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Envisioned as a story, a guide, a resource, and an aesthetic experience, this book features the work of a multigenerational collective of K–12 educators, students, and teaching artists seeking educational justice. This multivocal approach illustrates how bringing together arts-infused writing pedagogies, with the visionary and intellectual force of freedom dreaming, can create more luminous and socially transformative educational spaces. Through vivid vignettes, compelling first-person narratives, mixed media artwork, and detailed lesson plans, readers will experience schools as places of joy, belonging, and justice. As an act of radical hope during the turmoil and trauma of post-pandemic times, this book invites readers to draw on the principles of freedom dreaming and abolitionist teaching to imagine and enact arts-infused writing pedagogies across a multitude of settings. Authors offer guidance for teachers, teacher educators, and professional development leaders wishing to take up this work in their own contexts.Book Features:Provides detailed guidelines and principles for enacting arts-infused writing pedagogies, adaptable to a range of contexts.Showcases original artwork by K–12 students and educators, many in full color. Includes insights on teaching writing and engaging in inquiry-based professional learning from a local site of the National Writing Project.Highlights the role of teaching artists in enhancing teacher and student learning.Illuminates the potential of a/r/tography, affect, and wonder in qualitative inquiry.Contains visually arresting and narratively powerful contributions from students as young as 6 years old to teachers nearing retirement, as well as professional artists and novelists.Contributors: Marcus Kwame Anderson, Mandy Berghela, Dana Corcoran, Cheryl L. Dozier, Tammy Ellis-Robinson, Brittany Gonzalez-Barone, Emily Hass, Rana Hughes, H. D. Hunter, Patricia Poole Jeffress, Rae Johnson, Maria Latorre, Kyle McHugh, Gina M. Mooney, Christina Pepe, Matt Pinchinat, Brandon Porter, Camille Ramos, Amy Salamone, Fatima Shah, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Christina Taylor, Hanum Tyagita, Alicia Wein, Leah Werther, Vanessia Wilkins, Kelly K. Wissman, Jacquelyn Woods, Shania Yearwood

This teaching guidebook will help educators navigate emerging best practices to center historically marginalized voices and perspectives in middle, high school, and postsecondary learning spaces. The author provides an accessible blueprint for utilizing histories, culturally responsive teaching, and community responsive pedagogy to build collaborative and equitable classrooms. Inspired by research steeped in oral histories, Bunch brings forth lessons from educators, merged with voices of students, to share impactful classroom practices. The un/HUSH framework asks us to unlearn the “hush” often associated with marginalized histories and stories. The framework considers the following guiding principles: (H) using histories not told to inform teaching practices, (U) unlearning behaviors and practices that do not empower marginalized voices, (S) creating classrooms and spaces that allow for stories to be shared, and (H) encouraging healing to occur from connection, collaboration, and relationships. Part narrative, part guidebook, this resource harnesses the collective power of us to improve outcomes for students. “Bunch's un/HUSH framework can help all educators be guided by the voices of past educators.”—From the Foreword by Joyce Ladner, civil rights activist, educator, and author “I am confident that my experiences in Dr. Bunch's classroom have shaped me into the curious and knowledgeable woman I strive to be. I believe this book will help create similar experiences for students across the world.”—Xyanne Purnell, former student

