NIUSI

part of the Education Reform Networks

School/Community Relations

• "If There Is a Better Intercultural Plan in Any School System in America, I Do Not Know Where It Is": The San Diego City Schools' Intercultural Education Program, 1946-1949
  Explores the history of the San Diego City Schools' attempts at intercultural reform after World War II, noting educators' response to specific student and community needs in the wake of racial, ethnic, and religious tensions. The 3-year intercultural program was one of the first of its kind in California and became a model for other cities to follow.
• A collaboration model for school and community music collaboration.
  Considers a collaboration model (Eastman-Rochester Partnership) between an urban school district music program and a nationally recognized collegiate-level school of music. Explains that the purpose of this coalition is to build a new model of urban music education while restoring a once outstanding inner-city music program.
• A parent-culture’s perceptions of parent involvement.
  A phenomenolographical research project surveyed a culture of 26 participating parents in one district. Involved parents are motivated to pursue involvement in their children’s lives both in and outside of school and with their children’s friends.
• About a Recent Review of Research on Family/School Linkages?
  Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships Between School Personnel & the Families of their Students Adapted from a report by Anne Henderson & Karen Mapp, National Center for Family & Community Connections with Schools.This report reviewed 80 research studies and literature reviews. The book provides details on 51 of these studies.
• About Four Ways to Increase Parental Efficacy?
  When parents feel like they can make a positive difference in their children?s lives, they are said to have a high level of "efficacy". Parental efficacy is a belief in one?s skills, abilities and resources to parent effectively, including the ability to protect children from negative influences and improve the family?s school and community.Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships Between School Personnel & the Families of their Students By Anne Stilwell & Dianne Ferguson.
• About the Difference Between "Parent Involvement" and "Family/Community Linkages"?
  Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships Between School Personnel & the Families of their Students.School personnel have long talked about the need for “parent involvement”. In recent years the language has shifted slightly to “family involvement” in order to honor that many other family members – siblings, aunts and uncles, even close friends and neighbors – support and nurture children and youth and may play significant roles in their education.
• Already Reading Texts and Contexts: Multicultural Literature in a Predominantly White Rural Community
  Examines how the inclusion of multicultural texts played out in one predominantly white rural community, focusing on repercussions of a key event that set off conflict in the community and describing how various interpretations of this event haped teachers' and community members' beliefs about the selection, interpretation, and teaching of multicultural literature. (SM).
• Altered destinies: Making life better for schoolchildren in need.
  Talks about how far schools can and should reach out into the community, especially to parents in poor communities who are not being allowed to parent because of a lack of economic opportunity.
• Alternative Perspectives on Orality, Literacy and Education: A View from South Africa
  Examines theoretical concerns about discourses associated typically with what has come to be referred to as the oral tradition and discourses associated typically with academic contexts in order to see how these may relate to students' experiences of higher learning. Looks at the writing of students who are predominantly Xhosa speakers and analyzes the kinds of discourses they seem to display.
• Am I invited? Perspectives of family involvement with technology in inner-city schools.
  This article reviewed an after-school technology based family literacy program that focused on African American parents and school relationships. Program participants were students, family members and pre-service teachers.
• Assessing Dispositions toward Cultural Diversity among Preservice Teachers
  Assessed preservice teachers' attitudes toward cultural diversity prior to entering into multicultural education courses at an urban university. Respondents indicated strong support for implementing diversity issues in the classroom and high levels of agreement with equity beliefs and the social value of diversity.
• Blue ribbon planning. Northwest Education
  Described changes in a district that created a sense of ownership, created spaces that implement food educational ideas and accommodate community activities and given each school its own “signature.”.
• Breaking the Cultural Cycle: Reframing Pedagogy and Literacy in a Community Context as Intervention Measures for Aboriginal Alienation
  This paper presents an alternative view to the pedagogical needs relating to literacy for Aboriginal students. The question posed is how to utilize this knowledge to lessen the impact of perceived failure in early schooling of entrenched non-attendance patterns for Aboriginal students of compulsory school attending ages.
