This brief emphasizes the importance of including the voices and experiences of students, families, staff, and community partners in educational decision-making processes. It provides five key considerations for schools to effectively engage with their educational partners, such as making authentic connections through listening sessions and…

This essay offers a framework for broader community involvement as a means of increasing the relevance and usefulness of evidence developed. This essay begins by defining key concepts related to democratizing the development of evidence. The sections that follow outline a logic model that calls for a bidirectional, iterative set of core activities…

Mantua Township is a small rural town located in southern New Jersey, about 30 minutes outside of Philadelphia. Students in the township attend one of three neighborhood schools, pre-K through sixth grade. Sewell School educates students in grades pre-K to K, Centre City School educates students in Grades 1 to 3, and J. Mason Tomlin School…

In "Crisis as Catalyst," Patricia M. Virella uncovers opportunities for school leaders to act as agents of equity and inclusivity during crisis situations. Virella interviewed dozens of school principals across the United States and Puerto Rico, and in this book she shares the key lessons from their experiences with crisis events of all…

A secret sauce for family and community engagement emerged as a result of a technical assistance project that supported Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership grantees in California. Power-sharing, communication, creativity, and continuous recommitment to families were key ingredients of that sauce. When these were present, programs were able to…

Co-constructing a long-term sustainable vision on the future of teaching is a policy priority for many countries as society rapidly changes. There is a need to create space in the teacher debate to look forward for inspiration and to learn from contemporary change in other professions, such as the concept of "connective professionalism".…

University education partners have great potential to facilitate schools' moving from a school led traditional approach for family involvement to an asset based, empowerment approach to partnerships. On this journey, educators grapple with the cognitive dissonance of change as they engage their emerging multilingual families in the lives of their…

Data collected from across the child care and early education (CCEE) field, both during and prior to COVID-19, have been critical for identifying and scaling public resources to meet the increasing needs of children, families, early educators, and providers. Much of the data collected throughout the global health crisis demonstrated how the…

Education reformers must resist the tendency to use "community engagement" as a means for getting stakeholders to rubber-stamp a predetermined agenda. The tokenism of key grassroots stakeholders and the field of community engagement must be avoided. To do so, leaders and their institutions must continually reflect on how they include…

Community school strategies have emerged as a promising approach to mitigate the social and learning impacts of COVID-19. This brief draws on how the crisis-motivated responses of educators and school leaders might serve as integral investments in successful and sustainable community schools. Schools and districts interested in such an approach…

If judged against prevailing understandings of community schools (CSs) in the scholarly literature, all Romanian schools should qualify as CSs in light of the regulatory framework. However, few Romanian schools are genuinely CSs. This article describes a recent NGO-led initiative to assist Romanian schools in becoming CSs and explores the nature…

Under the current model of education research and development (R&D), solutions to the pressing challenges facing schools and districts across the country often fail to meet the needs of those who need them most: historically marginalized populations such as Black and Latinx students and students living in poverty. To address this problem,…

In this paper, a Collective Education Mentorship Model (CEMM) is described by four non-Indigenous students who co-created and undertook a program with this model for an undergraduate-level university experiential learning experience centred around Indigenous health. This model is framed around shared teaching of students by various…

School climate reform, an evidence-­-based strategy, supports K--12 students, school personnel, parents/guardians and community members learning and working together to promote pro-social education. Done well, these efforts will result in even safer, more supportive, engaging, helpfully challenging and harmonious schools. The U.S. Department of…

Every day in New York City, between 90,000 and 100,000 young people, almost all of them Black and Latina/o, must show up to school thirty to forty-five minutes before their first class begins because they attend schools with metal detectors and scanners. School administrators and policymakers have accepted this scenario as part of Black and…