A spiritually grounded source of inspiration and answers for education leaders in troubling times Public confidence in schools is waning, and there remains an unprecedented teacher shortage in the United States. Leading with Heart and Soul: 30 Inspiring Lessons of Faith, Learning, and Leadership for Educators shows leaders how to use spiritual principles to care for teachers, students, and other stakeholders despite these obstacles. Principals, superintendents, and others will gain motivation from the stories and strategies inside. Drawing on spiritual principles and Dr. Irvin Scott's experience as a classroom, school, district, and non-profit leader, this book will reinvigorate you and your team as you try to answer your most pressing questions about the future of education, including: How do we empower innovative, servant-hearted educational leaders to meet the needs of students? How do we inspire whole communities to support the learning journeys of their youth? How do we engage the entire educational ecosystem—including nonprofits and other organizations—to uplift equitable opportunities to learning and ensure that every student has the resources needed to thrive? This is not a time for leaders to turn away from our children, their caregivers, and the educators who teach and nurture them. Instead, it is a time to lift them up and celebrate the work they do while navigating our own administrative mandates and challenges. Leading with Heart and Soul speaks directly to the individuals in a position to achieve that goal. It is perfect for book clubs; personal study; and within public, Christian private, and faith-based charter schools.

A revised and updated edition of an exploration into the foundational principles, impact, and real-life success stories from Communities In Schools.Since 1977, Communities In Schools (CIS) has reached more than one million students and their families annually approximately 3,000 American schools, surrounding them with a community of support and empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life.In The Last Dropout, CIS founder Bill Milliken offers nine key principles that Communities In Schools has tested over four decades. Interwoven are his real-world life stories, a journey that began in the turbulent 1960s as a youth worker and evolved into a handful of groundbreaking'Street Academies'that became the CIS movement with a national network of hundreds of local affiliates. Milliken also shares transformative stories about how CIS leaders have adopted these principles in their own communities, with stunning results.Milliken's guiding philosophy has been'It is relationships, not programs, that change children,'and it is a principle that has served as a beacon in the movement for educational equity and success.

In recent decades, the populations in major urban areas across the country have become increasingly diverse in terms of their ethnicities, languages, and economics, and within these evolving contexts many of our schools have struggled to produce good learning results for substantial numbers of their students. Our schools have tried to be fair to all they serve by using similar instructional methods, materials, and technology, and comparable schedules, facilities, and funding, but the outcomes realized for many students are seriously worrisome in terms of their abilities to succeed in our economy in the future. The Covid-19 pandemic further exacerbated this problem. Diverse Students, Diverse Outcomes: Portal Schools for Access to Diverse Teaching and Learning proposes ways to preserve our enormous staff and facility investments in order to provide schooling that will help different students learn in different ways and in the process make education much more attractive and engaging for all concerned—and thereby more economical. The concepts outlined are enriched by perspectives of other building types and supplemented with brief descriptions of twenty-eight schools created over the last fifty years that have been very successful—yet from which we seem to have learned little.

How local educational justice movements wrestle with neoliberal school reformParents, educators, and activists are passionately fighting to improve public schools around the country. In This Is Our School! Hava Rachel Gordon takes us inside these fascinating school reform movements, exploring their origins, aims, and victories as they work to build a better future for our education system.Focusing on a school district in Denver, Colorado, Gordon takes a look at different coalitions within the school reform movement, as well as the surprising competition that arises between them. Drawing on over eighty interviews and ethnographic research, she explores how these groups vie for power, as well as the role that race, class, and gentrification play in shaping their successes and failures, strategies and structures. Gordon shows us what happens when people mobilizefrom the ground up and advocate for educational change. This Is Our School! gives us an inside look at the diverse voices within the school reform movement, each of which plays an important role in the fight to improve public education.

Abolitionist Leadership in Schools offers school and district leaders rich insights and approaches for recreating, restructuring, and reorienting their service to students, families, staff, and communities in crisis. Though often associated with sudden, large-scale disruptions, crises are ongoing matters—particularly among systemically-oppressed people—that underscore the planning voids, resource inequities, marginalizing policies, and strategic lapses of any teaching and learning community while perpetuating students'social-emotional, psychological, and pedagogical traumas. This expansive book guides school leaders to provide pre-emptive, premeditated, and progressive leadership while countering the impacts of racism that endure in our schools. Working from an abolitionist lineage, author Robert S. Harvey's radically humane vision explores lessons from our collective national past, provides strategic planning with creativities and contingencies, and fosters liberatory decision-making through accountability, communication, and more.

