What is community? - University of Leeds · Web viewTo understand community needs one must first understand the socio-economic topography of the localities within which people live

Colin L. Fletcher and George Bramley,Black Country Institutional Strengthening (BCIS) Projects

Evaluating Quality in Community Education within a Regional Context

Presented at ECER 96, Seville, September 25-28Abstract

Central to community education is the opportunity for lifelong learning that takes place both in and outside the formal education system. Educational quality is linked with urban renewal and creation of wealth at a regional level. It can be measured both by national benchmarks and at community level. Nationally schools are compared on the basis of the percentage of students obtaining solid academic qualifications and attendance levels, but at the more localised level more complex, intuitive and sophisticated evaluations of educational quality take place reflecting the social and economic topography. At ECER95 we outlined our framework for evaluating secondary school performance within the tightly defined region known as the ‘Black Country’ (Bramley and Fletcher 1995): the school effectiveness grid described cross-tabulated types of communities against types of schools which fitted specific statistical parameters. This paper continues our interest in performance indicators grounded in local need by presenting a definition of educational quality which relates to specific communities within our region (cf. Conduit, Brookes, Bramley and Fletcher 1996). Quality indicators at different education levels are discussed in terms of being appropriate for differing educational situations along with the need for more sophisticated methods of evaluation.

Keywords: Community; quality indicators; evaluation

What is community?

The concept of community was problematised, as Clark (1987: 50) notes, fairly early on:

Doubts about the term ‘community’ seem first to have arisen from Hilary’s discovery of 94 different definitions of the word, less than a quarter of which produced anything like a common formula, and least 16 of which contained mutually exclusive elements (Hillary, 1955)

Fletcher (1987) in the same volume discusses the changing nature of community, or more specifically communities. Community is portrayed in the media as being in declined, a sad reflection of a golden age of ‘warm togetherness’. Community as a mechanism of social policing and maintaining divisive social structures is the less represented mirror image. Progressive measures often implemented at the behest of the European Court of Social Justice within EU States and Supreme Court within the USA have altered radically social systems on which communities operate. Equal Opportunities Laws and changing employment structures have changed the social fabric. It is the old certainties of working at the local steel works that have decayed not the fundamental nature of community: the interaction of individuals and the place within which they live.

The Nature or Philosophy of Community Education

The core assumptions underlying the community aspect of education according to Fletcher (op. cit., p.35) are:

1. Community is defined by one’s relationship with people. How ‘community’ changes as a consequence of one’s relationship with people becomes an urgent problem.

2. Attaching ‘community’ as a label to education is not equivalent to hitching up a trailer. It is indicative of the fact that education can innovate and

Draft: not be quoted without permission of authors

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does change. Even now, education is not a totally dominated and determined activity. How community education is innovative becomes a high-priority issue.

3. There are specific visions of ‘community’ in community education and these can be traced to moral principles from which they actually derive. We rarely get the chance to trace principles systematically and so can often feel weakened and a long way from where we wished to be. How such moral principles reach into practices becomes the intellectual responsibility of the professional and practitioners alike.

More specifically community education is about (Martin, 1987, p. 19):

... the accessibility of education to everyone so that people can achieve a fuller and more rewarding life. People need to be involved in controlling more of their lives, making decisions through discussions and debate.

... modifying the existing education system to the benefit of those who are considered disadvantaged or deprived. Its aim is to give people who ‘miss out’ a better deal.

... acting in solidarity with those people in society who have least power, enabling them to analyse their situation and to achieve political change. Power to the People!

Community education can operate on five levels according to Clark (1985) which were summarised by Martin (op cit.) as follows:

Model Purpose Community educator’s role

Query

1. Dual use Cost-effective use of facilities

Administer / manager

No more than common-sense?

2. Community service Meeting local needs Multi-purpose provider

Educational rationale?

3. Networking Sharing / exchange of local educational resources

Network agent Control and direction?

4. Awareness raising Analysis of key current issues

Enabler / catalyst Nature of praxis?

5. Ideological approach Political education and social action

Advocate / change agent

Institutional tolerance?

