With the rise of COVID-19 and growing awareness of racial injustice, the last few years have been exceptionally tumultuous for our systems of education and their stakeholders. But scholars critical of traditional paradigms of schooling and accountability have argued that these crises kindle opportunities for profound change. Gloria…

Community colleges serve many critical purposes for residents within their local service areas by providing relatively low-cost (Ma & Pender, 2023), open-access postsecondary education and workforce-focused training (Jacobs & Worth, 2019). A recent national survey of previously enrolled community college students finds that "gaining…

The Institute for Higher Education Policy's (IHEP) Equitable Value Explorer (EVE) data tool provides measures of economic value based on students' post-college earnings relative to the state in which their postsecondary institution is located. Such a broad geographic unit, however, may lead to inadequate comparisons for institutions like community…

This qualitative multiple case study explored district, school, and classroom level leadership support for school-family-community (SFC) partnerships in Title I elementary schools located in distant small towns or rural areas. Over five decades of research support the benefits of schools actively partnering with families and communities to promote…

This dissertation was an investigation of how students in two-way bilingual immersion (TWBI) programs construct their bilingual identities inside and outside the school setting, highlighting the unique and multifaceted nature of their language development and cultural identity formation. TWBI programs aim to cultivate bilingualism and biliteracy,…

The philosophy of full-service community schools (FSCS) is increasingly infused into the ethos of schools across the nation in Black and Brown communities with purported goals to engage families and address the multifaceted disparities they experience in schools and communities. Limited research explores the experiences of Black families within…

For decades, Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) has blatantly disregarded and ostracized Black caregivers and community members who have attempted to address concerns about the educational experience of Black students. The only moderately successful strategy was political activism led by Dr. Barbara Sizemore in the 1970s to secure a board majority,…

Background/Context: Community colleges are positioned as a cost-effective way for students to complete the first two years of a bachelor's degree, yet informational barriers to the transfer process are well documented. To transfer, students must overcome informational constraints, navigate bureaucratic hurdles, and resolve conflicting requirements…

This article reports on the first results of the educational model piloted in EUTOPIA, a transnational university alliance established under the European University initiative. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings and core principles of our model which seeks to enable students, academics and societal partners to form Connected Learning…

Mentoring is a high-impact strategy for supporting student success and is particularly important for rural community college students, who often face heightened structural and systemic inequities, highlighting the need for mentorship approaches tailored to their unique needs and strengths. This data note analyzes the descriptions of 587 mentorship…

The Performance Measures for Student Success Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report is based on data compiled during the previous year and serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of North Carolina's 58 community colleges. In 2010, a review process…

Objective: The purpose of this study is to highlight the type of community cultural wealth developed and used by Latina/o community college transfer students who encountered limited pre-transfer assistance and unreceptive cultures at their transfer institutions. Method: This study took place at Southwest State University (SSU), a Predominantly…

This article examines the ways in which teachers and community-based activists collaborated to advance an anti-privatisation agenda within an urban school district. The article emerges from our respective studies of privatisation in Oakland, one a historical study of the advance of neoliberalism and the other a case study (Merriam 2007,…

The current study assesses the utility of the University Belongingness Questionnaire (UBQ) in community college settings. Utilizing item response theory (IRT), the UBQ was evaluated with a sample of 1155 community college students at one large community college on the west coast. In addition, other constructs were measured to ascertain the…

Students in Appalachia have a heritage of problem-solving. We explore how computational thinking (CT) relates to and complements this heritage by analyzing 34 local ingenuity stories, and perspectives from 35 community members about the relevance of CT. We found the two problem-solving approaches are meaningfully different, but can be used in…