Just Schools examines the challenges and possibilities for building more equitable forms of collaboration among non-dominant families, communities, and schools. The text explores how equitable collaboration entails ongoing processes that begin with families and communities, transform power, build reciprocity and agency, and foster collective capacity through collective inquiry. These processes offer promising possibilities for improving student learning, transforming educational systems, and developing robust partnerships that build on the resources, expertise, and cultural practices of non-dominant families. Based on empirical research and inquiry-driven practice, this book describes core concepts and provides multiple examples of effective practices.“This is the most compelling work to date on school and community engagement. It will be required reading for all my future classes.”—Muhammad Khalifa, University of Minnesota“Full of practical steps that educators and administrators can and must take to build strong collaborations with families.”—Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston“This important publication provides a way forward for educators, families, students and community members to co-create “Just Schools” by honoring, validating, and celebrating each other's knowledge, skills, power and resources.”—Karen Mapp, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Although teachers, school counselors, and administrators are all situated within educational settings tasked with supporting students'educational development, rarely do these professionals have sufficient opportunities to learn from and collaborate with one another before entering these schools. Unfortunately, many of these professionals are unaware of the primary and secondary responsibilities their peers and colleagues assume. What's worse, this lack of insight potentially compromises the extent to which educational leaders can forge effective partnerships that benefit students from the most alienated, disenfranchised and marginalized communities (e.g., Black children in under-resourced schools). While the educational discourse has included recommendations for maximizing interactions between these educational professionals, the collective voices of teachers, school counselors and administrators in regards to these issues has not been adequately examined. Thus, this book is a compilation of manuscripts and studies that explore partnerships and strategies educators and educational leaders use to produce positive socio-educational outcomes for Black students in various contexts.'Creating and Sustaining Effective K-12 School Partnerships: Firsthand Accounts of Promising Practices'is unique because it illuminates examples of effective school-community partnerships that foster positive student outcomes.'Creating and Sustaining Effective K-12 School Partnerships: Firsthand Accounts of Promising Practices'is intended as a practical text for committed educational leaders, at different professional points (e.g., practicing teachers, pre-service school counselors and teachers), who are eager to transform the current educational trajectory of Black children through interventions that show promise.

Ferrara and Jacobson go inside community schools across the country to explore the different roles that make this collaborative education reform work. This book provides practitioners, policymakers, family members, youth, and local leaders a greater understanding of the different roles that make up a community school and tools for action. Built on years of practice, research, and continuous improvement, community schools are an innovative, effective, and grassroots strategy for bringing schools and communities together in order to improve outcomes for students, families, and communities. This education reform is growing as school site, local, and state leaders seek collaborative solutions to our schools'most persistent challenges. The contributors, experts in the field, represent a diverse group of people with longstanding commitments to the community school strategy. From principals to family members, from community partners to teachers, this book illustrates how together, we all have a part to play in the development of successful community schools.

A foundational tenet of the Out-of-School Time (OST) field is that all youth deserve impactful and engaging learning experiences. That requires that organizations, programs, and OST professionals remain responsive to the emerging needs of their diverse youth populations and the communities in which they live. This book illustrates the tensions that arise when organizations and OST professionals try to engage all youth, especially the traditionally underserved populations — when infrastructure, funding, and mindsets have not kept pace with the evolving needs of youth and their communities. The issues raised in this book — funding, outreach, engagement of immigrant families — have yet to be fully explored with an equity lens. Within these broad topics, this book brings to the surface the equity and access challenges as well as posit solutions and strategies. Each chapter is written from an insider's perspective, by practitioners themselves, who articulate some of the key and relevant issues in the field. Each chapter ends with a Research-Practice Connection section written by the editors, which discusses the topic from a research lens and generates a set of questions that can be used by researchers in future studies to explore the topic in a more in-depth, expansive manner. Book reviews and associated articles: Afterschool Matters: Practitioners Advance Equity and Access Learning in Afterschool & Summer: Equity and Access in OST Programs

