According to Randi Weingarten, attacks on public education are not new. The difference today is that the attacks are intended to destroy it. Over the last three years, legislators in 45 states proposed hundreds of laws placing public schools at the center of culture wars: laws seeking to ban books from school libraries; laws restricting what…

This article chronicles the history of community schools and identifies common features, or "pillars," that are associated with high-quality community schools. It is drawn from "Community Schools as an Effective School Improvement Strategy: A Review of the Evidence," a report that examined 143 research studies on community…