Restructuring Urban Schools: The New Futures Experience

Abstract

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s New Futures Initiative is an effort to increase the life chances of disadvantaged youth by promoting institutional change in the schools and other youth-serving agencies in several medium-sized communities. The research reported here was conducted over the first three years of the five-year initiative and focuses only on the educational portion of New Futures. The findings are not conclusions about the effectiveness of New Futures, but rather they offer a mid-point assessment of attempts at restructuring a set of targeted schools to better serve at-risk students. In general, it was found that educational initiatives have not yet stimulated the restructuring of these schools. For the most part, interventions were supplemental and left the basic activities and practices of schools unaltered. Little change could be found in the social relations between educators and students; curriculum and instruction left students unengaged in serious academic work; new roles for teachers and administrators largely failed to materialize; and schools were unable to find ways of collaborating with other institutions, both public and private, to strengthen their educational resources. Despite these disappointing findings, New Futures has succeeded in bringing together most of the major stakeholders concerned with youth in each community. Important dialogue has developed, and the inadequacies of the first set of interventions appear to have stimulated a reconsideration of how to change schools to make them substantially more effective. Finally, the need for a policy-making collaborative responsive to the problems of youth has been recognized.