For more than three decades, community schools have aimed to improve education and neighborhood outcomes in low-income, urban communities of color. In this article, we position community schools as a place-based reform strategy that pushes back on top-down accountability systems. While most research on urban school reform focuses on improving…

A case study of the events precipitating a black student boycott in 1969 in Gainesville, Flordia, when school board manuevering to avoid school integration led to the threatened closing of Lincoln High School, a reputable black community school. Also described are the subsequent transformations of Lincoln into a vocational-technical school and…