The study described in this paper elevates the role of community and educational stakeholders in building purposeful and meaningful relations with school district superintendents in the state of Kentucky. The purpose of this survey-based research is to explore superintendents' experiences with various educational stakeholders including school…

Atlanta, the fourth-fastest gentrifying city in the United States, is comprised of neighborhoods close to the city center and seat of urban wealth, that suffer from high poverty rates, unemployment, and low literacy rates. One neighborhood school has been ranked as one of the lowest in the state. To combat historical under-performance, Atlanta…

The AIM process is a strategic planning process for school districts to create Comprehensive Health and Wellness Plans (CHWPs) aligned with the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model. The purpose of this study is to describe results of this process as it was implemented with 21 rural school districts. An 81-item survey was completed by…

Stakeholder engagement is central to California's vision for how the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), with its Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP), can improve outcomes for K-12 students. On February 1, 2019, PACE's annual conference, Putting Evidence Into Action to Advance Equity in California, brought together policymakers, educators,…

As part of an ethnographic study of one rural school-community relationship, this paper explores how school and community leaders conceive of the purpose of schooling in their community, delineates the educational policies and practices that support this purpose, and offers insight into the implications of such a purpose. Adding to the rural…

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…

Schools in underserved districts experience pressure to improve achievement outcomes, trapping curricula, teachers, and students in a skills-driven literacy framework, repeatedly reinscribing a racist pedagogy. Although the research community recommends resisting skills-based literacy, researchers often neglect to commit to a research-practice…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a leadership development initiative on the school leaders and leadership coaches who participated in it. The initiative, called the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), was created in a research-practice partnership between a consortium of 12 predominantly rural, high-poverty school…

The past several decades have seen a substantial amount of time, resources, and expertise focused on producing sustainable improvement in schools at scale. Research on these efforts have highlighted how complex this challenge is, as it needs to attend to building teacher support and participation, aligning with the organizational context, and…

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) experienced demographic shifts and witnessed public display of Mexican-American student and community discontent during the late 1960s. This paper illuminates how and why LAUSD sought to improve the education of its students by engaging with the Mexican American community in three ways: 1) the…

The rationale for conducting a community survey to obtain information on a specific problem or issue for local school board policy formation is illustrated in this case study. A survey mailed to 10 percent of all district households in a small midwestern city yielded a 31 percent response rate. Survey analysis was utilized by the school board to…

The purpose of this paper is to report on part of a research study designed to learn about the interrelationships of racial conflict, change in the institutionalization of social power within an educational system, and adaptive organization of the black community within Newark, New Jersey between 1958 and 1972. The central fact informing the…

The Kalamazoo Promise, announced in 2005, is an innovative college-scholarship program available to every graduate of the Kalamazoo (Michigan) Public Schools. Programs such as the Kalamazoo Promise, which is being emulated in cities across the United States, open new avenues for the acquisition of human capital regardless of income level or…

Through the late 1970s the idea was expressed that community education provides a structure for citizen involvement in local decision-making processes and that democratic processes would be reintroduced at the community level through a new commitment to it. Minzey and LeTarte proposed the concept of process--to develop a community process of…

In 1912 the Division of Municipal Recreation and Adult Education of the Milwaukee Public Schools was formed. Milwaukee then became known as the "City of the Lighted Schoolhouse". The Division was formed as a result of a law passed by the Wisconsin Legislature which permitted school boards to use school facilities for evening schools,…