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 year’s annual report focuses on the school’s strong sense of community and the collective agency of educators, students, families, and UCLA partners in response to the pandemic and Spring 2020 school closure. Alongside our annual demographics and dashboard indicators, we share a set of core practice narratives that bring to life the power of community to support the well-being and education of its members.
Mann UCLA Community School is a university-assisted neighborhood public school within the Los Angeles Unified School District. In 2016, UCLA partnered with Horace Mann Middle School to help reimagine the school as a K-12 community school, building on the strengths of the community as well as the success of the Robert F. Kennedy UCLA Community School in Pico Union/Koreatown. To share our story and progress during the high school’s third year, this annual report focuses on preparing students to be active and critical participants in society.
This report highlights how support for student agency at the UCLA Community School was distributed across district policy, school organization, instructional practices, stakeholder collaborations, attention to student identity development, and connections to the broader school community.
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).
In this brief, we discuss the value of play, highlight playful learning approaches at the UCLA Community School, and introduce organizations that advocate for play-based learning policies. We also provide suggestions and further reading for teachers and families.