These five models have much to do with the role of teachers. Teachers might be seen as administers of the National Curriculum but their roles encompasses to a greater or lesser degree, multi-purpose provider, network agent, enabler and advocate. Though this does not preclude a dominant teaching style which is institutionally sanctioned. More significant to this paper is Martin’s three models of community education.


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Universal model Reformist model Radical modelImplicit model of social / community

· Consensus · Pluralism · Conflict

Premise · Homogeneity and basic harmony of interests

· Heterogeneity and inter-group competition

· Class structure, inequality and powerlessness

Strategy · Universal non-selective provisor for all age / social groups

· Selective intervention to assist disadvantaged people and deprived areas

· Issue-based education, equal opportunities and social action

Initial focus · Secondary school / community college

· Primary school/ home /neighbourhood

· Local working-class action groups

Key influences · Henry Morris · Eric Midwinter, A.H. Halsey

· Tom Lovett, Paulo Freiro and deschoolers

Twentieth-century origins

· Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire village / community colleges

· Plowden Report (1967) and Educational Priority Areas

· Community Development Projects, innovative adult education and community work

Dominant themes · Lifelong learning· Integrated provision· Openness and access· Decompartmentalizati

on· Rationalisation· Co-ordination· Voluntarism· Neutrality· Co-operation

· Positive discrimination

· Decentralisation· Participation· Social relevance· Home-school links· Preschooling / play

Informal adult education

· Self-help· Partnership

· Redistribution / equal opportunities

· Community action power

· Redefinition of priorities

· Local control· Political education· Learning networks· Structural analysis· Solidarity and

collaborationOrganisations · Top-down

(professional leadership)

· Formal· Programme· Institution· Reactive

· Bottom-up (local leadership)

· Informal· Process· Locality· Proactive

A school or centre offering community education might be assessed against one or more of these models. More significantly these models show the diversities of philosophies within the community education movement. The extent to which realistic comparative assessments can be made is restricted when the underlying principles behind two programmes diverge.

Evaluating Quality

Quality in education is important not least as Carol Fitz-Gibbon (1996, p. 3) states:

Education is a compulsory treatment, the complex social system in which everyone is required to participate. You can avoid the law all your life, hardly ever go to a doctor and never bother with psychologists, but you have only to reach the age of 5, or thereabouts, to merit compulsory treatment by educators. Education is the social science with clout: the non-voluntary intervention. once you reach ‘school age’, educators lay claim to thousands of hours of your time. Education, the universal right, is an offer which is rarely refused.


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Quality is achieving the targets set: ‘But what if what you said you would go do was very meagre - or impossibly ambitious’ (Fitz-Gibbon, op cit.). To set realistic targets an adequate information architecture is required and it will take time to develop appropriate evaluation systems. Poor information architecture is more often harmful. Richard (1988) defines three evaluation models:


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· Compliance Monitoring Model

Determine if school are operating in accordance with some predetermined, externally exposed standard(s) emphasising "inputs" (i.e., resources available) rather than performance.

· Diagnostic Monitoring Model

Focus on student improvement and, therefore, mostly rely on criterion-referenced pre- and post-testing patterns. There are primarily formative in nature and focus on how assessed student needs are being addressed.

· Performance Monitoring Model

Focus primarily on norm-referenced achievement tests given usually at 4th, 8th and 10th grades. they are summative and intended to enable schools and districts to be compared currently and longitudinally.

(Taken from Gallegos, pp. 45-46)

In many respects compliance models might be said to be at work in community education. The Sutton Centre Project written up by Fletcher (1983) had the following objectives against which the quality of provision of community education could be assessed:

· Attract new industries to the area.· Halt the drift from the town.· Complement the [local] commercial development.· Build a comprehensive school to serve the central area.· Opportunities for integration and for the elimination of expensive duplication.· No perceptible lines of demarcation.· Enrich the whole texture of community living.· Help the organisations trying to do something for the aged and the handicapped.· Adequate facilities for both drama and choral work.· Education made more relevant and also more accessible to parents and the adult

world in general.

