Governmental policies in the United States and beyond increasingly call for school leaders to involve local communities in decision-making, yet engagement practices have often centered the perspectives of White parents and marginalized the voices of racially minoritized families. In this comparative case study of seven school districts, we draw on…

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…

This paper reports one part of a broader Aboriginal Voices Project that has been undertaken by 13 Australian researchers bringing together 10 systematic reviews on Aboriginal School Education. The extent of collaboration and engagement between school and community leaders is important to influence joint decision-making and required to attain…

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".…

Background: Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is an equity-focused approach intended to generate local knowledge and democratise the production of research evidence. Aims/objectives: We explore the promise and challenges of YPAR to inform education policy decision making. We focus on California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)'s…

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…

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…

In recent decades, changes to the education policy landscape have made local public engagement more difficult. Among these changes are increased centralization of policy making, the rise of school choice, and mayoral and state takeovers of urban school districts. Philadelphia is at the vanguard of these changes. We discuss how community-based…

In this article, we share the experience of the "Amplifying Voices" initiative. Held by the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education (CLADE) within the scope of public policy advocacy, "Amplifying Voices" applies the principles of consultation and dialogue in youth and adult education communities, aiming at a stronger…

A School Management Committee (SMC) is an administrative tool adopted in many developing countries to decentralise administrative and financial responsibilities at school level, while involving local people in decision-making and making education more responsive to demands. I question the assumption linking administrative decentralisation and…

People witness today in the US what might be considered a "generous hijacking" of educational policy. Policy debates on charters, vouchers, for profit schools, testing and evaluation companies, and "education reform" reveal a triple privatization of educational policy. Varied enactments of educational privatization dot the…

This article raises the question, "Is the rapid expansion of the school Academies programme consistent with the Government's policy of enabling socially disadvantaged local communities to participate in making decisions that shape the quality of their lives?" (Contains 1 note.)

This article examines experiences in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces with devolved school governance, introduced in 1996 to promote democratic participation in education decision making. Utilizing the ''theory of action'' framework, this analysis is an effort to de-center the school governance debate by moving from a central government…

Describes the two-year systematic process by which the Saskatoon Catholic Board of Education formulated a mission statement. This grassroots policy development, based on principles of naturalistic inquiry and consensus building, comprised four stages: consultations with 70 small discussion groups representing all stakeholders, interpretation of…

Vermont experienced a rapid expansion of federal childhood funding and programs (accompanied by their voluminous and sometimes contradictory regulations), and identified the need to unify the system after recognizing that the complexity of the early childhood education service delivery system was bewildering for parent-consumers. This report…