The power of unity: Building civic capacity and green schools in Cincinnati and Boston

School districts across the country are building green high performance schools using nationally recognized design protocol, such as the Collaborative for High Performance Schools' Best Practices Manual or the United States Green Building Council's LEED for Schools. Urban districts are known to have tight budgets, buildings in disrepair, and lower achievement rates --whereas research indicates that green schools can help save money, create healthy and new learning environments, and improve test scores. The purported benefits of green schools seem to address serious disparities in urban education.;This project set out to investigate why some urban districts are active participants in the green schools movement, while others are not, using Clarence Stone's concept of civic capacity from the literature on urban education reform. Civic capacity refers to "the involvement of various sectors of the community in a problem-solving effort"; strong civic capacity is thought to help implement and sustain reform (Stone 2001, 20). This thesis examines two cities with different levels of green school activity, Cincinnati and Boston, in terms of their civic capacity. It poses the question: to what extent does the strength of their civic capacity explain their varying progress to implement green schools initiatives?;Through comparative analysis of two case studies, this thesis finds that civic capacity plays an important role in Cincinnati and Boston's ability to green their schools. The state's role in school construction, however, is also found to be instrumental to pursuing the green schools agenda both independently and collaboratively.