• Bridging Cultures between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers--With a Special Focus on Immigrant Latino Families
  This book focuses on how to meet the challenges of education in a pluralistic society, presenting the Bridging Cultures framework, which is designed for understanding differences and conflicts that arise in situations where school culture is more individualistic than the home value system. Six sections examine: (1) "The Bridging Cultures Framework" (e.g., what culture is, the dynamic nature of culture, individualism and collectivism, and strands of multicultural education); (2) "Parent Involvement: Recommended but Not Always Successful" (e.g., minority parent involvement, parent-school partnerships, and finding common ground); (3) "The Cross-Cultural Parent-Teacher Conference" (e.g., the tradition of parent-teacher conferences, using cultural knowledge to enhance communication, and improving parent-teacher conferences); (4) "Learning What Works" (e.g., understanding parents' points of view, evaluating the messages schools send, and developing closer personal relationships with families); (5) "Teachers as Researchers" (e.g., action research, inquiry and reflection, and ethnographic inquiry); and (6) "Conclusion: The Challenge of Coming Together" (e.g., the need for cultural knowledge, how Bridging Cultures fits into the big picture of school reform, and what is to be gained).
• Bringing all students to high standards: Report on national education goals panel filed hearings. Lessons from the states.
  Common themes that emerged in report on standards were high expectations for all students; consistency over time, clear accountability, using data to drive improvement; improving teacher quality; expanding the school day and year; supporting children and families; and support from the business community.
• Building policy from practice: District central office administrators' roles and capacity for implementing collaborative education policy.
  Defines district central office administrators' roles and capacity to support the implementation of school-community partnerships. Findings come from a strategic case study of Oakland, California (1990-2000).
• Collaborative Research in Inclusive Classrooms: An Investigation with Reflections by Teachers and Researchers
  Participatory Research and Development (PR&D) is a means of integrating research and practice by linking the historically separate communities of university research practice as one learning community. More specificially, PR&D is designed to impact teacher thinking and instruction, student performance, as well as school and university systems and culture.
• Community Choices Public Policy Education Program: Exploring the Human Resources/Economic Development Connection
  The Community Choices program is designed to engage communities in a systematic assessment of the linkages between their human resource attributes and their economic development opportunities. This document contains seven modules.
• Community-based Service Learning for Multicultural Teacher Education
  Creates a topology of preservice teachers' responses to community-based service learning within several courses, investigating meanings they made from their community experiences. Data came from interviews and student essays and papers.
• Contemporary American Indian Life in "The Owl's Song" and "Smoke Signals."
  Discusses "Smoke Signals" (a 1998 award-winning film) and "The Owl's Song" (a 1974 novel), both of which feature young adult American Indian protagonists. Suggests instructional strategies for teaching these works in tandem.
• Continuing Professional Education in the Multilingual and Multicultural Environment of the 21st Century
  Offers lessons learned about working in multicultural and multilingual environments: (1) carefully plan communication requiring interpreters/translators; (2) strive for mutual knowledge creation; and (3) allow for sufficient time and process in workshops to support participants' need for clarification. (JOW).
• Coordination among schools, families, and communities:Prospects for Educational Reform.
  Improving the connection among schools, families, and communities has emerged as a recent focus of the educational reform movement. Both the diverse goals of the coordinated services movement and variety of models are presented.
• Creating Culturally Responsive, Inclusive Classrooms
  This article provides the following guidelines for creating culturally responsive, inclusive classrooms: use a range of culturally sensitive methods and materials, create a classroom atmosphere that respects individuals and their cultures, foster an interactive classroom learning environment, employ ongoing and culturally aware assessments, and collaborate with other professionals and families. (Contains references.) (CR).
• Creating pathways of change: One school begins the journey.
  Discusses how a school influenced the community members’ perceptions. The school: 1) created a school identity, 2) experienced a “community of the mind”, and 3) developed the sense of the school as a human agency.
• Critical Issue Bibliography (CRIB) Sheet: Retention and Recruitment of Underrepresented Faculty and Students.
  This Critical Issue Bibliography (CRIB) Sheet focuses on approaches to recruitment and retention of faculty from underrepresented groups as part of the creation of a multicultural college environment. The 31 annotated citations, all of which are in the ERIC database, are grouped into: (1) Overall Strategies; (2) Faculty; and (3) Student.
• Cultural Identity and Teaching
  Understanding your own cultural background, and connecting that background to that of the students in your classroom as you explore the connections you have and the different ways you might look at things creates a rich learning environment in which the teacher and students can all participate, be valued, and learn.
  Download the document here.
• Determining Policy support for Inclusive schools
  This document was designed to help teams of policy-makers, practitioners, and advocates implement inclusive practices. There are six sections in this guide, each representing a policy area.