Some of these objectives might be seen as compliance indicators. They are either achieved, partially achieved (the targets may have been unrealistic) or not achieved. Achievement is measured subjectively through the lens of a ‘feel good’ or ‘feel bad’ factor. Creation of employment and reducing urban drift are more quantifiable, but it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which a community education programme can be implicated. Many of the significant aims of community education fall into this category. It seems that only national objectives are measurable i.e., examination pass rates and attendance levels. Though these may be set against the context of community needs. To understand community needs one must first understand the socio-economic topography of the localities within which people live. Bramley and Fletcher (1995, 1996) defined six distinctive clusters of localities which are collectively known as genius loci or the spirit of places. These six genius loci are shown in figure 1.


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FIGURE 1: CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SIX CLUSTERS (GENIUS LOCI)

Central to community education is meeting local needs and priorities. Figure One summarises the grouping of 87 electoral wards in the Black Country region which is the focus of the authors’ studies. The concept of ‘contextual advantage’ is central to our approach and is derived from the concept of ‘collaborative advantage’ in which more is achieved by partnership than would achieved in totality by the individual partners (Huxham, 1996). Each neighbourhood provides differing learning opportunities and support systems which can be harnessed. Yet as Newton and Tarrent (1992) note:

Traditionally schools as organisation are thought of as open systems in constant interaction with environment. Change coming from the outside have been viewed as challenges to which the organisation must respond....This idea, that most change originates in the environment has been traditionally held about all organisations, not just schools, by both contingency theorists and population ecologists. This basic idea has been challenged by two Chilean scientists, Maturna and Varela (1980), who have developed a new approach. They argue that all living systems are organisationally closed, with autonomous system of interaction that make reference only to themselves. They argue that living systems are characterised by three principles:

autonomy

circularity

self-reference

(Newton and Tarrent, 1992:51(own emphases))


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The issue for schools is therefore one of how they engage with their communities. An area for urgent investigation is the extent to which classroom and senior teachers engage with their school’s neighbourhood and how this might be implicated in both academic and wider social outcomes. It is not just raw socio-economic environment which can be implicated but it is also teachers understanding of, and attitudes towards, it. Without understanding teachers’ understanding and attitudes to their environment its not really realistic to assess their work with children from deprived localities.

The contradiction which comes into sharp relief is that community schools pursuing quality must exert the three properties of autonomy, circularity and self-reference whilst working closely with their communities. If quality is doing what you say you would do (Fitz-Gibbon, 1996) then it is feasible only to develop compliance indicators. Compliance indicators have an ‘Orwelian’ regressive nature and do not provide the basis for realistic and formative evaluations.

This returns us to national core indicators and the notion of what constitutes good educational data. Educational data has to answer many questions but its quality, and unbelievably in many instances its quantity is not adequate to answer crucial questions about whether students being offered ‘best practice’. ‘Best practice’ has more utility than the notion of quality which is closely enmeshed in education with ‘standards’ and more specifically who sets those standards. The existence of best practice can be crudely and more sophisicately assessed as we progress four different levels of outcome data:

Raw: e.g. number of children’s who got a ‘B’ or above in English Language within a particular school.

Comparison: comparing one English Department against another in a similar school.

Fair Data: statistically adjusted for context.

Really Fair Data: experimental data where students are assigned randomly to intervention and control groups using the ‘borderline principle’, whereby those students who would benefit would receive intervention and half of those who might benefit are assigned to the intervention group.

Only data of the last category provides more than intuitive knowledge of whether one practice is more appropriate than another. Intuitive knowledge is closely bound up with professional practice and the reflective practitioner (Schon, 1983). Some would argue for a move away from objective-positivist evaluation of community education, that it has no place, but this would impoverish the development of the movement. CEDC (1991) recommended the following quantifiable performance indicators for adult community education:

I. the student:staff ratio based on full-time equivalent (FTE) students and academic staffII. non-teacher cost per enrolled FTE student;III.cost per FTE student and on a cost;IV.completion rates for enrolled students, and the cost per FTE student completing a cost;V. rates for target qualification gained, and the cost per FTE student gaining a qualification;VI. rates of success in gaining employment or progression to further and higher education.

