Strengthening Connections Between Schools And Communities As A Method Of Improving Urban Schools

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

Drawing on a range of contexts influenced by the Promise Neighborhoods Program—a federal place-based initiative to improve educational outcomes for students in distressed urban and rural neighborhoods—this book outlines effective characteristics and elements for implementing supplementary education. Chapter authors demonstrate that the disparities in educational achievement between white and non-white students can only be addressed by a holistic approach that takes the communities in which schools are situated as its focal point. This edited collection distills the insights gained from the communities implementing such comprehensive education programs and provides the framework and models for reproducing such successes.

In School-Community Connections, leading thinkers in the fields of education, psychology, social work, urban studies, and business identify ways that collaborative efforts between schools and the communities they serve can improve education for urban students.

Improving the connection among schools, families, and communities has emerged as a recent focus of the education reform movement posing many challenges for educators, social service professionals, community activists, and parents. This book provides information on the diverse goals of the coordinated services movement and the problems of reconciling competing goals within the movement. The political environment surrounding coordinated services reforms is discussed, including efforts to scale-back the scope of "the welfare state." Different models of coordination are presented, such as Kentucky's Family Resource Centers, the Nation of Tomorrow project in Chicago, a community-school coalition in Philadelphia, community youth organizations, and programs for the homeless as well as organizational and management issues surrounding coordination drawn from programs throughout the United States and Canada.

Strengthen family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students' education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, this fourth edition of a bestseller provides tools and guidelines to use to develop more effective and equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, this foundational text demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-oriented programs. Readers will find: Many examples and vignettes Rubrics and checklists for implementation of plans CD-ROM complete with slides and notes for workshop presentations

The improvement of urban schools is one of the major challenges facing practitioners and policy-makers today. Issues related to poverty create particular difficulties in urban schools, and the emphasis on market-led improvement strategies has tended to add to these challenges. In addition, strategies for ‘raising standards’, as measured by aggregate test and examination results, can result in marginalisation or exclusion of some groups of learners. Drawing on research evidence, Improving Urban Schools addresses the question of how primary and secondary urban schools can be improved in a more inclusive way. The authors argue that urban schools and their communities have within them expertise that tends to be overlooked, and latent creativity that should be mobilised to move thinking and progress forward. They show that new approaches to leadership, various forms of collaborative school-to-school partnerships, and major changes in national policy development are needed to make use of this untapped energy. The book includes vivid accounts of these activities to shed light on what really happens in urban schools, and presents practical strategies for school leaders and practitioners who want to make a difference in urban schools.

Provides insights into university partnerships with urban schools.