Drawing on rich case studies of Baltimore City and Boston, this volume identifies policy factors and processes critical to the successful district-wide adoption of community schools. By applying the Multiple Streams Model (Kingdon) to comparative analysis of policy determination and the narratives of local stakeholders across a 16-year period, chapters illustrate the role of federal legislation, funding, and buy-in from coalitions, community leaders, and local advocates in ensuring policy adoption in Baltimore City. In contrast, Boston’s more limited reforms are explained in light of local challenges and hindering dynamics. Ultimately, the volume offers key recommendations for stakeholders to drive successful policy uptake in urban school districts. Offering a new analysis of policy for community schools, this volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers with an interest in school reform, as well as urban education.

This book offers a novel and up-to-date exploration of the common belief that increasing conventional school resources will increase academic achievement and help close gaps between various advantaged and disadvantaged students. Taking the scholarship around this question, such as James S. Coleman’s 1965 report on the Equality of Educational Opportunity, as a starting point, it brings in an extensive range of contemporary data sources and statistical analysis to offer an updated, robust, and considered review of the issue. Moving beyond these empirical questions, it also explores how these empirical findings have been utilized in “education adequacy” litigation, discussing the evolving law of adequacy cases, while explaining the challenges of introducing complex data and analyses within a litigation framework. Judges typically have little experience with the complexity of modern education data and the analyses required to draw sound inferences. It will thus be of interest to scholars, researchers, and faculty and jurists with expertise or interest in education policy, the economics and sociology of education, and public policy.

Working in a Survival School documents how global educational policies trickle down and influence school cultures and the lives of educators and educational leaders. The research traces the everyday work and experience of educators within an all-boys Catholic college suffering an unprecedented decline in enrolment numbers. In short, it was a school in ‘survival mode.’ Drawing on Dorothy Smith’s scholarship on Institutional Ethnography, the authors document how the school operated and how its efforts to survive influenced the daily work of educators.Institutional ethnography reveals the school as a bounded space subject to a variety of competing local and translocal forces that are historical, political and economic in nature. Exploring the discursive and material effects of policy on both the work and identities of educators, the authors illustrate how the everyday experience of being an educator is shaped by marketisation and how leaders engage in stratagems to promote the school as a vehicle of educational excellence and quality to lure clientele. Building on existing scholarship in educational policy studies and new public management, Working in a Survival School considers how the global marketisation of education systems is experienced in one school fighting to survive. This book is of interest to educators, school leaders and academics interested in policy enactment.

This book critically analyses how cultural and educational policies construct creativity through a range of concepts and compares this against the open and expansive idea of creativity as experienced by individuals in society more broadly. The book draws on empirical data, case-study examples, and ethnographic motifs to identify the discursive construction of creativity and the way in which discourses of creativity are enfolded into narratives of progress in cultural policy. Along with auto-ethnographical perspectives, chapters apply a rich conceptualisation of Foucault and Agamben’s work to contemporary questions and issues in education alongside recent policies and lived experiences from teachers. Exploring ideas of both fixed and expansive creativity, the volume argues that education policy and cultural policy are neoliberalised and that creativity is shaped in schools by regulative schooling systems, but ultimately identifies how individuals enact creative practices that subvert and disrupt neoliberal narratives and limited appropriations. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of education policy, creativity studies, and education politics. Those interested in arts education or in intersections between education and the writings of Foucault and Agamben more broadly will also find the book of value.

This volume centres the notion of "chance" in education as a key concept in contemporary education – relating to aspects like accountability, datafication, or international large-scale assessments – and discusses the impact that the historical desire to "tame" this notion has had on present-day educational policy and practice. Encouraging readers to widen their educational imagination, chapters combine secondary research from the fields of cybernetics, systems thinking, and comparative education with issues of control, prediction, and comparison as ways to tame chance in education. Using the theoretical lenses of reasoning, notions, and addendums for legitimacy to foster a critical awareness of rarely discussed educational matters, the book explores how these notions are central to the taming of chance within education. Ultimately, the authors determine the styles of reasoning that are foundational and frame how we think about, and act on, education, and thereby address one of the top priorities in educational policy, politics, and practice today. This timely book, with its unique perspective on the debates around education, will be of interest to students, researchers, and scholars in the fields of education policy and politics, international and comparative education, and theory of education. Those involved with the philosophy of education will also find the book valuable.

Originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, this expanded text provides new insights into the successful, sustained implementation of Full-Service Community Schools (FSCSs) in the United States. Reviewing the Success of Full-Service Community Schools in the US documents the experiences of students, teachers, and communities involved in the establishment and growth of FSCSs. By considering how successful this reform strategy has been in meeting the needs of underserved communities, the text illustrates the potential these schools have to transform students’ learning and outcomes. In particular, the studies illustrate the value these schools have in supporting low-income students and students of color. At the same time, by interrogating the defining pillars of FSCSs – expanded learning opportunities, integrated services, family and community engagement, and collaborative leadership – chapters identify challenges that if left unattended, could limit the transformative potential of this reform strategy. This groundbreaking text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, professionals, and policy makers in the fields of Educational Change and School Reform, Multicultural Education, Sociology of Education, Education Policy, and School Management and Administration.

Ferrara, Jacobson, and their colleagues illuminate how community schools become a comprehensive, place-based strategy that both supports high-quality teaching and learning and addresses out-of-school barriers to success.