COLLEGE PARK, MD (February, 2014) Dissatisfaction with U.S. schools has generated a wide range of school reform efforts in recent years. One of the most current, and compelling, reform strategies centers on school-community partnerships.
As Professor Linda Valli and her colleagues point out in a new expert brief released today, a close look at these partnerships indicates a variety of models, strategies, and purposes for these partnerships. Valli and colleagues report, School-Community Partnerships: A Typology for Guiding Systemic Educational Reform, published by the Maryland Equity Project at the University of Maryland, College Park, provides a comprehensive review of the research on these partnerships.
In this brief, the authors develop a typology of school-community partnerships. According to Professor Valli, thinking about types of partnerships can enable practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to systematically determine the conditions needed to support a particular partnership and identify the obstacles to achieving specific goals.
The idea behind school-community partnerships is that schools can serve students academic needs better if they can quickly and efficiently respond to the overall health and well-being of children and their families. But since reformers do not always mean the same thing when they talk about community schools, full-service schools, or school-community partnerships, the typology sorts out the array of partnerships based on overall goals and implications for organizational change.
The report also provides examples of school-community partnerships in Maryland for each model.
Available at: http://mdequity.org/research/k-12education
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