing garbage and stones from windows, heaving chimney bricks from rooftops, and battling with fisticuffs in the streets until police squads arrived to break up the melee (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Crime and violence surrounded the high school, increasing police presence around campus while also crafting a bad reputation for the Harlem community. Covello tried to manage community hostility by creating broad research and advocacy coalitions for intercultural education, but the schools surroundings often bled into the classrooms and undermined the community-centered curriculum. Though he attempted to make the high school a safe arena for

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interracial and interethnic association, the neighborhood experienced such dramatic shifts in so little time that adjustments in curriculum and programming proved difficult. Overall the population of East Harlem visibly shifted as the white population in the core health areas dropped by 30,000 residents in ten years while the black population rose by more than 7,700 residents in the 1930s (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). The African American population only continued its growth during World War II and the years afterwards. Within two decades, Harlem transformed from a community of white ethnic immigrants to a predominantly African American and Hispanic neighborhood. The development of an intercultural curriculum placed extraordinary burdens on Covello and his staff to change deep-seated racism in classrooms as tensions exploded outside of the high school. Even as the school dispersed street units, created community action councils, and preached community harmony, generations of immigrants resented each other and aimed to leave the neighborhood when possible. In particular, Italians and Puerto Ricans clashed often as the parental generation [of Italians] scapegoated the migrants in the sense that they blamed Puerto Ricans for their childrens leaving East Harlem, thereby violating the sacred norms and values of la famiglia and the domus (Johanek & Puckett, 2007). Second and third generation Italians capitalized on greater economic prosperity by moving away from Harlem to safer outer boroughs. However their mobility not only created demographic shifts in Harlem but also generated interethnic resentment that could not be curbed by Covellos community school. Changes in the neighborhood not only created difficulties in the classroom but installed an almost irreversible set of cultural norms in the community that perpetuated tension rather than cooperation. As the social center of the community, Benjamin Franklin High School tackled issues of racism and interethnic conflict that were perhaps beyond its control and capacity.

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INSECURITY IN PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY Because social service programs often rely on resources provided by private philanthropic foundations, the security of its future funding hangs in the balance. Social reforms established by civil society organizations operate on the fringe of state support. Programs created and operated by nonprofit organizations receive tax exemptions but rely on private funders in order to continue its operations from year to year. The danger in relying on philanthropic foundations and private corporate donations lies in the philanthropic sectors fleeting focus on innovation instead of long-term sustainability. One distinguishing purpose of philanthropy is to locate and support important social innovations, acting as a potent force for innovation in that the freedom donors enjoy opens up endless opportunities (Frumkin, 2006). Philanthropic foundations set their giving criteria with the intention of funding innovative solutions to broad social problems. Donors want to fund new models of social improvement with the hopes that these innovations will lead to long-term results. The quest for innovation ensures that philanthropic foundations do not fund programs in perpetuity. Instead, philanthropy incubates innovation and moves on to the next silver bullet solution once a program becomes too normalized or institutionalized. Unless a program can demonstrate significant results within a short time horizon, foundations will likely move on to the next big problem and the next new solutions being implemented by other nonprofit organizations. For programs with demonstrated results, the philanthropic sector encourage[s] the public sector to pick up and expand the implementation of the initiative, but private philanthropy rarely funds social reforms indefinitely (Frumkin, 2006). The difficulties of structural change also make the institutionalization of social reforms unlikely without the support of private philanthropists. Burdened by bureaucracy and incentivized by elections, politicians

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will not adopt social reforms incubated in nonprofits and philanthropy without visible, widespread support. Even then, changing policies and systems through the political process takes an inordinate amount of time. While philanthropy maintains great flexibility and potential to further social reform, the character of the sector to search for uncharted terrain leaves many established programs vulnerable to the whims of donor goals. Concern about the insecurity of private philanthropy surrounds the Harlem Childrens Zone and Promise Neighborhood initiatives. Because these programs are currently in operation, it is difficult to predict their future trajectory whether that involves disintegration or institutionalization. However, examining the funding sources for the Harlem Childrens Zone indicates that the program relies heavily on resources from private donors including Stanley Druckenmiller, who made his fortunes on Wall Street (Tough, 2008). Geoffrey Canada relies on a portfolio of corporate supporters and philanthropic foundations to maintain his extraordinary undertaking in Harlem. But what will happen when the Robin Hood Foundation and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation decide to fund another program? What will happen when business tycoons decide to shift their attentions and checkbooks elsewhere? It seems as though Canadas Harlem Childrens Zone will remain vulnerable to the whims of private philanthropy unless its continuum-of-solutions model becomes institutionalized within urban neighborhoods and local governments. While the Zone has enjoyed state support and endorsement through the Department of Educations Promise Neighborhood initiative, the replication of the Zone across other high-need communities will also rely in part on private funding (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Reliance on private philanthropy leaves civil society organizations and their social programs vulnerable to the changing winds of the philanthropic sector, jeopardizing the long-term sustainability of social reforms and services provided in the nonprofit sector.

