Urban school counseling: context, characteristics, and competencies.

This article explores the nature of professional school counseling in urban settings. An overview of key characteristics of the urban environment and urban schools first provides context for the role of the professional school counselor in such a setting. Second, specific challenges facing urban school counselors are considered. Third, a set of urban school counseling competencies is discussed.

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Although the goal of education in any setting is fundamentally the same, ensuring educational success for all children, this mission takes on challenging dimensions in an urban environment. Complex issues that characterize life in cities and their immediate metropolitan surroundings often confound education in urban schools.

Professional school counselors working in urban schools must promote academic, career, and personal-social development against the backdrop of environmental issues that by degree are often more challenging than they are in suburban or rural educational settings. Although attention has been focused on rural school counseling in recent years (Hines, 2002; Morrissette, 1997, 2000), school counseling practice in an urban context has tended to be overlooked.

The purpose of this article is to explore the nature of professional urban school counseling. First, an overview of key characteristics of the urban environment and urban schools will provide context for the role of the professional school counselor in such a setting. Second, specific challenges facing professional urban school counselors will be considered. Finally, suggested competencies for advancing school counseling in an urban context will be discussed.

THE URBAN CONTEXT

To fully appreciate the issues confronting urban school counselors, it is important to examine the context for those issues. It is necessary, therefore, to define what is meant by urban and examine crucial characteristics of such an environment.

The U.S. Census Bureau (2002) classifies as urban all territory, population, and housing units located within an urbanized area or an urban cluster. It delineates urban area and urban cluster boundaries to encompass densely settled territory, which consists of (a) core census block groups that have a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile, and (b) surrounding census blocks that have an overall density of at least 500 people per square mile. According to the Census Bureau, an urbanized area consists of densely settled territory that contains 50,000 or more people. An urban cluster consists of closely settled territory that has at least 2,500 people but fewer than 50,000 people. The Census Bureau introduced the urban cluster for the 2000 census to provide a more consistent and accurate measure of the population concentration in and around places.

Concomitant with the operational definition of urban, the Census Bureau also defines the general concept of metropolitan area. This is an area with a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities that have a high degree of economic and social interaction with that nucleus. Each metropolitan area must contain either a place with a minimum population of 50,000 or a total metropolitan area of at least 100,000. A metropolitan area contains one or more central counties. It also may include one or more outlying counties that have close economic and social relationships with the central county.

Given these Census Bureau definitions, the term urban can be conceived of as referring to cities, and in most instances the municipalities or counties in close proximity to them. Conceptualizing an urban area in this manner suggests a number of important characteristics that may help to define the nature of such places. The following is a list of characteristics that help to define the urban context. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does represent many of the aspects that have come to characterize urban settings:

* Population density

* Structural density

* High concentration of people of color 

* High concentration of recent immigrants

* High rates of reported crimes

* Per capita higher rates of poverty

* Complex transportation patterns

* High concentration of airborne pollutants 

* Strong cultural stimulation

* Diversity in property values

* Inequities in the educational system

* Large, complex educational systems

* Inequities in the legal system

* Lack of community connectedness

* Cultural heterogeneity 

* Inequities in access to health care.

THE URBAN CONTEXT OF SCHOOLS

Urban schools in large measure reflect the characteristics of the environment in which they are located. The status of urban public education has become a topic of much concern in recent years (Gallay & Flanagan, 2000; Kolodny, 2001; National Center for Education Statistics, 2000; Olson & Jerald, 1998; Parker, Kelly, & Sanford, 1998). It is evident that public schools in urban areas face significant issues that are qualitatively different from those confronting schools in rural or suburban contexts. Olson and Jerald, in reviewing a number of indicators, have provided an important framework for examining the context and inherent challenges of urban education:

* The achievement gap. Urban youth are less likely to receive a postsecondary degree and are more likely to drop out of high school compared to rural and suburban youth. In addition, they are less likely to meet the minimum standards on national tests and less likely to complete high school in 4 years. Significantly, urban youth often enter college or the workforce unprepared to succeed at competent levels, which places them in a precarious situation for attaining meaningful work.

* Concentrated poverty. This is a major urban phenomenon. Urban students are more than twice as likely to attend high-poverty schools. Concentrated poverty heightens the probability that schoolchildren will lack access to regular medical care, live in a household headed by a single mother, become a victim of crime, have a parent who never finished high school, become pregnant, and drop out of school.

* The teaching challenge. Urban school districts face major challenges hiring teachers and filling teacher vacancies. Significantly, urban schools are far more likely to hire unlicensed or underqualified teachers. In many instances, urban school systems cannot meet the salaries or working conditions that are offered by suburban districts.

* The school climate. On average, urban students attend bigger schools than do non-urban students. The climate in urban schools is, more often than not, characterized by teacher reports that weapons and physical conflicts among students are a problem. Significant student absenteeism and tardiness often are associated with an urban school climate. Likewise, a lack of parent involvement is often a characteristic of the climate of urban schools.

