This book has been designed to provide teachers of kindergarten through grade 12 with techniques and approaches for helping their African American students achieve in school. It presents a planned approach to four major initiatives: (1) to restructure the instruction and behaviors practiced in most classrooms today; (2) to provide teachers with…

This guidebook offers suggestions for teaching survival skills to students. It provides strategies for implementing key elements of an approach to learning survival skills that engages students as active, self-directed learners in the community. The guidebook is designed to help educators link students to resources in the community so that they…

The changing makeup of cities apparently accounts for much of the failure of the educational system in the United States. An ecological model of the educational process suggests that it is possible to distinguish salient characteristics of the social arrangements within which schools are embedded as a means of understanding educational outcomes…

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and Little Rock's Pulaski Technical College (PTC) have both used the focus group process with key constituents to understand institutional needs and priorities and public expectations of their institutions. The model followed by both institutions consists of the following three phases: forming the…

In November 1989, the College of the Canyons (CC) in Valencia, California, conducted a community survey of Santa Clarita Valley to determine residents' satisfaction with CC; use of CC services and facilities; perceptions of the value and performance of CC in six functional areas; perceptions of the quality of education; attitudes about fees, the…

Community participation has become an important aspect of almost any change efforts in public schools in recent years. The movement has waxed and waned through the decades since the Common School, but is enjoying renewed interest with the emphasis placed on involving stakeholders in systemic change efforts. Typically, community participation has…

Total Quality Management (TQM) promotes a long-term, strategic look at organizations; by extension, Total Quality Education (TQE) promotes an essential, strategic view of communities, educational provisions, and children. This book discusses applying the TQM approach, which focuses on long-term quality, to a TQE, communitywide focus. The emphasis…

For several years, San Diego public schools have been involved in a comprehensive school-community collaboration effort to restructure education. Institutional links were formed between schools, social-service agencies, and other community resources to help reduce dependency on public assistance. Three different levels of community collaboration…

In 1989, the Community Partnership: Child Care and Early Education was formed to examine policies and make recommendations with respect to early childhood care and education (ECCE) in Ramsey County, Minnesota. The Partnership established a Task Force to develop a long-term vision for ECCE consistent with community values and to create a blueprint…

In 1991, eight schools received funding to carry out a 3-year locally designed family and community involvement project. This multisite collaborative action-research project aims to identify school policies and practices that obstruct or advance effective family-school-community partnerships. Data gathering and analysis are being carried out at…

The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Summit that focused on the education and academic achievement of African American students was unique because the school district and the African American community came together as partners to seek ways to improve the educational status of African American students. This report tells the story of…

This summer institute was specifically designed to give the Wai'anae community in Hawaii a chance to share ideas that would strengthen the support for all of their youth. It also gave them a chance to learn about resiliency, which is defined as "a person's capacity to survive through life's difficulties." Resiliency can be fostered in youth by…

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation has been involved in the community-school/community-education movement since the 1935 Flint Community Schools (Michigan) experiment led to fuller use of local school facilities for learning and recreation programs. The National Center for Community Education (NCCE) was established in the 1960s as a training…

In rural coastal communities, trade-offs between conserving and developing environmentally sensitive resources are acute. At the community level, part-time volunteers and citizen officials are asked to make complex decisions based on ambiguous and frequently contradictory "scientific" evidence of economic and environmental relationships.…

The pilot Ecumenical Child Health Project tested ways to coordinate local church activities aimed at improving young children's access to health care. Within a year, coordinators at 3 pilot sites had succeeded in initialing or enhancing several activities that linked health care to more than 1000 families and children living in medically…