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LOSS OF A CHARISMATIC LEADER A final cause for the dissolution of social reform movements is the loss of a charismatic leader and founder of the initiative. In order to garner support for social reforms on the periphery of the state and the fringes of acceptability, many social programs rely on the charisma of a leader capable of persuading others to support a radical departure from the weak social welfare state. These leaders become important spokespersons for their organizations, capitalizing on their extensive social networks to expand comprehensive continuums-of-solutions. Often times, social reforms become associated with a particular individual so that the leader drives the growth and success of the program. However, radical social reforms and programs rarely outlive their charismatic leader. Continuity in social movements requires extraordinary resources, coordination, and leadership. More often, social reforms lose their prominence, funding, and legitimacy shortly after the death or retirement of their leader. The settlement house tradition in the United States resulted from the vision of Jane Addams, who carried the Hull House through its first forty years. Addams enjoyed international acclaim as a visionary leader. She was a pioneer in the era of Progressive reform, working closely with presidents, academics, and social reformers to highlight the plight of the poor. Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Her personality transcended the work of the Hull House, providing the settlement house with national and international fame due to her reputation as a leader. While the Hull House lived on after Addams death, the height of its social reforms and prominence as a radical adjustment to the welfare state occurred during the early years under the direction of Addams. Without Addams to focus national attention on the poor, the Hull House continued its work quietly, receiving most of its attention based on its historical status rather than current work. Addams possessed unique

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skills as a leader and maintained an impressive social network including several presidents and other political leaders that could not be replicated by her successors. Similarly, Leonard Covello also went to great ends to advocate for the creation of Benjamin Franklin High School. As one of the most respected educators in New York, Covello captured the attention of the public and the respect of school board leaders willing to provide his community-centered school with resources and flexibility to experiment. Covello built the high school around his vision for an East Harlem community with vibrant civic engagement, democracy, and community cooperation to solve social issues. He recruited teachers who would share his vision of an academically rigorous, socially conscious high school. He crafted curriculum over several decades to build civic knowledge and bridge the community and the school. Although Covello retired before the closing of Benjamin Franklin High School, he did so out of frustration for the lack of institutional support for his community-centered education. After World War II, the support of school board leaders and the public for a community-centered school with a civics curriculum waned. Benjamin Franklin High School no longer enjoyed prominence within the community so that Covellos attempts to expand the schools community focus incited skepticism and backlash. While Benjamin Franklin High School began its decline before Covellos retirement, his departure from the school sent the high school into a spiraling degeneration. Four years after Covellos retirement in 1956, the board of education radically restructured the high school, making it co-educational and scrapping the community focus in its entirety. Embedded within an increasingly violent Harlem neighborhood, the high school experienced low enrollment and atrocious academic results so that the board of education shut down the school in 1982. Covello lived to see the dramatic decline of the school that he built on

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108th Street. After his death, the school was reopened as the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics which it remains today. While Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Childrens Zone enjoy great attention in the discourse on education reform and social change today, Canadas role as a charismatic leader fits the patterns of leadership and unsustainability that characterized the Hull House and Benjamin Franklin High School. Most people associate the Harlem Childrens Zone with Canadas idealistic vision for his community. Canada founded the Harlem Childrens Zone, making his dream of an integrated pipeline of academic and social services a reality for 100 blocks in Harlem. His success was chronicled in Waiting for Superman, a documentary about the failures of the American public school system. He has been cited in an endless amount of news articles related to education reform. His work serves as the inspiration for a major initiative in the current administrations education policy. Canada is the face of the Harlem Childrens Zone, and like Addams and Covello, he possesses an extraordinary amount of influence over public schooling not only in New York City but across the nation. His social networks include the President of the United States, the Secretary of Education, and host of other influential leaders in education. Though it is impossible to predict what will become of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Childrens Zone, his charismatic leadership fits the patterns established by previous reformers such as Addams and Covello. If this is the case, then the future of the Harlem Childrens Zone depends on the path of Geoffrey Canada, leaving the long-term sustainability of the program vulnerable to a single leader.

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CONCLUSION
Social reform in the United States emerges within a complex history of American individualism and limited state intervention in the lives of the public. Skepticism about a statesponsored safety net provided civil society with ample opportunity and flexibility to provide social services through a localized patchwork of nonprofit organizations, philanthropic foundations, and civic associations. Without a strong state mechanism, the responsibility to care for societys poor, ill, young and old rested with the people themselves. Social reformers often work in silos, providing only a few services to address specific issues in poverty such as vocational education, temporary shelter, food pantries, and health clinics. From this tradition arose a weak social welfare state geared towards changing individual behavior and making the poor economically self-sufficient. As deliberately individualized cultural interventions, public schools often act as the vehicle through which to implement social reform in the community. However, the lack of comprehensive solutions to persistent poverty deprived those most in need of lasting support and long-term solutions to their circumstances. Within this context of limited social welfare and sparse social reform, recent attention on Geoffrey Canadas Harlem Childrens Zone highlights a seemingly innovative model of neighborhood revitalization and education reform. While the Zones integrated pipeline of academic and social services seems exceptional within the American context of social reform, it is not the first attempt to create a comprehensive continuum-of-solutions. The Zones philosophy of bridging public schools with their surrounding communities is the latest iteration of a long tradition of radical community schooling attempting to create a more robust social safety net. Previous examples of wraparound services include Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago, Milwaukee public schools during the Progressive Era, and Leonard Covellos Benjamin Franklin

