Tying it Together: Education-Focused Community Change Initiatives

Policymakers make many demands of our schools to produce academic success. At the same time, community organizations, government agencies, faith-based institutions, and other groups often are providing support to students and their families, especially those from high-poverty backgrounds, that are meant to impact education but are often insufficient, uncoordinated, or redundant. In many cases, these institutions lack access to schools and school leaders. What’s missing from the dominant education reform discourse is a coordinated education-focused approach that mobilizes community assets to effectively improve academic and developmental outcomes for students. This study explores how education-focused comprehensive community change initiatives (CCIs) that utilize a partnership approach are organized and sustained. In this study, I examine three research questions: 1. Why and how do school system-level community change initiative (CCI) partnerships form? 2. What are the organizational, financial, and political structures that support sustainable CCIs? What, in particular, are their connections to the school systems they seek to impact? 3. What are the leadership functions and structures found within CCIs? How are leadership functions distributed across schools and agencies within communities? To answer these questions, I used a cross-case study approach that employed a secondary data analysis of data that were collected as part of a larger research study sponsored by a national organization. The original study design included site visits and extended interviews with educators, community leaders and practitioners about community school initiatives, one type of CCI. This study demonstrates that characteristics of sustained education-focused CCIs include leaders that are critical to starting the CCIs and are willing to collaborate across institutions, a focus on community problems, building on previous efforts, strategies to improve service delivery, a focus on education and schools in particular, organizational arrangements that create shared leadership and ownership for the CCI, an intermediary to support the initial vision and collaborative leadership groups, diversified funding approaches, and political support. These findings add to the literature about the growing number of education-focused CCIs. The study’s primary recommendation—that institutions need to work across boundaries in order to sustain CCIs organizationally, financially, and politically—can help policymakers as they develop new collaborative approaches to achieving educational goals.

Improving the Timeliness and Response to an Aerosolizedanthrax Attack in the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. Region

Our research was conducted to improve the timeliness, coordination, and communication during the detection, investigation and decision-making phases of the response to an aerosolized anthrax attack in the metropolitan Washington, DC, area with the goal of reducing casualties. Our research gathered information of the current response protocols through an extensive literature review and interviews with relevant officials and experts in order to identify potential problems that may exist in various steps of the detection, investigation, and response. Interviewing officials from private and government sector agencies allowed the development of a set of models of interactions and a communication network to identify discrepancies and redundancies that would elongate the delay time in initiating a public health response. In addition, we created a computer simulation designed to model an aerosol spread using weather patterns and population density to identify an estimated population of infected individuals within a target region depending on the virulence and dimensions of the weaponized spores. We developed conceptual models in order to design recommendations that would be presented to our collaborating contacts and agencies that would use such policy and analysis interventions to improve upon the overall response to an aerosolized anthrax attack, primarily through changes to emergency protocol functions and suggestions of technological detection and monitoring response to an aerosolized anthrax attack.