The Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD) was created in 2011 to rapidly turn around the lowest performing schools in the state by authorizing high performing charter management organizations to operate the schools. A lack of enough quality applicants, however, led the district to directly run a group of schools. This research investigates…

Local university and college take as their own responsibilities to serve local economy and promote social development. For them, the cooperation mechanism "Industry-Academia-Research" is not only inevitable to keep up with the development of the times and education, but also necessary to adapt themselves to market demands. It is also the…

This paper explores the relationship between school music and community music in Australia. While many Australian schools and community music activities tend to exist in relative isolation from one another, a range of unique school-community collaborations can be found throughout the country. Drawing on insights from "Sound Links," one…

A confluence of social, economic, and demographic trends has left a generation of young Americans facing an uncertain future in the workforce. If we are to improve their prospects and prepare them for rewarding careers, disparate stakeholders--employers, educators, youth advocates, and others--must work in common purpose. This article suggests…

Four members of the ACE Fellows Program class of 2010-2011 share the results of their fellowship projects, all of which were based at urban universities. The projects addressed partnerships between the universities and their urban communities in different contexts, including the creation of college-town developments, establishing a center for…

The Metropolitan Studies Institute (MSI) at the University of South Carolina Upstate (USC Upstate) demonstrates a robust and unique record of community impact through community indicators research and other translational research. The MSI's work drives programmatic priorities and funding decisions, generates revenue, and increases the community's…

This paper describes one of the ways in which the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) makes a difference in neighborhoods, cities, and regions by extending library privileges to community users. It reports the results of a study of the services that CUMU libraries provide to community users.

This article discusses the ways in which the community is involved in Portuguese school management. It is based on an analysis of the external evaluation reports of 298 Portuguese schools for the academic years 2006-07, 2007-08 and 2008-09. The corpus analysed allowed the identification of two main aspects of the participation processes: (1) local…

The articles in this special issue examine the increasingly complex relationship between segregation, desegregation, and integration in a sociopolitical environment vastly different from that of the initial days of desegregation. These issues are examined from historical and political perspectives, contextualizing the complexities of segregation,…

When this issue of "Peabody Journal of Education" was originally conceived, the authors of this article had several questions: What are universities doing to assist urban schools to meet their potential? How are universities leveraging human resources in service to schools, particularly as many such schools undergo restructuring? Do…

Dwight Carter admits he was a novice at social networking when he was introduced to the 140-character world of Twitter in 2010. Now, three years later, the principal of Ohio's Gahanna Lincoln High School and one of three winners of the 2013 National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Digital Principal Award does not know what he…

This article responds to the theme issue by providing a glimpse of the historical and contemporary efforts in the area of developing school, family, and community partnerships, a long-standing area of need and inquiry in the literature. It reports on the collective learning from these articles where implications of the findings pointed to the…

In this paper, we share an example of how community service learning (CSL) has been taken up within the framework of critical pedagogy in order to assist educators thinking about moving toward a more critical CSL. We draw from theoretical perspectives on critical pedagogy, data from a research study, and instructor and student experiences to…

Using a sociopolitical perspective to understand the alignment of community values and school policies, we conducted focus groups in three geographically close but economically varied neighborhood in one Midwest urban area. The article presents findings related to constituent values, social capital, and school policies, including charter school…

As an institution built on the foundation of a Normal School, collaboration among faculty members and across program areas and academic units has been part of Western Kentucky University's (WKU) heritage since 1906. In addition to the various collaborative initiatives across campus, there are a variety of initiatives that involve various agencies…