The global pandemic has renewed public interest in the community schools approach, a century old reform movement that centers the school in the strengths and needs of local neighborhoods. This movement is often framed as an effort to provide wrap-around services such as health and after-school programs. Community schools also represent a radical rethinking of who has knowledge, how young people learn, and how teachers teach. To support this rethinking, we are launching a new multi-media, open access journal with four features: School Cases, Teacher Scholarship, Youth Research, and Policy ABCs.
This brief describes the policies, structures and practices that support UCLA Community School’s vision and commitment to collaborative decision-making as a core pillar of its approach to community schooling. We demonstrate how collaborative leadership serves to mediate the integration of programs and services in support of its students, families and community.
In this report, we study the experience of seven cohorts of students (n=597) from the UCLA Community School and track their pathways to and through college using four measures: (1) postsecondary plans, (2) immediate college enrollment, (3) college persistence (first to second year, and four-year pathways), (4) college completion (within six years). Overall, the school is preparing almost all graduates to enter college and college enrollment and initial persistence rates are higher than the national average.
This report provides practitioners and researchers with an interactive roadmap that documents how educators and researchers partnered to pilot and design a community-based self-assessment system composed of self-assessment instruments (i.e., tools, assessment measures) and classroom routines (i.e., instructional practices that promote self-assessment skills) across grade-levels (grades 2 – 12).
This month, we celebrate UCLA’s Centennial, our principals, and the launch of the UCLA Immigrant Family Legal Clinic. And as the school year wraps up next week, we are looking forward to another summer of extended learning and enrichment for our students. We highlight one program below, featured this month in Variety magazine.
This month, we highlight how our community schools support UCLA student learning–as teaching artists and as educational researchers. We are also excited to share one of the many community partnerships that inspire our students to dream big!