• Developing a Rationale for Multicultural Education in Rural Appalachia
  Because of their ethnic/racial homogeneity, Appalachian schools often see multicultural education as irrelevant. Teacher education must link the oppression of Appalachia with that of more visible minority groups; show how knowledge is subjective; and emphasize that true national unity results from honoring diversity.
• Early Childhood Literacy: Programs & Strategies To Develop Cultural, Linguistic, Scientific and Healthcare Literacy for Very Young Children & their Families, 2001 Yearbook
  This yearbook recounts the work in 2001 at the Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) at Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi. Rather than an "elitist" laboratory school for the children of university faculty, the ECDC is a collaboration between the Corpus Christi Independent School District and the university, with an enrollment representative of Corpus Christi's population.
• Education and cultural capital: the implications of changing trends in education policies.
  The article discusses the impact of policies that empower parents through school choice options, gifted & talented programs and parental involvement in general. The concept of cultural capital is discussed as a perpetuator of economic advantages for privileged parents and exacerbating class inequalities in lower income families.
• Education for students with special needs: The judicially defined role of parents in the process.
  The new or revised congressional initiative gave parents an expanded role in how elements of this statute can be carried out for the betterment of students with special needs. The information must be shared for all involved.
• Fostering Community through the Use of Technology in a Distributed Learning Environment
  With the technology revolution, the importance of creating a sense of community in the learning environment is as significant as ever. This article shares the lessons learned in developing and teaching a multicultural counseling course via distance and distributed education.
• Gathering Strength: Canada's Aboriginal Action Plan. A Progress Report = Rassembler nos forces: Le plan d'action du Canada pour les questions autochtones. Rapport d'etape.
  Gathering Strength is an integrated government-wide plan to address the key challenges facing Canada's Aboriginal people.
• Highly successful and loving, public elementary schools populated mainly by low-SES children of color: Core beliefs and cultural characteristics.
  There is a popular assumption about the pervasive school failure of students of color whom are also from households with low SES. These highly successful schools are academically competitive with – and even superior to – the better Anglo schools suggesting that these schools may have developed a better model for schooling.
• Immigration Then and Now: Old Face, New Story
  The current wave of immigration is creating such an upheaval, and caught in this emotional jumble are first generation immigrant students. These students are being raised and educated in the United States and are developing understandings of their place within the nation and what it means to be an American.
• Including Gypsy Travellers in Education
  Examined the educational exclusion and inclusion of Gypsy Traveller students, exploring how some Scottish schools responded to Traveller student culture and how this led to exclusion. Interviews with school staff, Traveller students, and parents indicated that continuing prejudice and harassment promoted inappropriate school placement and persecution.
• International Education: Another View of Distance Learning
  This paper argues that diversity and flexibility have been the cornerstones of the community college over the last three or four decades. Of recent interest has been the change in the student profile from that of the recent local high school graduate to the returning student, as well as a mix of international students.
• It's Elementary: Special Topics in Elementary Education
  As elementary teachers work to educate and meet the needs of the students in their care, their job has become increasingly challenging and demanding. This volume addresses a variety of issues and topics related to elementary education around eight sectional themes relevant to the work of elementary teachers: celebrating diversity, classroom configurations, reading revisited, writing world, content connections, todays classroom, artistic avenues, and assessment alternatives.
• Latino youth at home, in their communities and in school: The language link.
  Latino English-Spanish bilingualism represents a resource to building bridges between communities, homes and schools. Strategies and programs are discussed to facilitate participation of Latino families.
• Learning through Community Service in International School Settings
  States that many international schools have taken on the role of being community centers that support families adjusting to life in a foreign country. Describes several community-service programs that are not strictly school-based and that help students and families be aware of the broader community's culture as well as the campus'.
• LEP Parent Involvement Project: A Guide for Connecting Immigrant Parents and Schools
  This guide is a set of materials developed for use in adult education settings such as English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes, community-based organizations, and parent groups for the purpose of helping immigrant parents see themselves as active participants in their children's learning.
• Life & Loss: A Guide To Help Grieving Children. Second Edition
  Because children experience grief in a variety of contexts, adults need a guide through the maze of thoughts and feelings that loss evokes for themselves and their children. This guide seeks to empower parents, educators, clergy, and health care professionals to handle children's loss and grief issues in an informed, open, and loving way, reducing the fear and denial often associated with these topics.
