Community Schools - by Joanne Ferrara & Reuben Jacobson (Paperback)

About the Book

Ferrara, Jacobson, and their colleagues illuminate how community schools become a comprehensive, place-based strategy that both supports high-quality teaching and learning and addresses out-of-school barriers to success.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Carrying out an effective community schools initiative presumes new roles for all involved-- teachers, administrators, students, families and community partners. However, we know little about what this new way of "doing school" means for these stakeholders. Until Community Schools: People and Places Transforming Education and Communities, the field has had limited understanding of the many roles vital to a successful community school strategy, how they were developed, integrated and sustained. This book's up-close consideration of stakeholders' efforts to rethink their responsibilities and relationships provides an important community schools implementation perspective largely missing until now--one that features the people involved.

For community schools advocates and practitioners alike, this book makes clear why community schools are so important. It is a must-read blue print for anyone who cares about helping at-risk and vulnerable children by strengthening neglected neighborhood schools and investing in public education.

In these challenging times, community schools have proven to be a powerful strategy to ensure that all children receive the full range of supports they need to be ready to learn: from health care and social services to before and after school experiences that reinforce classroom instruction to opportunities for families to become educationally engaged. This insightful book shows how a diverse set of leaders across a community can work together to improve schools. Its vivid examples inspire hope and pave a path to progress.

There is growing interest throughout the country in community schools that can respond holistically to the needs of children. This book describes how to make such schools work. The authors analyze the critical role of leadership and what they must do to coordinate the delivery of services to ensure success. For educators, policy makers and parents who seek to create schools that can serve as genuine assets to their communities, this book will be an excellent resource.

This timely book elevates the voices of practitioners and adds a missing dimension to the growing literature on full-service community schools.

With its attention to the people who make community schools possible, this book can be an important resource to many across the research, higher education, and PreK-12 sectors. Educational researchers in the field of com-munity schools, leadership studies, and school-community collaborations will all find utility in these chapters. In addition, this book offers help to teacher educators via a chapter by Ferrara and Gómez on the role of student teachers in community schools, and it also provides a text that their students--preservice teachers--can read to understand the multifaceted roles of schools in meeting not only student but also family needs. Finally, practitioners in community schools or leaders in districts hoping to adopt this model will find this book to be an invaluable resource to better understand the many parts of a successful community school. Overall, this volume reminds us of the essential work of not only teachers and school leaders, but also of coordinators, school boards, social services case workers, and families in the work of schools that create stu-dent success by attending to the whole child, not simply the child within the walls of the school

About the Author

JoAnne Ferrara is the associate dean of undergraduate programs and a professor. Prior to joining the Manhattanville faculty, she held positions as a general and special education teacher, a literacy coach, and school administrator for the New York City Department of Education.

Reuben Jacobson is an adjunct professor at the American University in Washington, D.C. Previously, Reuben served as the Deputy Director for the Coalition for Community Schools at the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL). Reuben has been a leader in the community schools field for 10 years, helping to grow and strengthen community schools by working with national partners and local leaders.