Engage your community and help students achieve their full potential! Americans see public schools as a critical community resource and rank education as a priority second only to the economy. How can educators harness this public interest in education to bring parents, families, and communities to action for our schools? Improving Schools Through Community Engagement addresses these questions and more in this invaluable source of methods and strategies for educators to initiate action. Involvement of family and community members has a significant impact on student achievement. This handy resource provides a framework that education leaders can use in designing and implementing initiatives to more effectively engage the public by: • Framing a clear focus for community engagement • Identifying and including representatives from each diverse constituency group • Developing an understanding of the varied perspectives of these groups • Presenting strategies to encourage constituent involvement and action A more engaged community results in improved teaching and learning. The energy of parents, teachers, and communities working together starts small and spreads over time. If everyone gets involved, the possibilities for action are limitless!

University involvement within their communities and the promotion of engaged scholarship is essential for the success of the learning institution as well as for providing students with opportunities to interact with various leadership roles and hands-on interactions with the communities themselves. Community schools employ strategic partnerships to expand the boundaries of school improvements and to increase the direct benefits gained by the community. Emerging Perspectives on Community Schools and the Engaged University is an essential research publication that explores the importance of civic engagement in various school settings, but especially in higher education settings. Featuring a wide range of topics such as service learning, charter schools, and democracy, this book is ideal for community organizers, superintendents, directors, provosts, chancellors, education practitioners, academicians, administrators, researchers, and education policymakers.

Educational Leadership and the Community has been written in conjunction with the Community Education Department Centre (CEDC) and offers you different approaches to educational leadership which are focused on community engagement and social regeneration.

This study examines the why and how of USAID-supported community schools, the strategies that were adopted and how they changed over time. It also addresses the lessons learned by USAID to guide its strategic and programmatic decisions. This study is a descriptive analysis that does not seek to analyze the strengths and challenges of community schools, or scrutinize the compelling issues raised by the experimentations, or evaluate the experience.

A resource to help educators identify, address, and meet the needs of the diverse families in today's classrooms. Examines how families are represented in the media, schools, and other institutions and applies that information to building effective home-school partnerships. Examines how different relationships between families and teachers are defined by discourses that circulate through formal and informal curricula. Explores how families and educators can collectively reconceptualize these conversations to create positive educational experiences for children. From publisher description.

This book explores what specialists are saying about system leadership for school improvement. Case studies examine innovative approaches to sharing leadership and to leadership development programmes for system improvement.

The Kids Left Behind: Catching Up the Underachieving Children of Poverty examines critical studies on high-performing, high-poverty schools to identify how schools can fulfill the mission of educating all students to proficiency, especially students at risk. The authors identify eight best practices and then further break those down into specific strategies, often using real-life examples from successful schools. The titles of chapters 4¿11 correspond to the eight best practices of high-performing, high-poverty schools identified by the research. Each chapter begins by comparing ¿the Old World of education¿ with ¿the New World of education¿ to show how best practices can revolutionize teaching and learning. Next each chapter outlines specific strategies to implement the practices at the district, school, and classroom levels. Each chapter concludes with a rubric that readers can use to evaluate the progress of their school or district. The Kids Left Behind compiles the most important research on how low-performing, high-poverty schools can achieve radical improvements in learning for their most vulnerable students¿and does so in an accessible, easy-to-use format.

No Child Left Behind and accountability programs generally operate via assessment-driven instruction causing a de-professionalization of teachers and a disengagement of students. Chris Gallagher offers us an alternative: instruction-driven assessment with teachers as the primary assessment instrument. It looks like a way to restore teachers as professionals and to restore students as engaged learners . . . and it looks doable. - Gerald W. Bracey, author of Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered This is the most engaging, exciting, and useful book on assessment I have read in a long time. Chris Gallagher draws on the rich experiences of Nebraska educators to show why and how that state's teachers are leading a profoundly important assessment revolution. - Monty Neill, Executive Director, FairTest (National Center for Fair & Open Testing) Reclaiming Assessment details a more humane, more educationally sound way to conduct assessments than what is called for in national and state test-based accountability policies. It examines how Nebraska rejected harmful, high-stakes testing in favor of teacher-designed assessments through a groundbreaking local-control assessment system. Presenting vital conceptual details and practical information for any state, district, or school committed to finding something better for their students than filling ovals, Chris Gallagher focuses in on what makes Nebraska's plan work and how it can transform and has transformed classrooms and policies. In particular he homes in on four key aspects of successful teacher-led assessment: engaging teachers by reinvesting them with classroom- and curricular-level decision-making power engaging students through meaningful classroom assessment engaging colleagues through a new, energizing model of professional development engaging parents and other community members through school-community projects. In each instance, Gallagher combines lessons from Nebraska's school-improvement program with "portraits of practice," vignettes written by Nebraska educators that give a close-up look at how the state's assessment system works, why it works, the settings in which it's making a difference, and the leadership styles that match its goals best. Both a challenge to educators to take back assessment from politicized, top-level bureaucrats and a call to create a new agenda for contemporary education, Reclaiming Assessment is an ideal starting point for your efforts to return to student-centered, not test-centered assessment. Put your trust in educators' abilities to observe and know their students, then read Reclaiming Assessment, adopt an assessment model that's already succeeding in hundreds of schools, and start improving how your students are assessed today.