Community Schools, Democracy, and Second Chances

At the UCLA Center for Community Schooling, our work begins with a simple belief: public schools matter—not just as places where learning happens, but as institutions that shape democracy, opportunity, and belonging. In a recently published chapter, co-authored by our colleagues Jorge Ruiz de Velasco and Milbrey McLaughlin at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University, we examined the evolving role of community schools alongside public alternative schools. Often overlooked, these schools serve young people who have been pushed to the margins of traditional schooling.

Below, co-authors Karen Hunter Quartz and Marisa Saunders reflect on the core ideas lifted in the article. In conversation, they explore what community schooling offers, how alternative schools fit into the picture, and why steady, democratic reform matters now more than ever.

This chapter is featured in 2nd edition of the AERA Handbook of Education Policy Research. The full chapter is available here.

Karen: If we’re talking about community schools, the place to start is with purpose. Community schooling isn’t just a strategy—it’s an idea about what public education is for.

Marisa: Exactly. Community schools are grounded in the belief that schools are social institutions, deeply embedded in their neighborhoods. They’re accountable not just for academic outcomes, but for supporting young people’s full development and strengthening the communities they serve.

Karen: That idea has a long history—from John Dewey’s vision of schools as social centers, through the Civil Rights era, to today’s organizing by families, educators, and students responding to school closures, privatization, and chronic underinvestment.

Marisa: It is also important to say what community schools are not. They’re not an escape from public education or a workaround for systemic problems. They’re an effort to strengthen public schooling by centering shared responsibility, local voice, and democratic participation.

Karen: That matters because, over the past few decades, the dominant story about “alternatives” in education has shifted. Alternatives have increasingly been framed as choices in a marketplace—exit options for individual families.

Marisa: Community schools challenge that framing. They insist that public education is a common good, not a consumer good—and that schools should serve democracy, not markets.

Karen: In the article, we explore this idea by pairing community schools with another set of institutions that receive far less attention: second-chance alternative schools serving over-aged, under-credited, system-involved, or otherwise marginalized youth.

Marisa: Historically, these schools emerged from very different assumptions. Unlike community schools, which grew out of bottom-up struggles for inclusion and control, second-chance schools were often created from the top down—to manage students who didn’t fit the rigid four-year, age-graded model of schooling.

Karen: Too often, that translated into lower expectations and fewer resources. In the worst cases, these schools became places of containment rather than opportunity.

Marisa: But one of our key arguments is that, over time, these two models have begun to converge in practice—especially as educators confront the real conditions shaping students’ lives.

Karen: That’s where a youth-sector perspective comes in. Learning doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s shaped by housing insecurity, health, trauma, immigration status, caregiving responsibilities, and access to meaningful opportunities.

Marisa: Community schools respond by integrating supports—health services, mental health care, expanded learning time, and family partnerships—rather than treating those needs as distractions from learning.

Karen: And many second-chance schools, at their best, do the same. They create flexible schedules, personalized pathways, strong relationships with adults, and connections to postsecondary education and work-based learning.

Marisa: This approach aligns closely with what we know from the science of learning and development. Research shows that relationships, belonging, and agency are not peripheral to learning—they’re foundational.

Karen: Which also means rethinking accountability. If learning is developmental and deeply contextual, then success can’t be reduced to a single test score or a fixed timeline to graduation.

Marisa: We argue for accountability that’s grounded in local knowledge and real outcomes: growth, persistence, meaningful transitions, and long-term opportunity.

Karen: That kind of accountability is democratic. It shifts power toward educators, families, students, and communities—the people closest to the work.

Marisa: But community schools aren’t automatically transformative. Without sustained investment, capacity-building, high expectations, and attention to power and equity, they can reproduce the same inequalities they aim to disrupt.

Karen: Which is why we end with a focus on what we call steady work.

Marisa: Not constant reform churn. Not the next shiny initiative. But long-term investment in educators, relationships, trust, and local capacity.

Karen: Community schooling is steady work. It’s slow, relational, and deeply human—and that’s precisely why it holds so much promise.

Marisa: At a time when education is increasingly treated as a private good, community schools remind us of another tradition: one where education is a shared project, democracy is learned through participation, and second chances are a collective responsibility.

Suggested Citation: Quartz, K. H., Ruiz de Velasco, J. Saunders, M., & McLaughlin M.W. (2026). Community and Alternative School Policies. In L. Cohen-Vogel, P. Youngs, & J. Scott (Eds.) Handbook of Education Policy Research, 2nd Edition. (pp. 483–500). American Educational Research Association.