The 2013 merger of Memphis City Schools (with 103,000 students) and Shelby County Schools (with 47,000 students) was the largest school district consolidation in American history. In its first year of operation, the new Shelby County Schools (SCS) commissioned CRPE researchers to perform a critical review of the district's readiness to implement a…

Researchers and policy makers have established that family involvement is related to student academic performance. Family participation at a school in a southern state in the United States was declining after the third grade level, and educators at the school needed more information to address this problem. Self-efficacy and ecological theories of…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the motives, practices, attitudes, and barriers of parental involvement as recognized by administrators and teachers in southwest Tennessee in order to improve the school-home and community relationship in southwest Tennessee. This study investigated the benefits of parental involvement and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the gap between conceptualizations of social injustices and the desired social transformation that addresses multiple social subsystems and levels on one hand, and social justice leadership that addresses intra-school efforts on the other. The paper aims to expand the conceptualization of social…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which cooperating teachers deem required student teaching skills and activities relevant to the agricultural education student teaching experience. The population for this descriptive study consisted of individuals who served as cooperating teachers in Iowa and South Dakota during the last 5…

"An overview of contemporary curriculum discourse shows a worrying drift to the technical; in current curriculum debates, technique is winning out over substance, procedure over principles" (Looney 2001, p.149). As a project worker in the School Completion Programme in Ireland I ask what and who education is for and look at to whom and…

University-school-community collaborations are little documented despite being advocated across third-level institutes. Researchers identify the need for quality university-school-community collaborations to tackle a host of social inequalities while also addressing innovative approaches to teaching and learning. This study involved the…

Early Childhood Education in India derives its premise from its sociocultural context. In spite of policies in place for developmentally and contextually appropriate Early Childhood Education, the practices are largely detrimental for this age group. The ray of hope, amidst such a scenario are a few initiatives, one such being the rural preschool…

As community-university partnerships become more common, it is becoming increasingly apparent that challenges emerge whenever groups as different as universities and communities attempt to work together. These challenges are not yet well understood and new analytical approaches are urgently needed that frame the problems and suggest avenues by…

Coordinated school health (CSH) is an increasingly popular approach used by school and community stakeholders for implementing policy and programmatic changes. Because funding is limited, examination of factors that maximize the potential for schools to build sustainable partnerships is crucially important. This study assessed the extent to which…

The civic mission of American colleges and universities has received renewed attention over the last decade. From the "engaged campus" designation now offered by the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching to the growth of Campus Compact (from 782 institutional members in 2000 to 1150 in 2012) to major institutional…

The Marin Environmental Stewardship pilot project demonstrates the potential for a partnership model that brings together external and internal collaborators to recruit and train episodic 4-H volunteers to meet environmental education needs within a community. The clientele served by the volunteers trained through the project was at-risk, urban…

Local control of schooling has been considered a defining feature of the American school system; however, in the past several decades of public schooling has also increasingly been subject to the influence of extralocal institutional mandates that encourage curricular and organizational standardization. We conducted a content analysis of 480…

This "Conversation Currents" features JoBeth Allen and Valerie Kinloch discussing their thoughts and experiences working with families and communities. Allen bases her comments on the belief that programs have to be adaptable to many different constituencies and demographics, and so must be recreated every year with every teacher and…

Hallsburg ISD is a small, rural, K-6 school district struggling to sustain its operations due to reduced funding from the state, decreased enrollment, and a decrease in the local tax base. This Problem in Practice Record of Study examines the sustainability issues associated with this school district and its importance to the community. Key…