CEDC (op cit. ) also refers to four specific characteristics of community education which must be assessed as part of any quality audit:


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Access: This includes not only access to premises (by those other than pupils and staff) but access to educational activities and opportunities. In this context several physical, financial and psychological factors need to be considered.

Lifelong Learning

Leadership: the ability to facilitate, participate, innovate and co-operate.

Relevant curriculum / content: what participates determine they need to know and students learn more easily from familiar material.

CEDC then goes on to state seven key performance factors, of which quality is one. The others are:

Benefits/Effects: performance indicators should seek to explore the predictable outputs. e.g. examination results; plus value derived from the learning experience e.g. increased confidence.

Resources: the effective and efficient use of physical , financial and human resources;

Communications: exploring satisfaction with the quality of all forms of communication.

Equity: equality of opportunity, balance and distribution and take up; (customer profile against community profile).

Innovation: focusing upon the ability to adapt, introduce something new or change.

Responsiveness: examining the ability to react to changing needs and expectations.

Producing quantifiable indicators to enable fair comparison is problematic for the last four factors. One may be forced into making value judgements with regard to a particular college or school. These judgements may be informed by client perceptions either in the from of interview data which is costly both to collect and analysis, or by questionnaire. To ensure fairness a more rigorous psychometric approach would be required than employed in the usual customer-satisfaction questionnaire with particular attention applied to inter-rater reliability.

Towards a Regional Context

Single indicators on their own do not tell us much about a given school. Too many indicators make it difficult to compare the effectiveness or quality of individual schools. Bramley and Fletcher (1996b) used cluster analysis to group 86 secondary schools on the basis on three years common data and produced nine clusters schools. The nine types of schools were as follows:

Independents SchoolsMaximal PerformersNear-Maximal PerformersGood PerformersMiddle PerformersLower-middle attainers with high time-in-classLower-middle attainersLarge Schools with successful vocational provisionLow attainersSteady Decliners

The basic premise was that schools of the same type will have common issues and possibly similar objectives and these can be set against the type of locality within the school is located. Schools within similar localities may also share similar issues even though they may be of a different type. It is these later issues that may inform the Draft: not be quoted without permission of authors

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development of community based indicators and the development of appropriate quality assurance practices. One might expect to see similarities amongst schools with a similar academic profile and locality. These similarities can be explored using the issues areas developed by NCES (1991) that are shown in figure two.

FIGURE 2: NCES (1991) SIX ISSUES AREAS

The way in which schools address these issues, or more specifically Senior Management Teams, needs a more purposeful evaluation. In the United Kingdom, extensive evaluation is undertaken on a four-to-six year cycle by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) for learner outcomes and the quality of the educational institution. Though the quality of the data, or more specifically its relevance, fairness and validity have been questioned. Community links are mentioned towards the end of the report but school management and curriculum delivery are dominant themes. The evaluation model is more akin to Scheerens (1991) model outlined in figure three which includes exo-, micro-, meso- and macro- level indicators. Climaco (1992) for example, provides a detail breakdown of different level performance indicators within Portugal using this model.


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FIGURE 3: INTEGRATED MODEL OF SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS (TAKEN FROM SCHEERENS, 1990, P.73)

Conclusion

In conclusion there is the need for sophisticated measurement techniques. Areas that might be developed are:

· Understanding of and eventual measurement of teachers’ perceptions their schools’ neighbourhood

· Teacher expectations of their pupils and how this is mediated by the local community characteristics

· Student expectations about adult life and its relationship to their community· The extent to which citizenship is fostered by schools· Patterns in school-community links in terms of the type of community serve or its

genius loci.· The extent to which good school-community links foster well-adjusted adults

From all that has been said it would seem that:

· Community schools are particularly appropriate sites for a broader definition of quality than that of academic achievement.

· Such quality includes the school’s interaction with its locality, an interaction which is also hypothesised to be either an achievement enhancer or at the very least an achievement motivator.

· Community schools draw their missions from at least three main models of community education and these models point to factors of effort and expenditure which all schools may or may not explicitly engage in.