* Access to resources. The share of public resources for funding urban schools is often a major challenge. Nationally, urban districts spend less per student than do non-urban districts. This lack of resources often is seen in aging and crumbling school facilities where students with a lack of books and supplies attempt to learn. Urban schools also are often lagging behind in access to educational technology that is so crucial to the contemporary learning process. Significantly, funding problems in urban schools often are exacerbated by financial mismanagement on the part of educational leaders.

* Politics and governance. Urban school districts are, in most instances, large bureaucratic institutions that are fueled by highly charged political realities. These realities include the ever-growing influence of key political stakeholders on the educational process. Mayors, city council members, school board members, union officials, and, in some cases, state officials can be counted among these major stakeholders. The political realities of urban schools are exacerbated by central administrations that are highly bureaucratic, grossly mismanaged, and increasingly inefficient when it comes to educational governance. Within the morass of politics and governance are superintendents who, on average, serve fewer than 3 years as chief executives of urban school systems.

SCHOOL COUNSELING IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Given the contextual factors that characterize urban schools and their impact on student development, it is important to consider the nature of professional school counseling in this environment. Urban school counselors must support young people as they explore options, make choices, and prepare for life after high school against a backdrop of the challenges that confront the school systems in which counselors work.

The overarching issue confronting urban school counselors is pervasive academic failure (National Center for Education Statistics, 2000; Olson & Jerald, 1998). In their attempts to address this issue, counselors often must confront complex factors that significantly undermine the ability of many young people to achieve academic success in urban schools. They also must deal with structural dynamics that greatly impinge upon their professional roles.

The implementation of counseling programs in urban schools is hampered often by chronic student absenteeism, family instability, high levels of student transience, increasing school and community violence, and high rates of teenage pregnancy. Additionally, urban school counselors are faced with major challenges associated with increasing cultural diversity in schools. Counseling interventions are greatly impacted by language issues and value differences that come with the cultural diversity that characterizes many urban schools.

Urban school counseling is further complicated by major structural challenges to programming. These include ever-increasing workloads, meager resources, minimal professional development, unionization, expanding bureaucratic interference or indifference, and high rates of administrative turnover.

As if these issues and challenges were not enough, urban school counselors also must contend with the contemporary demands placed upon schools for greater accountability. In an era of legislative initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2001), urban school counselors, like their rural and suburban counterparts, find themselves under significant public pressure to ensure that all students achieve to high academic standards.

URBAN SCHOOL COUNSELING COMPETENCIES

It is evident that school counseling in urban areas brings with it significant challenges. Counselors who work in urban educational environments must be prepared to confront serious impediments to student development. Counseling in urban schools, therefore, implies a set of competencies on the part of professionals that will enable them to effectively address the personal, interpersonal, and structural challenges that tend to stifle academic success for scores of young people. These competencies are underscored by a major movement underway to transform the nature of professional school counseling.

School Counseling Reform: The Foundation of Urban School Counselor Competency 

Within the past decade, professional school counseling has undergone a transformation. School counselors have been challenged to achieve new professional goals and assume new and more proactive roles (Education Trust, 2000; Erford, House, & Martin, 2003). Professional school counselors are being called upon to be visible leaders in national educational reform movements and central to the missions of schools (House & Hayes, 2002; Martin, 2002). The work of a school counselor in this transformational effort is predicated on the principles of access, equity, and social justice. These principles reflect a commitment to ensuring that all children, regardless of race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status, have the opportunity, to achieve to their fullest potential.

School counselors are now challenged to assume roles that reflect a commitment to these principles. Accordingly, they are being asked to shift from an individual focus to a systemic focus in their work. Rather than work in isolation with individual student problems, professional school counselors are being asked to team and collaborate with other educational stakeholders and work at a macro level to bring about systemic change (Bemak, 2000). In addition, they are being called upon to move beyond a primary focus on school counseling activities to more extensive involvement as leaders in both the school and the community, (Erford, House, & Martin, 2003). Finally, in an era of greater educational accountability, professional school counselors are being called upon to demonstrate with data that their efforts make a difference in the lives of the students with whom they work (Dahir & Stone, 2003).

Competencies for the Transformed Urban School Counselor

Within the context of this national reform initiative, the following represents a set of important competencies for professional school counselors in urban educational environments. These competencies reflect the knowledge set, skills, and attitudes or beliefs needed to promote student academic, career, and personal-social development given the realities of contemporary urban schools.

Cultural competence. Urban school counselors must be culturally competent (Holcomb-McCoy, 2004; Lee, 2001). They should possess the awareness, knowledge, and skills to intervene in responsive and appropriate ways into the lives of the increasingly culturally diverse student population that characterizes the urban school setting.

Skills for promoting empowerment. Urban school counselors must have individual and group counseling skills that are grounded in the concept of empowerment. Empowerment is a developmental process in which people who are powerless or marginalized in some fashion become aware of how power affects their lives. They then develop the skills for gaining reasonable control over their lives that they use to help themselves and others in their community (McWhirter, 1994).