In Broader, Bolder, Better, authors Elaine Weiss, of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, and Paul Reville, former Massachusetts secretary of education, make a compelling case for a fundamental change in the way we view education. The authors argue for a large-scale expansion of community-school partnerships in order to provide holistic, integrated student supports (ISS) from cradle to career, including traditional wraparound services like health, mental health, nutrition, and family supports, as well as expanded access to opportunities such as early childhood education, afterschool activities, and summer enrichment programs.The book builds on nearly a decade of research by the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a national initiative endorsed by more than sixty policy experts and leaders from across the country, and draws on the work of Harvard's Education Redesign Lab. It pulls from case studies of effective ISS efforts in twelve diverse communities to illustrate the variety of strategies that can be adopted locally.A call to action that also provides examples of communities that are successfully leveling the playing field for poor children, this book offers a detailed vision for building—through field work, mobilization, and financing—comprehensive systems to prepare all children for success.

Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book AwardDrawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

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.

Parents, young people, community organizers, and educators describe how they are fighting systemic racism in schools by building a new intersectional educational justice movement.Illuminating the struggles and triumphs of the emerging educational justice movement, this anthology tells the stories of how black and brown parents, students, educators, and their allies are fighting back against systemic inequities and the mistreatment of children of color in low-income communities. It offers a social justice alternative to the corporate reform movement that seeks to privatize public education through expanding charter schools and voucher programs. To address the systemic racism in our education system and in the broader society, the contributors argue that what is needed is a movement led by those most affected by injustice--students of color and their parents--that builds alliances across sectors and with other social justice movements addressing immigration, LGBTQ rights, labor rights, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Representing a diverse range of social justice organizations from across the US, including the Chicago Teachers Union and the Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network, the essayists recount their journeys to movement building and offer practical organizing strategies and community-based alternatives to traditional education reform and privatization schemes. Lift Us Up! will outrage, inform, and mobilize parents, educators, and concerned citizens about what is wrong in American schools today and how activists are fighting for and achieving change.

Create inclusive educational environments that benefit ALL learners! As schools become more diverse with students of differing abilities and needs, this self-reflective and action-oriented guide helps you create and support more inclusive schools and classrooms that intentionally educate all students. Using the Five Essential Elements of Cultural Proficiency as a roadmap, this book presents: Students'learning differences as just that – differences rather than deficits Strategies that show you how to break though the common barriers to culturally proficient and inclusive schooling Assessments that gauge your awareness and show you how to best serve every student's needs

The subject of this text is vulnerable children, families and interventions within the community school system that work with people who have problems with their daily lives. A community school is a school that has broadened its mission and vision to meet the needs of all of its students. The community school is where health, mental health, and other services are provided, with an emphasis on prevention. The community school is a new environment where a systems approach to change is utilized. It is not a school where human services are an add-on, but one where collaboration and input from the community determines the services that are provided to the students and families. The text not only identifies critical issues that are faced in public schools and lower income neighborhoods but also workable solutions. The book integrates theory and practice to communicate to the reader what a community school looks like, the purpose of a community school, and the varying facets that are involved in developing, maintaining and growing a community school. This book adds to the knowledge base of faculty and university students, school personnel and community stakeholders, while focusing on systems theories, prevention and collaboration.

All Our Children aims to create a moral imperative for congregations, faith leaders, and faith-based social justice groups to make advocating for quality public education for all an explicit part of their mission through partnerships with under-resourced public schools. Includes an Introduction and Epilogue as well as chapters executive summary and discussion guide written by diverse voices within the Episcopal Church, laying the theological groundwork while showcasing examples of how partnership between church and school can lift up “education as forming humans” as one way to serve God's mission in our neighborhoods.

