Political will

There were over 300 applicants for the Promise Neighborhoods grants. In addition to helping individual neighborhoods through funding, it has increased the collective wealth of knowledge by pooling together best practices, allowing schools to see “what the potential solutions are” based on what has worked in other, possibly similar, areas.
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The next speaker was Mayor of San Antonio Julián Castro, who spoke about the role of local government in Promise Neighborhoods.
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Within San Antonio, he is dealing with 15 independent school districts, making his task harder to handle. Coming from a long-term development standpoint, he described the problems he deals with in urban education as the age-old question of the chicken or the egg; how do you help schools when neighborhoods are poor, but how do you improve neighborhoods when schools are bad? To this, Castro has tried to improve multiple aspects of the neighborhood in-step with each other. In addition to improving the school, he has put in great efforts to getting jobs into the area because this will not only help to develop the area, but it will also help to keep educated people from the neighborhood there, which is a vital component to improving the neighborhood in the long-run.
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So in an effort to tackle the problem holisticly, Castro outlined things he is doing to improve the community and, thus, improve schools: after school programs, $1000 education scholarships to students who achieve 3.0 and 95 percent attendance for college at a Texas school, support for Pre-K, and development of infrastructure in those neighborhoods. A key, he says, to the development of infrastructure and the programs is that the community is engaged in the process. This does two things: first, the community feels a part of the process, and therefore will not diametrically oppose themselves to any reform; and second, it will aid in the effort of creating effective programs because the people immersed in the issue have insight that those on the outside do not. And like Canada, Castro believes that you need to be able to facilitate the image in a kid’s mind, despite the tough neighborhood, of his/her success.
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When discussing how he maintains the political will to work on and devote energy to these neighborhoods, he says that “the way to ensure that there is community-wide support is to make clear the goals throughout the community, what they want to see done and how the community can see the benefits. This way, they can believe in and want that the same goals you have. Where you get pushback is from other poor communities, but my response is that ‘we’re starting here, but will grow into your community as well.’”