• Multicultural Perceptions Of 1st-Year Elementary Teachers' Urban, Suburban, and Rural Student Teaching Placements
  This study was designed to determine the effects student teaching in four settings (urban Comer, urban non-Comer, suburban, and rural) had on 1st-year teachers' (a) perceptions of success in general, (b) success as it relates to their perceptions of the multicultural needs of students, and (c) perceptions of success in their interactions with parents from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
• Multicultural Service Learning: Educating Teachers in Diverse Communities
  This book explains the complex interplay of service learning, multicultural education, and teacher preparation. It shows how the author collaborated with community partners and preservice teachers to jointly construct the service learning supplement to a multicultural education course, from the bottom up.
• Multiethnic Children's Literature: Its Need for a Permanent Place in the Children's Literary Canon
  This literature review emphasizes teaching from a multicultural perspective with a focus on integrating multiethnic literature into the core curriculum. Multiethnic literature has been defined as literature dealing with peoples of diverse backgrounds within the United States, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans.
• Parent involvement in elementary school and educational attainment.
  Used data from the Chicago Longitudinal study to investigate the association between parent involvement in elementary school and success in high school. Results indicated that even after controlling for background characteristics and risk factors, parent involvement in school was significantly associated with lower rates of high school dropout, increased on-time high school completion, and highest grade completed.
• Parental school involvement and children’s academic achievement. .
  This article outlines some of the mechanisms through which parental school involvement affects achievement and identify how patterns and amounts of involvement vary across cultural, economic, and community contexts and across developmental levels.
• Parting Words: Academic Librarians as a Model and Active Force for Social Responsibility on Campus
  Suggests ways in which academic librarians, as models of social responsibility, can work toward a more just campus community and society. These include care for users and fairness toward, awareness of language and culture, the provision of alternate sources of information, and the display of information on social responsibility.
• Pathways to Inclusive Practices:Systems Oriented, Policy-Linked, and Research-Based Strategies that Work
  This guidebook was developed for parents, practitioners, administrators, and policy-makers seeking to make schools and classrooms more responsive to the educational needs of all students,including those with disabilities.
  Download the document here .
• Peer acceptance of included students with disabilities as a function of severity of disability and classroom composition.
  Students with mild or “hidden” disabilities are more accepted by their non-disabled peers. The greater the perception of disability, the lower the acceptance rating.
• Perceptions of alienation among students with learning disabilities in inclusive and resource settings.
  Students with learning disabilities who received pull-out academic support daily for 45 minutes reported significantly higher levels of alienation students who were fully included in the regular classroom.
• Perceptions of Teachers, Administrators, and Community Members about Returning to a Neighborhood School Structure
  This study investigated the perceptions of selected stakeholders about the impact of returning to a district-wide neighborhood school structure after having been under a federal desegregation mandate (involving busing) since the 1970s. It focuses on data from interviews with African American and white elementary school teachers.
• Planning for school change: School-community collaboration in a full service elementary school.
  Presents a qualitative study of a planning year for a full-service elementary school, with a focus on conflicts and tensions arising from the school-community cooperation.
• Predicting parental involvement in children’s schooling within an economically disadvantaged African American sample.
  Predictors of parental school involvement were examined within a sample of 159 economically disadvantaged, African American parents living in an urban setting. School involvement was defined in terms of parent activity within the school.
• Preparing Science Teachers for Diversity through Service Learning
  Discusses challenges teachers face with learners from different backgrounds. Presents service learning as an alternative framework for teacher education with the potential for engaging teachers in an active construction of knowledge and development of connections between community and multicultural teaching practices.
• Preparing Teachers To Support American Indian and Alaska Native Student Success and Cultural Heritage. ERIC Digest
  This digest briefly summarizes the literature on preparing educators to promote the success of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students. Success in Native terms means not only academic achievement but also the development of the whole person.
• Proceedings of the Annual Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education (21st, DeKalb, Illinois, October 9-11, 2002)
  This document contains 41 papers and 11 poster session presentations from a conference on research-to-practice in adult, continuing, and community education.
• Promoting Multicultural Understanding and Positive Self-Concept through a Distance Learning Community: Cultural Connections
  Explores the effectiveness of distance learning and multimedia technologies in facilitating an expanded learning community between geographically separated elementary and secondary schools with Hispanic students in Texas. Highlights include the Cultural Connections program; teacher collaboration; curricular activities; identity-forming multicultural activities; interactive videoconferencing; multicultural understanding; and students' positive self-concept.