Schwarz, founder of the groundbreaking Citizen Schools program, shares his vision for reducing inequality by pairing successful adults with low-income students. Parental wealth now predicts adult success more than at any point in the last hundred years. And yet as debates about education rage on, and wealth-based achievement gaps grow, too many people fix the blame on one of two convenient scapegoats: poverty or our public schools. But in fact, low-income kids are learning more now than ever before. The real culprit for rising inequality, Eric Schwarz argues in The Opportunity Equation, is that wealthier kids are learning much, much more—mostly outside of school. In summer camps, robotics competitions, sessions with private tutors, and conversations around the dinner table, children from more affluent families build the skills and social networks that propel them to success. In The Opportunity Equation, Schwarz tells the story of how he founded the pioneering Citizen Schools program to combat rising inequality by bringing these same opportunities to children who don't have access to them. By increasing learning time in schools and harnessing the power of an army of volunteers with various skills and professional backgrounds—lawyers, engineers, carpenters, journalists, nonprofit leaders, and grandmothers who sew—Citizen Schools offers after-school apprenticeships that provide the building blocks for adult success. Recounting the triumphs and setbacks he's encountered in implementing the program, Schwarz shows that some of the nation's lowest-performing schools in its lowest-income cities can, with help, provide their students with many of the same experiences wealthy communities afford to their children. The results have been proven: in the dozen school districts, from New York to Oakland, that have partnered with Citizen Schools, rates of attendance, proficiency, graduation, and college acceptance have gone up—and the achievement gap closes. At a time when many stakeholders in the education debates are looking for new, silver-bullet shortcuts to educational excellence, Schwarz shows that the best solution is human-centered, rooted in the American tradition of citizen voluntarism, and, most important, achievable. We can provide quality education for all students and close the opportunity gap in this country—and we can do it together.

Research on Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility focuses on research and theoretical developments related to the role of geography in education, human development, and health. William F. Tate IV, the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and former President of the American Educational Research Association, presents a collection of chapters from across disciplines to further understand the strengths of and problems in our communities. Today, many research literatures—e.g., health, housing, transportation, and education—focus on civic progress, yet rarely are there efforts to interrelate these literatures to better understand urgent problems and promising possibilities in education, wherein social context is central. In this volume, social context—in particular, the unequal opportunities that result from geography—is integral to the arguments, analyses, and case studies presented. Written by more than 40 educational scholars from top universities across the nation, the research presented in this volume provides historical, moral, and scientifically based arguments with the potential to inform understandings of civic problems associated with education, youth, and families, and to guide the actions of responsible citizens and institutions dedicated to advancing the public good.

The work of school, family and community partnerships is complex and messy and demands a thoughtful and deep investigation. Currently, parent and community involvement does not draw on school reform and educational change literature and conversely the school change literature often ignores the crucial role that communities play in educational reform. This edited volume focuses on structural considerations regarding education and the school communities, school-level and family culture, and the interrelationships between the agency and actions of school personnel, family members, community citizens and students. This book extends the dialogue on school reform by looking at parent and community engagement initiatives as part of the school reform literature. The contributors illustrate the negative impact on students and their education when assumptions made by school personnel regarding the organization of education, the nature of families, and the contributions they should make to their children's education are not challenged.

Community participation plays a large role in the success or failure of our public schools. This book focuses attention on the problem of inequality in public engagement, considering how race, class, ethnicity, language, and immigration status shape opportunities for engagement. Without the active participation of the public, chances for improving school systems are limited. Without equal opportunity for public engagement, those in the lower reaches of stratified society are left largely on the outside looking in—and that all too easily becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Public Engagement for Public Education speaks to the potential for students, parents, community members, and civic leaders to join forces and create more equitable schooling. Such engagement can expand access to quality educational pathways which in turn paves the way to a stronger voice in society and the promise of the American dream. If segments of society are blocked access to those pathways, the book argues, nothing less than the health of American democracy is at stake.