Strong collaborations are critical to successful youth transitions. Preparing students with disabilities for life after high school requires extensive partnerships within and beyond the school. However, transition educators often struggle to meaningfully engage the people and programs that exist within their local community. A community…

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem. This study is based on a collaboration with 14 school stakeholders: American Indian students, parents, community members, and educators at a high school in a community-driven problem-solving process called Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL). ILL members addressed the root…

School engagement is an important factor in academic success and social belonging for postsecondary education. Dually identified students receiving special education and English learner services may face obstacles to engagement. We conducted secondary analyses of the National Longitudinal Transition Study from 2012 to provide a description of high…

Since 2014, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has partnered with the Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University (Gardner Center) to support OUSD's efforts to assess, enhance, and scale their community schools work. They began by working with the district to develop a System Strategy Map to articulate the district's…

Many reports on rural education give little attention to digital learning. At most, they tend to note either infrastructure needs or the potential of remote course access, with little focus on instruction, outcomes, or exemplars. This report intends to begin correcting that imbalance by connecting the dots between rural regions, rural education,…

Using a community-partnered research framework, the goal of this study was to rapidly assess coronavirus disease (COVID-19) impact on teachers, students, and families and guidance received to navigate distance learning. Participants were teachers (N = 430) working in elementary schools (n = 301), middle schools (n = 56), high schools (n = 60), and…

This paper examines the options available to states to redefine their accountability systems as they begin to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The new law provides the possibility that states can create more balanced systems of support and accountability focused on educating young people so they can become productive, engaged…

Amaya Garcia of New America talks with Kappan about grow-your-own programs, in which school districts partner with teacher preparation programs to recruit and prepare community members, often current students or school staff, to teach in local schools. A recent 50-state scan shows that there is a great deal of variety in how these programs are…

School engagement is an important factor in academic success and social belonging for postsecondary education. Dually identified students receiving special education and English learner services may face obstacles to engagement. We conducted secondary analyses of the National Longitudinal Transition Study from 2012 to provide a description of high…

In this article, we discuss a partnership with a district-wide Ethnic Studies (ES) program, the Ethnic Studies Professional Development (ESPD) project, through which we designed and led a year-long teacher professional development series for middle and high school ES teachers in one school district. We describe the context of the ESPD project, our…

When Black and Latino students are given advanced opportunities, they thrive alongside their peers. However, only a fraction of eligible students is enrolled in Advanced Placement (AP) Biology, Chemistry, and Physics courses, which means that most Black and Latino students are being denied vital learning opportunities that can set them up for…

In this paper, we explore how co-design creates opportunities to learn practical design knowledge related to clarifying and balancing goals for a particular class of design contexts: developing materials that meet ambitious, externally defined disciplinary learning goals that also connect to the interests and priorities of students from…

Higher education institutions are in a great position to create authentic programming to support local underfunded or underperforming public school districts. This article gives an overview of an education outreach collaborative between a 4-year public university, local schools, and a community institution and highlights lessons learned from the…

This study explored the use of classroom physical activity (PA) in secondary science classrooms. To accomplish this, semistructured interviews were conducted with secondary science teachers (n = 11). Interviews were based on the constructs of the social-ecological model. Most teachers reported using classroom PA in some form--in-class breaks,…

This article gives meaning to innovating promising practices in high poverty rural contexts, as experienced by the Rural Math Excel Partnership (RMEP). The project sought to develop a model of shared school-family-community responsibility to support student success in foundational math courses as preparation for science, technology, engineering,…