A Review of the Emerging Community Schools Research and Evaluations

• In Event: Community Schools Research: Advancing Equity and Collaboration Through a Holistic Approach

Abstract

The community schools scholarship has significantly expanded over the past decade, drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to understand various aspects of the strategy, from the role families, communities, and youth play in community schools to ways to measure quality of community schools implementation in diverse contexts. This paper offers a state of the community schools scholarship through a typology of prevailing areas of inquiry, measuring frequency of methodologies, research topics, and common theoretical and practical applications.
The paper draws on nearly 300 resources, publications ranging from peer reviewed journal articles, white paper, and online tools, as submitted to a national community schools clearinghouse by scholars and practitioners from across the country. The publications are a part of a growing repository of scholarship within a national network launched four years ago to bridge community schools research and practice.
Through frequency analysis, this paper examines common research topics, questions, methodologies, and cross-cutting recommendations for further scholarship. Resources were marked for their publication type, research questions, methodology, sample size, context, alignment with community schools field standards, and connection to the community schools research agenda launched in 2020 through a national research-practice network. Once categorized, each section (e.g., publication type) was examined for frequency of diverse types of publications to gain a sense of mediums used to publish scholarship about community schools. Examination of research questions and findings offered themes and throughlines of areas that were most commonly examined, including prevailing theoretical frameworks that inform the research inquiries. Finally, methodological designs were examined to not only understand the balance of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method studies, but also to identify emerging methodological considerations, such as participatory action research.
The findings show that a majority of studies focus in the areas of partnerships, community and family engagement, collaborative leadership, organizing, and equity and social justice. The prevailing methodologies are qualitative, including literature reviews, and mixed methods. Research findings offer a deeper examination of community schools implementation in a place, the role of strategy in systems building, service coordination, and access to learning and developmental opportunities. The role of various actors within and outside of community schools are examined across the studies, lifting up the importance of interrogating voice, power, and accountability within the education system.
This paper illuminates the emerging trends in community schools research, key foci of inquiry, and posits areas for further exploration. The paper serves to draw attention to the common areas of scholarship that have emerged in the past decade and offers recommendations to deepen our collective knowledge of the community schools strategy.

Author

• Emily Cheng, Institute for Educational Leadership
  Presenting Author