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104 Nat'l Civic Rev. 3 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/natmnr104 and id is 1 raw text is: Note from the Editor When I was the parent of young kids and our family moved from California to Colorado, we chose a particular suburb of Denver be- cause of its reputation for excellent schools. An additional bonus for me was that the elementary schools in this community were all named after writers. It turned out that the school district's reputation was well de- served. My daughters received top-notch educations. But a cou- ple of years after we moved there, the district was plunged into a seemingly unnecessary political conflict, when a group of parents rebelled against the district's new policy of outcomes-based ed- ucation. After months of stormy school board meetings and arguments back and forth, a slate of angry back-to-basics parents was elected, and they proceeded to shake up the district. The super- intendent of schools was forced out and new legal counsel was hired. In the meantime, the parents managed to alienate another group of parents, who accused them of politicizing classroom decisions and demonstrating an open hostility to the district's professional educators. Within one or two election cycles, the back-to-basics slate was out and a new majority of directors was elected, consisting of par- ents who had supported the original district policy of outcomes- based education. I joined the group of parents who opposed the back-to-basics di- rectors and worked in the campaign to remove them from office, not because I had any particular preference for outcomes-based education. It probably had more to do with my positive feelings about Damon Runyon Elementary, where my kids were going to school. To this day I am not sure what exactly was meant by outcomes- based education or why anyone felt it was necessary to go back to the basics in a district that routinely outperformed most others in the region. I understood, however, that the district's professionals had alien- ated some of the more traditionally minded parents by emphasiz- ing whole language over phonetics in the reading curriculum A Publication of the National Civic League and by using unfamiliar terms like outcomes-based education without getting community buy-in for what amounted to a new regimen of very high-stakes testing. It was for me an object lesson about the nature of school reform and the ongoing debate about how best to educate children. Even with the best of intentions, changes to the status quo are unlikely to achieve success without the active understanding and partic- ipation of the community. In this case, professional educators were trying to up their game and improve a school district that was already considered to be a good one. In doing so, however, they used bureaucratic jargon and failed to engage the community in a process of positive change. Either that, or they simply couldn't see that a large part of the commu- nity was not in agreement with the new direction and distrusted the professionals who were in charge of the process. This issue of the National Civic Review continues our focus on community change, civic engagement, and education. Several articles that appear in this issue were adapted from research papers and essays originally published by the Kettering Founda- tion, which has been a leading organization when it comes to the relationship between democracy and education. A roundtable discussion on community engagement and col- lective impact originally published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review also bears on the question of how commu- nities deal with educational challenges. Many communities, in- cluding Marshalltown, Iowa, the subject of a case study in this issue of the Review, are now using the term collective impact to describe their education initiatives. We hope these articles will help our readers better understand the complex relationship among communities, institutions, and the various modes of public engagement in the all-important goal of educating young people to be productive participants in this country's ongoing experiment in democracy. Michael McGrath Editor © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) National Civic Review * DOI: 10.1002/ncr.21215 * Spring 2015 3

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