Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Social Networks, Civic Capacity and Urban School Reform: A Multi-Level Analysis

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This dissertation examines the extent to which civic capacity drives reform and thereby directs which problems are tackled and the nature of the solutions offered. Stone (1998) maintains that civic capacity is the mobilization of various stakeholders in support of a community wide cause. These stakeholders in most large urban systems include professional educators, parents, the business sector, community-based actors, and, in some cases, city hall. The building blocks for civic capacity are civic mobilization and shared understanding. The former addresses the degree to which various sectors of the community come together in sustained support of school reform and related efforts to improve educational opportunities and performance; the latter involves the extent to which stakeholders, or what Stone also references as the urban regime, share a common understanding of the education problem at hand.While Stone's approach to civic capacity and urban regimes provides a new and important framework for conceptualizing urban education reform, it does not permit the development of an inferential theory that predicts both the effects of school reform on the community and the effects of the community on school reform. Interrelationships among civic capacity, institutions, social networks, and community organizations have neither been clearly specified nor analyzed empirically.For example, what kinds of institutional changes are related to increased citizen participation in localinstitutions and local policy-making? What types of interorganizational linkages foster citizen participation? How are these relationships related to school reform? In addition, empirical challenges remain. Most studies do not have a longitudinal base with which to track changes in civic capacity over time, are limited to single city case studies, or fail to fully operationalize key concepts. Thus, we have continued to build the case for the urban regime theory in theory, we have failed to test itsempirical validity.This dissertation addresses these theoretical and empirical challenges. Theoretically, it offers the first explanatory theory of the development of civic capacity and its effect on the success of reforms. In particular, the student proposes a Social Network Theory of School Reform that builds upon Stone's work and adds dimensions from sociological theories. This theoretical framework allows the student to address the following questions: How is cooperation established? What types of relationships are forged and which are maintained over time? How do various demographic, political, and social factors contribute to or diminish a city's ability to develop civic capacity foreducation reform? Empirically, the student measures --- over time --- the levels of inter-community organization, cooperation and interaction for school reform. By pooling together data from multiple sources, the student will measure the elusive concepts of civic cooperation and civic capacity, and thus shed new light on questions of how relations among community organizations and schools are structured, how levels of community participation and support contribute to the social organization of communities, and how systemic school reform influences these relationships and processes.