COMMUNITY SCHOOLS in Roxbury, New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia are demonstrating daily that parents with minimal education can govern schools and govern them well. They are also proving that even the poorest ghetto community can offer valuable and inexpensive education resources to anyone who makes the effort to recruit them.

Virtually all the community schools place ultimate authority in a parent council, usually including all the school's parents, and a parent executive board. Some schools are more purist than others about how much power should be delegated to hired school directors, and how much the council should involved itself in day-to-day matters. Usually, the more intimate and limited the community served, the more jealous are parents of their power. Both the Roxbury Community School and the East Harlem Block Schools a community school in New York's East Harlem, serve circumscribed areas and have nosy parent groups. The New School for children, which drawn students from all over Roxbury, leaves considerably more discretion in the hands of headmistress Joyce Grant.

Parent boards have amazed professional with the speed with which they learn the skills of managing schools and raising funds. "They stop things," says Tony Ward, the articulate, mustachioed director of the East Harlem Block Schools, "for reasons that make sense." Parents, for their part, have learned a healthy cynicism about the advice of professionals and a confidence in their own judgement. Most community groups had the help of professional educators in starting their schools, but learned to guard their own authority. "Professionals sat down in our living room and we insisted on retaining control," says Ellen Fields, one of the founders of the Roxbury Community Schools. "Many felt this was unfair, but some stuck with us."

IT HAS BEEN A SHORT STEP from building confidence to agitating for more general reforms. The Roxbury Community school has organized rent strikes in its Roxbury-Dorchester community. The Children's Community School in New York City regularly sends delegates to New York School Board hearings, and the Harlem Black Schools have been fighting various regulations of New York City's Division of Day Care, which helps fund the school.

Community schools have bolstered community power and education in more tangible ways as well. All of them hire and pay community and parent aides, some as classroom assistants, other as full time teachers. The practice not only brings federal and suburban (gift) money into ghettos, but often encourages uneducated ghetto residents to return to school. The Roxbury Community School offers night courses in which Northeastern and B.U. teachers help parents toward high school diplomas to teacher certification.

The spirit of constructive cooperation and egalitarianism which surrounds community schools has suggestive parallels in an institution characteristic of a very different culture and environment: the Israeli Kibbutz. Bruno Bettleheim, the psychiatrist, has suggested that nothing short of lifting ghetto children out of the ghetto environment, and placing them in a "comprehensive" environment conducive to learning, can quickly boost ghetto children to an educational parity with whites. Bettleheim pointed to the kibbutz as the kind of communal surrounding capable of accomplishing such an effort. The community school ethos may be able to capture the best of the kibbutz and the best of the ghetto as well.