• Reasons for and Solutions to Lack of Parent Involvement of Parents of Second Language Learners
  Noting that one of the most challenging tasks educators face in improving parent involvement, particularly among parents of English as a Second Language (ESL) students, this paper describes categories of parent involvement, examines several barriers to parent involvement, and offers suggestions for improving parent involvement.
• Recognizing and responding to cultural differences in the education of culturally and linguistically diverse learners
  Describes a variety of ways that culture influences teacher-student and teacher-parent interactions and provides recommendations to help educators respond to the educational needs of CLD students with and without disabilities.
• Reflections on Theory and Practice in Parent Involvement from a Phenomenological Perspective
  A phenomenological study of a 26-member involved-parent culture unearthed a conception: involved parents participate in their own and other children's lives both inside and outside schools. The portrait of an involved parent is more multicultural (and multifaceted) than commonly portrayed.
• Response to Rosa Hernandez Sheets' Review of "Race and Culture."
  Responds to an essay that examined the role of whites in multicultural education, reviewed three books, and discussed the role of racial/cultural identity in teaching and learning. Notes that the essay is sometimes at odds with facts found in one of the books it reviews, suggesting that the essay helps perpetuate the inadequacy of white teachers teaching diverse students.
• Safe Passage: How Philanthropy Is Working Together to Help All of America's Youth Connect by Age 25
  Released in July 2006, Safe Passage is the latest publication of the Youth Transition Funders Group (YTFG), a consortium of major philanthropic foundations dedicated to strategic collaboration to address issues of juvenile justice, foster care system reform, and out-of-school/struggling youth. The publication provides examples of solutions implemented across the country that have proven outcomes for youth.
• School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators, and improving schools
  Examines how teachers and administrators can prepare themselves to create positive relationships and productive partnerships with families and communities.
• Schools in Estonia as Institutional Actors and as a Field of Socialisation
  This paper provides a theoretical overview of education as an institution and as a field of socialization. It analyzes the relationships among multicultural education, integration, and civic society.
• Schools on move: Stories of Urban Schools Engaged in Inclusive Journeys of Change(JC Nalle Elementary School in Washington, DC).
  This story depicts a school in the midst of exciting changes and renewal. Through the voices of parents, students, teachers, and administrators, this School on the Move is making fundamental and enduring changes in the work of schools and in the results that such changes make in the lives of children and youth.
• Site-level predictors of children’s school and social competence in the Chicago Child–Parent Centers.
  Examined the influence of individual and site-level factors from the Chicago Child–Parent Centers (CPC) early educational program on four competence outcomes for 1539 minority youth in the Chicago Longitudinal Study.
• Social and Emotional Distress among American Indian and Alaska Native Students: Research Findings. ERIC Digest
  Many American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth are repeatedly exposed to opportunities to participate in self-destructive and illegal behaviors. This digest examines risk factors associated with four contexts: peers, family, school, and community.
• Suburban Bigotry: A Descent into Racism & Struggle for Redemption
  One New Jersey school district responded to racism and educational bias by implementing prejudice reduction initiatives. The community had been all white until the mid-1990s, when it became one-third minority.
• Support for children with developmental disabilities in inclusion classrooms through self-management.
  Implementation of self-management resulted in high levels of appropriate performance of schoolwork activities, negligible levels of disruptive behavior and elimination of time spent in time-out.
• Teacher Attitudes to, and Beliefs about, Multicultural Education: Have There Been Changes over the Last Twenty Years?
  This study compared Australian teachers' attitudes toward multicultural education in 2000 with their attitudes in 1979, focusing on: fostering community language maintenance, fostering cultural identity and prestige maintenance, and fostering the benefits of multiculturalism within the community. Participating schools included: those which had been multicultural before the advent of official multicultural policy documents in the late 1970s and continued to be so over the study period; schools that were monocultural during the 20 years; and schools that were transitional during that period.
• Teachers Leading Teachers: Enhancing Multicultural Education through Field-based Partnerships
  Argues that partnerships between early childhood teacher preparation programs and public school teachers will strengthen the discourse on multicultural education and its institutionalization. Presents strategies for gaining a personal connection to multicultural education ideals, including developing cultural biographies, examining stereotypes and prejudices, examining the construction of a personal identity, and critically examining the media.
