Community Schools as Ecological Systems: A Theoretical Framework

• In Event: Community Schools: Collective Trust, Collective Action, and Collective Impact

Abstract

Objectives
Community schools are a popular school reform strategy but have a scant research base that lacks grounding in academic theory. This paper proposes a theoretical model for researching community schools using ecological systems theory with the intent of advancing the field of community schools research.

Theoretical Framework
We apply Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which depicts youth development as a function of four dimensions: person, process, context, and time (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). This model, like community schools, emphasizes interactions among the multiple environments in which youth are embedded. However, this model alone is not sufficient to understand the processes at work in community schools, and so we look to other frameworks. First, we incorporate the motivation literature to explain the connections between teacher and parent practices and youths’ motivation, engagement, and, ultimately, academic achievement (Gonzalez-DeHass, Willems, & Doan Holbein, 2005; Patrick, Kaplan, & Ryan, 2011; Patrick, Ryan, & Kaplan, 2007; Rosenfeld, Richman, & Bowen, 2000).We also look to the resilience literature, which explains the role of social support services at community schools in mediating stressors to improve proximal and distal outcomes (Armstrong, Birnie-Lefcovitch, & Ungar, 2005). Finally, we draw on social reproduction and stratification theories to explain how community school services can create promoting or inhibiting environments that interact with characteristics related to students’ race and class to create developmental competencies (Abrams & Taylor Gibbs, 2000; Garcìa Coll et al., 1996).

Methods
This theoretical work relies on a thorough scan of four literatures: community schools, motivation, resilience, and social reproduction. We integrate the research bases of the latter three areas into the emerging community schools literature base to propose a theoretical model specific to community schools.

Evidence
We draw on four years of conducting community schools research to inform this framework. With feedback from both the practitioners at our partner district and academic researchers, we have refined this model over the course of our partnerships to one that both audiences have found useful.

Conclusions
Joining ecological systems theory with motivation, resilience, and social reproduction theories provides a framework for understanding community schools, grounding the field in established theory. However, the data needed to assess community schools in the context of this framework are substantial, requiring individual-level program participation records from all service providers at community schools and qualitative data on program practices and integration of services to truly understand the process component of the theoretical model. Such a mixed-methods study may not be possible for schools to conduct internally, and the cost of contracting a private research firm could be prohibitive. University-community partnerships provide a potential way to overcome this barrier.

Scholarly Significance
This work makes an important contribution to the emerging field of community schools research. Providing a theoretical framework can facilitate the development of a robust body of literature to build the knowledge base on community schools. At a time when community school initiatives are proliferating, it is important to have a common framework to understand their work in a way that is true to the strategy.

Authors

• Sebastian Castrechini, Stanford University

• Rebecca A. London, Stanford University