Volume XIII, Number 1&2, Spring 2007

Issue Topic: Advocacy and Policy Change

Promising Practices

Constituency Building and Policy Work: Three Paradigms

Janice Hirota and Robin Jacobowitz describe three paradigms that show how constituency building and policy change efforts can work together to achieve sustainable and systemic reform.

Sustainable and systemic school reform demands the integration of policy work and constituency engagement.1 That is the assertion of the Donors' Education Collaborative (DEC) Initiative in New York City.2 The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago conducted a 6-year evaluation of the DEC Initiative3 and found that, in combining constituency building with policy work, advocates aim to do more than just achieve specific reform policies; they also seek to foster the public's will to support and monitor policy implementation, demand accountability, and conduct ongoing oversight in order to ensure quality and equitable education for all children.4

This article draws most heavily on three DEC projects:5

• Equity Reform Project: Creating a citizens' mandate in New York state for school finance reform linked to finance equity litigation
• Parent Organizing Consortium: Building a citywide association of grassroots organizations to bring parent voices into education decision making and reform
• Transforming Education for New York's Newest: Engaging immigrant parents and students in education issues and actions

Methodology
The evaluation used a grounded theory approach, in which theory about the phenomenon being studied—in this case, the integration of constituency building into policy work—was generated from evaluation data. This approach involved semistructured and open-ended interviews with multiple respondent groups, including:

• Project actors, such as staff, representatives from partnering organizations, parents, and forum sponsors.
• Individuals related tangentially to projects and also directly affected by them, such as journalists and staffs in school districts or borough presidents' offices.
• Projects' intended audiences, such as New York City Board of Education administrators, community-based or reform group staff, or city and state elected officials.
• Critical observers of New York City public schools with extensive knowledge about and professional experience with education and the school system, policy and systems reform efforts, and varying institutional and constituency perspectives.

Evaluation methodology also included participant and nonparticipant observation in project events, such as strategy meetings, public events, and trainings; and review of project-generated and external artifacts, such as media coverage, city and state budgets, and New York City Board of Education meeting minutes.

The Three Paradigms
The study's findings support three paradigms, illustrated in the box below. These paradigms demonstrate how policy work and constituency building can operate in tandem, informing and strengthening one another. Engaged constituencies bring on-the-ground goals, insights, and concerns to policy debates, thus contributing substantively to the shape and meaning of reform, as well as to its visibility and legitimacy. Broad-based community and organizational involvement in a reform effort can create the necessary ongoing and long-term continuity to sustain change in bu-reaucratized, entrenched, and often highly political public systems such as public education.

Each paradigm reflects a different stage of progress toward policy reform. The diagrams should be read from left to right; the bottom tier depicts the project's broad strategy, while the middle and top tiers present successive levels of work. In addition, each paradigm as a whole reflects a different stage of progress toward policy reform. Taken together, the paradigms show an evolution from early stages of policy change work—broadening constituencies—to later stages, in which constituent capacity is built and the reform landscape is altered.

Paradigm 1: Efforts at systemic change that draw on solid constituency support can be both effective and sustained. Such support works best when it reflects a large and diverse stakeholder base, has a meaningful connection to the reform issue at hand, and links communities with policymakers. Projects that aim to engage stakeholders with an eye to these multiple concerns can employ constituency building and policy work iteratively to further systemic reform. Substantial stakeholder presence fortifies a project's policy voice and, in turn, fuels the project's constituency building by attracting more stakeholders. In this way, direct constituency involvement can lend authority, credibility, and legitimacy to a specified goal, thereby boosting a reform effort's policy influence. Similarly, a constituency that connects the community with policymakers creates a critical link between the need for reform and the power to respond.

Paradigm 2: “Constituency support” refers to the extent and diversity of support and also to its capacity and depth. Yet, in order to shape public dialogue and affect policy, constituents must be able to transform this understanding into credible solutions to crucial policy problems. In developing such solutions, constituents transform interactions with policymakers into problem-solving exercises. Solving these problems, in turn, enhances constituents' influence on both public and policy dialogues. Extensive training of constituents, analyses of data, and joining of local issues with systemic policy concerns can contribute to a project's capacity to act in the public sphere.

Paradigm 3: Accountability—for instance, the accountability of particular school administrators and teachers, as well as the accountability of structures and processes—is a touchstone for many reform efforts meant to ensure inclusion of multiple and relevant constituencies. Within this context, school reformers are developing ways to expand democratic participation, such as promoting transparency in planning, monitoring, and assessing school development; using data to analyze policy decisions; and creating ways to bring parents and others into policy debates and decision making.

Applying the Three Paradigms
The three Donors' Education Collaborative projects demonstrate that when successfully implemented, the strategy components—building constituencies and formulating and advocating for policy reform—interact in dynamic and dialectical ways. Over the 6-year evaluation, the projects became conduits through which community voices connected with education policy. The projects enlarged, diversified, and strengthened individual and organizational participation in school reform advocacy. At the same time, these enhanced constituent bases engendered a legitimacy and visibility that allowed projects to access and influence the policy arena and continue to attract deeply involved constituents to the reform effort. DEC projects became in themselves a means of linking communities with policy debates in ways that simultaneously strengthened constituent bases and built an infrastructure to support policy reform.

Second, such work calls for a staged strategy, or the planned use of interim outcomes as the platform for further strategic action. The paradigms illustrate successfully implemented staged strategizing. At times, reformers draw on experience and long-term perspectives to plan multiple stages into the future. More often, such strategizing occurs as outcomes are achieved. Analysis and articulation can help clarify-for practitioners as well as constituents, funders, and policymakers—the vital and varied intersection between constituency building and policy work and its potentially compelling force.

Finally, the three paradigms offer a framework for evaluating advocacy or reform efforts that have constituency building at their core. They can function like a theory of change, with evaluations examining progress both within and across each paradigm.

Click here for a larger version of the figure.

1 Hirota, J. M., &. Jacobs, L. E. (2003). Vital voices: Building constituencies for public school reform. New York: Academy for Educational Development and Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago; Mediratta, K., Fruchter, N., &. Lewis, A. C. (2002). Organizing for school reform: How communities are finding their voice and reclaiming their public schools. New York: Institute for Education and Social Policy, New York University.
2 The Donors' Education Collaborative (DEC), comprised of nearly two dozen New York City nonprofit and corporate foundations, began funding education reform projects in 1995, initially for 6 years. However, continuing and new DEC members extended their support for original and new projects into 2007 due to their strong commitment to education reform and collaborative funding.
3 Hirota, J. M., Jacobowitz, R., & Brown, P. (2004). Pathways to school reform: Integrating constituency building and policy work. Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago.
4 Hirota & Jacobs, 2003; Gold, E., Simon, E., & Brown, C. (2002). Successful community organizing for school reform and strong neighborhoods, strong schools: A comprehensive series of reports on the findings of the indicators project on education organizing. Chicago: Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform.; Hirota, J. M., Jacobowitz, R., & Brown. P. (2000). The Donors' Education Collaborative: Strategies for systemic school reform. Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago; Mediratta, et al., 2002.
5 Collaborating organizations, with quite different players, philosophies, strategies, and school reform goals, headed each of the three DEC projects described in this article.

Janice M. Hirota, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher
Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago
1313 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773-753-5900
Email: jhchapin@mindspring.com

Robin Jacobowitz
Doctoral Candidate
Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
New York University
P.O. Box 67
Rifton, NY 12471
Tel: 845-658-7590
Email: robin.jacobowitz@nyu.edu