Communities and Schools: A New View of Urban Education Reform MARK R. WARREN Harvard University In this article, Mark R. Warren argues that if urban school reform in the United States is to be successful, it must be linked to the revitalization of the communities around our schools. Warren identifies a growing field of collaboration between public schools and community-based organizations, developing a typology that identifies three different approaches: the service approach (community schools); the development approach (community sponsorship of new charter schools); and the organizing ap- proach (school-community organizing). The author elaborates a conceptual frame- work using theories of social capital and relational power, presenting case studies to il- lustrate each type. He also discusses a fourth case to demonstrate the possibilities for linking individual school change to political strategies that address structures of pov- erty. Warren identifies shared lessons across these approaches, and compares and con- trasts the particular strengths and weaknesses of each. Warren concludes with a call for a new approach to urban education reform that links it theoretically and practi- cally to social change in America’s cities. What sense does it make to try to reform urban schools while the communities around them stagnate or collapse? 1 Conversely, can community-building and development efforts succeed in revitalizing inner-city neighborhoods if the public schools within them continue to fail their students? The fates of urban schools and communities are linked, yet school reformers and community- builders typically act as if they are not. Twenty years ago, one would have been hard pressed to find a community- based organization that was actively working on education issues. The young community-development and organizing groups that had arisen in the wake of the 1960s typically focused their efforts on housing, safety, and economic development initiatives (Halpern, 1995). In turn, public schools lost the close connections they had to neighborhoods at the beginning of the twentieth cen- 133 Harvard Educational Review Vol. 75 No. 2 Summer 2005 Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College