This study examines the potential of community schools to revolutionize the educational landscape by creating a more impactful and locally tailored ecosystem. Through Action Research methodology, the research explores how deep community engagement can reshape educational experiences, focusing on the Flexible Pathways Initiative that empowers…

Community schools are an example of a comprehensive education reform initiative that brings communities together to address many of the pressing challenges facing education today. Unlike traditional schools, community schools serve as a hub, engaging educators, families, and community partners. Open to the community during evenings, weekends, and…

The global pandemic was traumatic for everyone, and it revealed the vast inequity in public services to which people have access. Fortunately, community schools had been coordinating services to meet the needs of their families prior to the pandemic, and when schools closed in 2020, they kicked into high gear to provide for those needs. This paper…

School communities have been shut out of many of the more critical decision-making processes impacting local public schools. Decisions are mostly made as top-down actions from federal mandates, general assemblies, state departments, districts, and school level administration teams, isolating the school communities they are tasked to serve.…

This study researched how a school could increase parental participation and community engagement while building a new Culinary Garden and Teaching Kitchen project. This engagement was foundational for expanding parental participation opportunities and further developing the community school. The study explored ways to balance power relationships…

Mission-driven nonprofit organizations sometimes struggle within a cycle of disempowerment resulting from oversaturation of data collection that is reactive to funder demands. In this article, we problematize Community Music School (CMS) data-collection and analysis efforts and discuss alternate approaches to learning about family and community…

In October 2023, more than 100 practitioners, professionals, and students gathered at UC Berkeley to share insights and discuss research on the growing crisis of student homelessness in California. With short-lived yet historic federal funding to support this population set to expire in September 2024, the convening encouraged researchers and…

Improving performance in an environment often tested by intermingled social problems, including poverty, racial isolation, cultural clashes between teachers and students, and school funding disparities requires authentic, committed family, school, and community partnerships. Using Bryk's (2010) model for effective and improving schools, our study…

This article speaks to the challenge of public land-grant universities addressing public need through community--academic partnerships and presents a case study to explain and illustrate these challenges. Included in this approach is the acknowledgment that as universities strive to bring the community perspective to their knowledge production,…

Community Writing has emerged as a relatively new subdiscipline that spans elements of larger fields such as Rhetoric and Writing Studies, Technical and Professional Communication, and Composition Pedagogy. Despite this recent emergence, teacher-scholars are still grappling with three major problematics traditionally associated with Community…

This paper examines how public education can ensure equity and diversity by clarifying the "democratic aspects" that can be captured through school-community collaborative activities in Japan and the U.S. As a result of comparison and analysis, it is indicated that in both Japan and the U.S., these activities are conducted in the context…

Schools in poor working class communities in South Africa face a myriad of equity challenges that impact negatively on their ability to achieve basic school functionality. Yet, within such communities, there exists a wealth of valuable local knowledge and support that can be mobilised to assist school leaders, not only to bring about school…

This practitioner brief is one of a series highlighting concrete strategies that education leaders can use to increase equity in education by building learning environments that meet all students' social and emotional needs. This brief discusses how school districts can use partnerships with outside organizations and agencies to help provide…

Community-based school governance has been promoted as a popular policy for decentralisation of education around the world. Within this policy, schools are expected to create institutional spaces such as School Management Committees with an assumption of reciprocal relation between school and community. This article questions the simplistic…

Higher education institutions are becoming increasingly embedded in their surrounding communities in order to learn from and respond to their often complex problems. Potential mutually beneficial--or reciprocal-- collaborations between students, faculty members, and communities are being set up, but few researchers have explored how community…