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High School in East Harlem. These cases represent just a few out of many efforts to strategically provide greater social welfare and services to poor, urban neighborhoods. Because this specific model of social reform requires coordination among several programs and integration of schools and communities, continuums-of-solutions represent a departure from the norms of social reform in the United States. Instead, this pipeline model of reform emerges in response to major social, economic, or political crises during which a stronger welfare state becomes an acceptable way to address the problems of disadvantaged communities. With enough poverty and discontent, the American public becomes more tolerant of a stronger welfare state whether provided by the state or organizations operating on behalf of the public interest. Continuums-of-solutions enjoy their temporary legitimacy during crises by intervening in neighborhoods mired in persistent poverty. Often times, these programs attempt to alleviate poverty by changing the culture of a poor neighborhood. They adjust attitudes and instill different behaviors in poor children and families supposedly more conducive to social and economic prosperity. But the longevity of wraparound services often depends on fleeting factors such as the support of private philanthropy, static demographics of a neighborhood, and continued presence of a charismatic leader to spearhead the radical reforms. These characteristics are at best temporary in nature, leaving comprehensive continuums vulnerable to changing personnel, resources, and populations. Furthermore, crises tend to become resolved or replaced by other urgent needs over time. The legitimacy conferred by crisis on radical social interventions eventually fade away as individualism and limited welfare regain prominence in times of prosperity. Ultimately, the occasional emergence of wraparound services serves as a reminder of the tensions between historical commitments to individualism as well as limited government and

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the civic desires to care for societys marginalized and disenfranchised. Continuums-of-solutions are evidence of the publics attempts to reconcile a social welfare state within a context of individualism and self-sufficiency. Though pipeline models of social and educational reform tend to enjoy only limited and temporary success, important lessons can be drawn from the trajectories of the Hull House, Milwaukee public schools, and Benjamin Franklin High School. First, efforts to integrate social and educational reform represent departures from the limited social safety net characteristic of American society and politics. Changes to schools and communities usually occur slowly and sporadically with diverse organizations working to provide limited services without coordination with other institutions. Secondly, wraparound services are not long-term solutions to failing schools and neighborhood poverty. While they represent more holistic attempts to distribute social welfare, continuums are ultimately unsustainable due to their reliance on private philanthropy and charismatic leaders as well as the unpredictability of changing neighborhoods and community needs. Additionally, these temporary models of comprehensive reform also highlight the need to address social problems through grassroots organization and the political process. The successes of Milwaukee progressives in implementing school reforms serve as evidence of the importance of changing systems rather than individuals. To make the school system more accessible, Milwaukee women, labor unions, and Socialists pressured elected officials to make schools serve the communitys needs. Rather than change the behaviors of the poor working class, the social reformers believed that state institutions should be responsive to the people. Their collective action and unrelenting pursuit of change through political channels made progressive reforms successful as school lunches, playgrounds, and vacations schools became normalized within the

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public school system. Ignoring institutions and politics will limit the extent to which social reforms can make lasting impacts on a communitys schools and social services. Furthermore, grassroots mobilization requires broad-based support which can exert greater pressure on elected officials to make changes to existing institutions. Relying on private funding and the leadership of a few can jeopardize the future of reform movements. Finally, it is important to note that the American tendency to educationalize social problems limits the extent to which social change can flourish. Public schools are responsible for educating every child in the country. That task is large and difficult enough on its own. Attaching additional social missions to assimilate immigrants, provide healthcare, reduce racism, and prepare civic leaders only burdens public schools without providing adequate resources to meet such expectations. Schools can only do so much to meet their obligations to provide rigorous academics and fulfill all of the social missions attached to public education. In order for educational reform to truly transform neighborhoods, equal, if not more, attention should be devoted to creating social structures and policies to support the work of public schools. Children and their communities will benefit from universal healthcare, affordable housing, and economic opportunities in the neighborhood. Schools alone cannot transform poor, urban neighborhoods. Long-term social transformation must be backed by the political will of the public and sustainable funding from diverse sources. Though the Harlem Childrens Zone and Promise Neighborhoods have refocused national attention on social and school reform, community leaders must recognize the need for institutionally led neighborhood change. Low-income neighborhoods need a stronger, more comprehensive welfare state capable of caring for the most marginalized and disenfranchised groups in society. Relying on charismatic leaders, private philanthropy, and

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social service organizations creates a sparse patchwork of welfare benefits provided on the fringes of public institutions, always vulnerable to changes in personnel and funding priorities. Instead of changing attitudes and behaviors, sustainable interventions in low-income neighborhoods must restructure inadequate institutions to respond to community needs and support local public schools through policy and the political process. Lasting social transformations come from concerted and comprehensive efforts to bolster social support for schools in a systematic way.

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