• Teaching and Learning with the Seventh Generation: The "Inward Bound" Experience
  Pre-health freshmen from a New York university worked at a traditional Mohawk community in return for lessons in Iroquois spirituality, healing, and ecology. Reciprocity between community members and students alleviated problems related to appropriation of Native American traditions and "great white hope" philanthropy, and deepened students' recognition of compassion and understanding of healing.
• The Counselor as a Member of a Culturally Proficient School Leadership Team
  The paradigm presented in this chapter is predicated on certain assumptions about the future of schools and schooling as well as the role of the school counselor. These assumptions include: the cultural and demographic profile of school counselors will continue to be different from students; the counselor will have an ever-present role on school leadership teams; although the traditional high school will continue, alternative programs will proliferate; and the counselor will have career, personal, and civic functions, and the cultural proficiency model will be inextricably linked with these functions.
• The Effects of Modified School Calendars on Student Achievement and on School and Community Attitudes
  This review synthesizes studies of the effects of modifying the academic calendar in Grades K-12 to do away with the long summer break while not increasing the length of the school year. The synthesis indicated that the quality of evidence on modified calendars is poor.
• The Pacific Islands Project: Promoting Social Tolerance and Cohesion through Education. Report 1: Stakeholders' Assessment. Report 2: Operational Assessment. Report 3: An Educational Framework for the Promotion of Social Cohesion and Democratic Participation in Schools
  A project sought to develop a general operational framework for the design of a school-based citizenship education agenda tailored to the specific social and cultural environment of Pacific Island nations. In particular, the project addressed how educational systems in these multicultural societies can forge national identities while promoting social tolerance and understanding, supporting community participation, and strengthening democratic processes.
• The rewards of parent participation.
  Focuses on the benefits of parental involvement in the School Development Program; identifies factors that intimidate undereducated and parents from low-SES communities.
• The Use and Role of Multiethnic Children's Literature in Family Literacy Programs: Realities and Possibilities
  Reviews the recent professional literature on family literacy programs, with a focus on the use and role of children's literature, specifically multiethnic texts, within those programs. Describes children's literature in family literacy and discusses the role of multiethnic literature in family literature.
• Tibetans and Tibetan Americans: Helping K-8 School Librarians and Educators Understand Their History, Culture, and Literature
  Provides a review and listing of literature for K-8 school librarians and teachers that focuses on the geography, history, and culture of Tibet and the diverse experiences and folklore of Tibetans. Includes references, other recommended works, and an annotated bibliography divided into folklore, biography, culture and history, fiction, videos, and Web sites of interest.
• Time use flows from school culture.
  School leaders must learn to read the culture and focus staff development on cultural issues affecting how people use time. This paper discusses cultures that nurture and wound and describes how to shape more nurturing cultures.
• Urban school reform from a student- of-color perspective.
  This article looks at one school community’s efforts to fundamentally alter the structure, curriculum and instructional practices in ways that would help to provide greater educational opportunities for all students.
• Urban Teacher's Views on areas of need for k-12/university collaboration.
  Examined urban teacher's and site administrator's attitudes about problems and needs in culturally and linguistically diverse urban classrooms, investigating teacher's beliefs about the most pressing needs for school-university collaborations in education. Using data from teacher surveys, representative from the university and school district worked to develop a community education partnership that addressed the listed needs.
• Voices of parents and teachers in a poor white urban school.
  This case study consists of interviews with teachers and parents about school/family relations in an all white urban school. Themes of separation between home and school, the function of parent volunteers, structural barriers to more family involvement, friendship between teachers and parents, service to the school, teacher attitudes about parents, and parent attitudes about teachers are explored.
• What High School Students Think about Their Families Being Involved in School?
  Schools are changing the way they understand and think about family involvement. The changes they are making help to develop relationships with families and other community members that benefit both the school and the community.
• What we mean by "family and community connections with schools"?
  When some people think of family involvement, they think of parents volunteering in their child?s classroom and attending parent-teacher conferences.Family School Linkages Project: Building Better Relationships between School Personnel & the Families of their Students Research Brief November 2002 from the National Center for Family & Community Connections with Schools.
  Download the document here .
• When theory hits reality: Standards-based reform in urban districts.
  This book presents a review of findings from a study of the Pew Charitable Trusts' four-year grants to seven urban school districts to support standards-based reform.