Community partnerships allow schools and districts to empower and engage a broad range of English learners and their families in culturally responsive ways to support student learning and socio-emotional development. This article serves as an introduction to this issue of "Voices in Urban Education." This issue focuses on out-of-school…

While Massachusetts has received accolades for its high scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) and Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, absolute results from standardized tests tend to correlate strongly with family income and parental education. The Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education…

One of the central tenets of the neoliberal world view is that there is no alternative to market-based societies with their focus on competition, individualism, and the abandonment of social safety nets and environmental protections. This vision has become the new common sense. As neoliberal policies and practices have spread across the planet,…

In June 2013, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago and the Institute for Educational Leadership convened a group of stakeholders, researchers, and practitioners in Washington, DC. The group discussed the role of partnerships in advancing educational opportunities for low-income children and youth in the United States. They examined topics…

As numerous studies from 1906 on have confirmed, children lose ground in learning if they lack opportunities for building skills over the summer. Nonetheless, summer learning loss comes up but rarely in the national discussion of education reform. By the end of summer, students perform on average one month behind where they left off in the spring.…

The English Language Learner (ELL) Summer Camp in Worcester, Massachusetts--an intensive six-week program that served middle school and high school students from Worcester Public Schools (WPS)--was the product of a five-way partnership that included the school district, higher education institutions (Latino Education Institute [LEI] at Worcester…

To stem the tide of students dropping out, many schools and districts are turning to early warning systems (EWS) that signal whether a student is at risk of not graduating from high school. While some research exists about establishing these systems, there is little information about the actual implementation strategies that are being used across…

Project Coach is an after school program developed and directed by the authors. The program, which is set in a high-need urban community in Springfield, Massachusetts, teaches high school and middle school students to be sport coaches and then to run youth sport leagues for elementary-aged youth in underserved neighborhoods in their own community.…

Not only are middle and high school-aged youth difficult to engage in afterschool activities, but they are more likely to have unique demands on their time in the hours afterschool. This issue brief highlights the challenges providers face in serving older youth and the innovative strategies that programs have used to recruit and retain older…

Equipping today's youth with the skills necessary to compete in the 21st Century workforce is a top priority of our nation's schools, communities, policy makers and businesses. This issue brief examines how afterschool provides kids with the opportunity to develop skills to help them succeed in an increasingly competitive labor market. (Contains…

What happens when teams from 57 cities building afterschool systems gather to discuss two key system responsibilities--improving afterschool programs and using data for informed decision-making? Lots of rich discussion. This report covers a national afterschool conference held in February 2013. It details what mayors, program providers, system…

The paper presents the report on "School Breakfast and Summer Food Service Program." Pursuant to Chapter 61 of the Acts of 2007 line item 7053-1925 and Massachusetts General Laws (MGL) chapter 15 section 1G(f), this report is submitted to the Legislature. An Act establishing school-based Nutrition and Child Hunger Relief Programs was…

Colleges are an important part of the creative sector. They offer what is all too rare: employment for artists, scientists, and other innovative thinkers in various disciplines; spaces to develop new work; and environments that ideally allow students and faculty members to experiment, take risks, and learn from their failures. One well-known…

This report recounts that many impressive projects in Massachusetts Learn and Serve America school-based sites have been observed. The term "project" is used in the report to refer to community service learning (CSL) as it is incorporated into classroom instruction. In general, the report notes, the projects ranged from simple to…

The School-Community Collaboration Project was conducted to train personnel to infuse career education elements into the ongoing educational process and to increase the involvement of parents and the employment community in the process. Five Massachusetts school systems participated in the project, including fifty-four educational personnel and…