Begin this exercise by reading the following report:

Oakland Community Schools Organizations, Building a District-Wide Small Schools Movement

(Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, April 2009). It can be downloaded from the Internet. At this writing, the website address was http://www.annenberginstitute.org/sites/default/

files/product/845/files/Mott_Oakland.pdf This report tells the story of a partnership between the Oakland, California, School District and a community-based agency called Oakland Community Organizations and how the partnership created 10 small schools in a section of the city. It describes how the task was achieved in a city with a population of 43,000 and how the process and its results were systematically studied.

This latter part alone, which describes research methods used in a large and complex organizational change intervention, will be of great interest to our readers. We draw your attention also to page 5 of the report, which lists a series of other case studies of community-organizing initiatives in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City, and Miami.

Although these do not directly focus on changing schools, they tell a lot about how community organizing is done.

A. Do you think that the size of a school alone has an impact on school culture and climate?