Little research has focused on the extent to which community school principals approach family engagement efforts, specifically from an equity-centered perspective. This study examined how community school principals' leadership practices exhibited tenets of Community Equity Literacy. Results from interviews with 13 administrators and 19…

Why are many urban universities' relationships with their surrounding communities fraught despite university efforts at community engagement? Relationships between the factors underlying university-driven neighborhood change remain largely unexplored. In this article, I take the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as a case study and examine the…

Introduction: Pennsylvania's Student Assistance Program (SAP) began in the mid-1980s to address student barriers to academic success. SAP teams, groups of trained school and community professionals, review referrals, and connect students to services. State leadership conducts an annual SAP team survey, but capacity to evaluate data and affect…

Using the Pennsylvania Department of Education Family/Community Standards, university professors from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford collaborated with multiple community clubs such as the Rotary and Kiwanis as well as local agencies including St. Bonaventure University on the development and implementation of a family literacy day event…

"Free college" programs are widespread in American higher education. They are discussed as addressing college access, affordability, inequality, and skills shortages. Many are last-dollar tuition guarantees restricted to use at single community colleges. Using student-level data spanning the transition to college, we investigate how two…

This installment of "Reports from the Field" demonstrates how the building of community-based digital archives in academic libraries can support campus diversity initiatives and spur greater engagement with community concerns. As college campuses rapidly become more diverse along racial and ethnic lines, social issues concerning race and…

The American Community Survey (ACS), a nationwide study collected continuously every year in every county in the United States, is designed to provide communities with reliable and timely demographic, social, economic, and housing data each year. These ACS estimates are not averages of monthly or annual values, but rather an aggregation of data…

This quantitative, exploratory study examined the budget decisions made by administrative leaders and academic leaders at 15 Pennsylvania community colleges as measured by the Budget Criteria Instrument (BDCI). Sixty-two leaders ranked 15 budget criteria items on the 4-point Likert scale used by the BDCI and the responses were analyzed based on…

This case study explores a county-wide initiative to improve school attendance through a successful network collaboration among organizations within Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The network was a collaboration between nonprofit, for-profit, governmental, and educational leaders who sought to raise awareness about the effects of chronic…

Many people living in rural areas are aware of the impacts of climate change and often have climate beliefs that are aligned with the scientific consensus. However, climate change conversations in rural communities may be seen as divisive, political, and potential sources of conflict in the community. We describe a rural/urban collaboration…

U.S. rural community colleges serve approximately 3.4 million students, yet there is very little research on these institutions. We conducted a mulitple case study to develop a typology of rural community college locations. We gathered and analyzed publicly available data (n = 25) and private institutional data (n = 6) and conducted in-person…

Schools and districts in Pennsylvania continue to experience a gap between the demographic diversity of their students and staffs. Culturally responsive practices are an important approach bridging the gap between PA's teachers and increasingly diverse students and communities. This qualitative study was guided by three research questions: What…

This paper reports a cross-case analysis of three summer writing programs for youth in the northeast United States, each a longitudinal study in the tradition of design research. Initially, all three programs were most concerned with leveraging cultural and linguistic diversity as a resource for multilingual participants. As the three principal…

State postsecondary education data systems are vital assets for policymakers, researchers, and the public. The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's (SHEEO) Communities of Practice project builds upon SHEEO's efforts to measure the capacity and effective use of state postsecondary data systems and provides states with…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the significance of incorporating diverse lived experiences and identities through culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in promoting sustainability, cultural diversity and the integration of various perspectives and worldviews rooted in identity and lived experience in sustainability education at…