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Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986-1999 (Studies in Government and Public Policy)

Amazon.com Price:  $21.39 (as of 06/05/2019 14:16 PST- Details)

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Description

Deindustrialization, white flight, and inner city poverty have spelled trouble for Baltimore schools. Marion Orr now examines why school reform has been difficult to reach there, revealing the struggles of civic leaders and the limitations placed on Baltimore’s African-American community as every has tried to rescue a failing school system.

Examining the interplay between government and society, Orr presents the first systematic analysis of social capital both within the African-American community (“black social capital”) and out of doors it where social capital crosses racial lines. Orr shows that even as black social capital may have created solidarity against white domination in Baltimore, it hampered African-American leaders’ capacity to enlist the cooperation from white corporate elites and suburban residents needed for school reform.

Orr examines social capital on the neighborhood level, in elite-level interactions, and in intergovernmental relations to argue that black social capital doesn’t necessarily translate into the type of intergroup coalition needed to bring about school reform. He also includes an extensive historical survey of the black community, showing how distrust engendered by past black experiences has hampered the formation of significant intergroup social capital.

The book features case studies of school reform activity, including the first analysis of the politics surrounding Baltimore’s decision to hire a private, for-profit firm to operate nine of its public schools. These cases light up the paradoxical aspects of black social capital in citywide school reform even as offering critical perspectives on current debates about privatization, web page-based management, and other reform alternatives.

Orr’s book challenges those who argue that social capital by myself can solve fundamentally political problems by purely social means and questions the efficacy of either privatization or black community power to reform urban schools. Black Social Capital offers a cogent conceptual synthesis of social capital theory and urban regime theory that demonstrates the importance of government, politics, and leadership in converting social capital into a resource that may be mobilized for effective social change.

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