The documentation and technical assistance project in urban schools

Abstract

Richard P. Francisco Center for Educational Policy and Management University of Oregon Eugene, Oregon U rban schools are plagued by difficulties and problems of all kinds. That point has been well documented in education and educational research. The article by Bell that appeared earlier in this journal focused on some of the unique properties of the urban school organization that create some of the problems and hinder those schools from accomplishing their main mission: the education of urban youth. If urban schools are to overcome the problems and progress to their mission, they are going to need considerable assistance. In 1975, the National Institute of Education (NIE) awarded a joint contract to the Center for Educational Policy and Management (University of Oregon) and the Center for New Schools (Chicago, Illinois) for a project to study the problems facing urban schools and to provide the schools assistance to solve some of their more pressing problems. The nation-wide project became known as the Documentation and Technical Assistance project in Urban Schools (DTA). DTA's charge was twofold. The first part studied and documented the problem-solving activities of nine model urban school communities throughout the country. The second part of the charge, technical assistance (TA), conveyed some of the documented information of the nine model school communities to other urban school communities and helped the other communities to use and tailor the conveyed information for problem solving in their setting. Simply, the DTA was a project that used knowledge about successful problem solving in one school to help another school develop its own successful capacity for problem solving. The purpose of this article is to discuss the ways that we in the DTA used process consultation to provide TA to a west coast urban school community. In doing that, we provide background information about our west coast urban setting, speak specifically about the helpful and unhelpful effects of our TA, and share our findings about the modes of process consultation that best suit urban settings.