School district decentralization typically shifts authority and resources from central office administrators at the district level to leaders at the school level. Although decentralization reforms have been prevalent in urban educational contexts for decades, they often yield poor results for low-income, minoritized communities. In this article,…

Contrary to the charge that advocacy-oriented research cannot meet social science research standards because it is inherently biased, the authors of this article argue that collaborative, community-engaged scholarship (CCES) must meet high standards of rigor if it is to be useful to support equity-oriented, social justice agendas. In fact, they…

Urban community leaders describe their perceptions of critical issues in education and offer recommendations for the creation of a college-going culture (CGC). This qualitative study employed a maximum entropy analysis. Results demonstrate critical issues with increasing educational attainment including complexity of the urban school system,…

Civic education translates research evidence about topics of social importance for broad public audiences, with increased understanding and meaningful action of the desired outcomes. "For the Sake of All" is an example of civic education on the social determinants of health and health disparities situated in the local context of St.…

Publicly engaged scholarship (PES) has emerged as a powerful force, yet institutional policies and cultures have often inhibited its acceptance in the academy. This article considers the benefits of PES for higher education as well as the obstacles to its enactment. It identifies the college level as a critical site for change and offers a rubric…

Top-down accountability policies have arguably had very limited impact over the past 20 years. Education stakeholders are now contemplating new forms of bottom-up accountability. In 2013, policymakers in California enacted a community-based approach that creates the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) process for school finance to increase…

Adopting a Freirean perspective, the purpose of this autoethnography is to reframe the typical relationship between university educators and communities in poverty by highlighting the educative impact of such a community on a university professor's academic, cross-cultural critical and civic learning. By reframing communities in poverty as sources…

In this research, situated in a small urban district with a state-imposed school board, we analyze participation of community members during a three-year effort to improve schools. Through a qualitative analysis of forms of community engagement, this article offers a framework for understanding participation. We present two overlapping continua of…

This article builds and explores the hypothesis that parent and community participation in school governance can have positive impacts on community development by fostering improvements in school performance and school-community relations and by acting as a catalyst for collective action around community-development issues. It does so through case…

Culturally relevant, ongoing project-based learning was facilitated in a predominantly African American urban elementary school via a community garden project. The project involved teachers, students, university members, and community members. This article evaluates the project through two classroom-community collaboration models, noting common…

Describes one urban education program that provides student teachers with firsthand experiences in urban settings and the observations and lessons learned by the participants. Implications for urban teacher-preparation programs conclude the report. (GR)

Argues that the principal cause of failure has been due to a lack of sufficient power to overcome the opposition of groups who depended upon and actively defended the historically centralized and professionally dominated system. (Author/AM)

Explores the cessation of the protest activity prevalent during the 1960s by examining one form of protest activity -- that which occurred in several Los Angeles high schools -- by means of an analytical framework based on a view of protest as a bargaining tactic designed to induce the intervention of sympathetic third parties. (Author/JM)

Questions the effectiveness of decentralization of New York City school administration in delivering quality education because of local community boards' susceptibility to political pressure and patronage. (SF)

Observation of several community-school groups in Boston has led the authors to conclude that most of these groups are small, weak, and vulnerable to internal disruption; their impact on the substance of education has been thus far slight. (DM)