· Community schools are in their specific relations with their specific localities or neighbourhoods. To appreciate these specifics it is possible to examine the


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variation and the types within a given region. In this way the specifics move beyond case-studies of unique formations into the empirical study of empirically defined groups of cases.

· Some quality objectives drawn up for community school do directly relate to models of local social improvement or transformation.

· We sought to bring the focus of the quality issues in community education down to that of the "teachers and the classroom" and how there is a direct engagement with the locality at that level.

· We would support the proposition of different levels of performance indicators.· We have proposed six areas of further investigation which doe bring together the

known missions of community schools, the characteristics of their comparable localities within regions, the directing of attention to the wider expectations of teachers and the wider and longer term consequences of the interaction of their teaching and the locality.

Undoubtedly some aspects of this enquiry will be messy. There is clearly a rhetoric about the extent to which school community links might alter the parameters within which schools perform.

The latter is significant in that it would directly contribute to the information architecture used to evaluate quality in community education.

References

BRAMLEY, G. AND FLETCHER, C. (1995) Locality Types and School Types: Towards Baselines for Improvement and Effectiveness in Secondary Schools Presented at the First European Conference on Educational Research, Bath, 14-18th September 1995

BRAMLEY, G. AND FLETCHER, C. (1996A) Genius loci: Six Types of School Location and their Validity .Wolverhampton: Educational Research Unit, University of Wolverhampton

BRAMLEY, G. AND FLETCHER, C. (1996B Regional taxonomy of Secondary Schools - Genius Loci re-examined. Wolverhampton: Educational Research Unit, University of Wolverhampton

CEDC (1991) Community Education and Performance Indicators Coventry: Community Education Development Centre, Training Services Working Paper

CLARK, D. (1985) Definitions defined in Community Education Centre, Network 5, 1 January

CLARK, D. (1987) The concept of community education In ALLEN, G., BASTIANI, J., MARTIN, I. and RICHARDS, K. Community Education: An agenda for educational reform. Buckingham: Open University Press

CLIMACO, C. (1992) Effective to know school using performance indicators: criteria, indicators and processes. Educational Review, 44 (3), pp. 295-303

CONDUIT, E., BROOKES, R., BRAMLEY, G. and FLETCHER, C.L. (1996) The value of school locations. British Educational Research Journal, 22 (2), 199-206.

FITZ-GIBBON, C. T. (1990) Monitoring Education: Indicators, Quality and Effectiveness. London: Cassell.


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FLETCHER, C. (1987) The meaning of ‘community’ in community education In ALLEN, G., BASTIANI, J., MARTIN, I. and RICHARDS, K. Community Education: An agenda for educational reform. Buckingham: Open University Press

GALLEGOS, A. (1994) Meta-evaluation of school evaluation models. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 20, pp. 41-54

HILLERY, G. (1955) Definitions of community: areas for agreement, Rural Sociology 20 (2), 111-123

MARTIN, I. (1987) Community education: towards a theoretical analysis. In ALLEN, G., BASTIANI, J., MARTIN, I. and RICHARDS, K. Community Education: An agenda for educational reform. Buckingham: Open University Press

MATURANA, H. AND VARELA, F. (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: the realization of living. London: Reidl.

NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATION STATISTICS (1991) Education Counts: An indicator system to monitor the Nation's educational health. Special Study Panel on Education indicators for the National Centre for Education Statistics. Washington

NEWTON,C. AND TARRANT,T. (1992) Managing change in schools: a practical handbook. London: Routledge.

SCHEERENS, J. (1991) Process indicators of school functioning: a selection based on the research literature on school effectiveness. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 17, 371-403

SCHON, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals think in practice. New York: Basic Books.

For further information please contact either Colin Fletcher or George Bramley. Educational Research Unit, University of Wolverhampton, Gorway Road, Walsall, WS1 3BD, United

KingdomTelephone + 44 1902 323137. Fax + 44 1902 323050. Email [email protected].


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What is community? - University of Leeds · Web viewTo understand community needs one must first understand the socio-economic topography of the localities within which people live