Tom Gross Marc Bassin High School Renewal Program New York, New York Guest Editors The foregoing articles add up to much more than the sum of their separate contributions. While each article makes a contribution in its own right to meeting some of the challenges of renewing urban schools, the gestalt constituted by all of the articles offers a message of optimism for the advocates of change in urban schools uncommon in the research literature of the past generation. Perhaps the applied behavioral sciences have begun to turn the comer in their capability for making a contribution to constructive renewal in urban schools! To summarize the collection of articles briefly: The initial article by Richard Schmuck defined the domain and the content of this issue, that of self renewal for urban schools through the various applications of process consultation. Process consultation was defined as focusing primarily on the how of interpersonal and group interactions rather than on the what of their content. Thus process facilitation aims to help urban educators with methods of communication, goal setting and problem solving and with procedures for planning, decision making, and implementing change. The next article by Warren Bell presented a detailed description of some of the debilitating social-psychological features of urban schools. In particular the psychodynamics of helplessness, powerlessness, and depersonalization act as severe hindrances to renewal. But as the subsequent articles revealed, these hindrances need not block all efforts at self-renewal in urban schools. The case studies offered by Gross, Bassin, and Jordan, by Porterfield and Porterfield, by Francisco, Keys, Milstein, and Scheinfeld each-at least in a partial way-demonstrated that despite the array of restraining forces present in a majority of our urban schools, there are some promising methods for facilitating their renewal. Indeed, the six cases-drawn from some of the largest urban environments in the United States-showed that not every urban school is beyond hope; that not every urban staff is unwilling to try out new procedures for working together; and that not every urban school is a nightmarish situation for process consultation. And the more we learn about what other process-oriented change agents are doing in other urban school districts right now, the more we gain optimism about the potential for the renewal of our toughest schools. Nevertheless, we are not naive optimists. Obviously, the task of renewing urban schools has a long, long way to go. And it seems clear that process strategies alone are only a partial antidote. The challenge of creating supportive, stimulating, and collaborative school climates for urban students is being tackled at a snail's pace and is many leagues from
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Mar 1, 1998
D.J Guan 
Open Access