Given the personal and structural challenges that often confront young people in urban schools, counselors should be able to move beyond traditional counseling practice when promoting academic, career, and personal-social development. They should have the skills to engage in programmed intervention that facilitates a process in which young people become empowered to proactively address urban challenges that impede their overall educational success. As part of the empowerment process, counselors should be able to promote the development of positive attitudes toward academic achievement as well as foster academic competency among students.

Counseling for empowerment also should involve the ability to promote positive self-identity and cultural awareness in young people. This is necessitated by the failure identity fostered in many youth as a result of their experiences with educational processes that have been negatively impacted by the challenges facing urban schools.

An empowerment perspective on counseling also includes skill to promote individual and collective awareness among young people about how their ultimate academic, career, and personal-social success is linked to the potential betterment of their communities. As students become empowered, counselors should be able to help them to channel their interest and potential into helping empower their families and communities.

Systemic perspective. Urban school counselors must adopt a systemic perspective with respect to their helping roles and functions. Rather than focus exclusively on the etiology of problems originating with students, counselors should make the urban systems in which young people must develop and function also a center of attention for programmed intervention (Lee & Walz, 1998). Adopting a systemic perspective demands that counselors develop an understanding of important urban systems and how they interact to affect student development. These include the educational system, the family system, the political system, the criminal justice system, and the social welfare system.

Advocacy. Adopting a systemic perspective suggests advocacy. Urban school counselors must be advocates for their students. In this role, counselors intervene in social systems on behalf of students in ways designed to eliminate barriers to academic success (Bailey, Getch, & Chen-Hayes, 2003). As advocates, urban school counselors are systemic change agents, working to impact urban social systems in ways that will ultimately benefit the students with whom they work.

Collaboration. Urban school counselors must be able to collaborate with key educational stakeholders to promote student development (Bemak, 2000; Bryan & Holcomb-McCoy, 2004). They should be able to collaborate, for example, with urban families to help them become empowered as a proactive force in the educational success of children. Such collaboration should be based on important considerations about urban family life. Counselors must be sensitive to the economic and social realties of many urban families and meet them where they are with respect to such things as language proficiency and cultural customs.

In addition, urban school counselors must collaborate with community stakeholders to advance the educational interests of students. Counselors should be able to form alliances within the business, religious, and political sectors of urban communities to promote education. They should be able to broker such alliances so that they result in community resources being channeled into school programming to support both counseling and teaching initiatives. An example of this might be collaborating with community stakeholders and actively supporting their efforts to develop supplemental academic support programs in neighborhood religious institutions, community centers, and other areas of social activity.

Urban school counselors also should collaborate with educational stakeholders within the school setting. In particular, they should collaborate with teachers and administrators on ways to increase their educational effectiveness given the social and structural challenges with which educators often are confronted. School counselors should facilitate faculty development initiatives that focus on increasing awareness of the urban systemic factors that impinge upon student development or that introduce innovative methods for promoting student success in this environment.

Leadership. Urban school counselors must be leaders in their schools and within the larger community (Bemak, 2000). They should be in the forefront of developing new educational initiatives that promote student development. They also should be active participants on leadership teams within their respective schools and in the school district. Urban school counselors should be involved in the development of new educational policies and procedures from the board of education to the school building level.

Likewise, urban school counselors must be politically and socially active leaders in the community at large. They should seek leadership positions within strategic community organizations and institutions that affect the quality of life for young people and their families. They should be in a position to directly influence important community political decisions and policy initiatives that have a connection to the quality of education for students as well as the welfare of their families.

The Challenge of Urban School Counseling Competencies

While it may be argued that these competencies are important for school counselors in all settings, the pervasive failure and wasted potential of scores of young people that characterize much of the urban educational landscape underscore the importance and urgency of this skill set for counseling in urban schools. These competencies imply a rejection of many long-standing traditions characteristic of professional school counseling. They require school counselors who work in urban school settings to transcend the traditional boundaries of school counseling practice. The competencies challenge urban school counselors to "think outside the box" and take risks in their efforts to address the complex issues that confront them and the students with whom they work. In developing these competencies, counselors must be willing to commit themselves to understanding the complexities of the urban environment and how they directly affect young people. They also must embrace the concept of empowerment and approach their individual and group interventions with students from such an affirming perspective. In addition, they must be willing to collaborate in innovative ways with all urban stakeholders and exert leadership within the school and community to promote educational success.

CONCLUSION

Counseling in urban schools is significantly different from school counseling in other settings. This article has provided direction for effective school counseling in an urban environment. It is based on the important notion that professional school counselors in this setting must possess the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to effectively address profound and often unique social and structural impediments to educational success for urban youth. The future of these young people and urban America demands no less.

References

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Courtland C. Lee is professor and director of the School Counseling Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. E-mail: [e-mail]