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Thomas J. Capretta, Jingyang (Max) Zhang, Eric M. Anderman, and Barbara J. Boone revisit Joyce Epstein's 1995 Kappan article on overlapping spheres of influence and family-school partnerships. They highlight one idea from the article that has been largely overlooked -- the role of student voice and leadership. To refocus researchers' and practitioners' attention to the role of students in family and community partnership, they synthesize existing research to elaborate on Epstein's original models and ideas. They provide three levels of research-based, practical recommendations for districts and schools to elevate student roles and cultivate student leadership in family-school engagement efforts. Finally, they illustrate what these practices look like in schools using an Ohio school district as an example.

Historical and contemporary factors have disenfranchised and destabilized certain school communities (specifically communities of color). Education leaders can be more inclusive and address the persistent impacts of these broader trends by embracing a community-focused approach to leadership. Darrius A. Stanley, Dan Brogan, and Emily Colton borrow from contemporary research which suggests that educational leaders can help bridge the gaps between schools and historically disenfranchised communities through community-engaged leadership. They offer a research-based, conceptual argument and practical approach to building and sustaining community inclusive schools through listening, engaging, advocating, and partnering.

The Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center (OhSFEC) is implementing a comprehensive, scalable approach to enact state policy for family and school engagement at local levels. Joyce Epstein and Barbara Boone report how OhSFEC's research-based design, implementation, and evaluation of a leadership ladder has enabled state leaders to support regional, district, and school leaders as they organize and implement family engagement programs linked to schoolwide goals for student learning and development. Initial evaluation of the program shows that the policies and practices are being applied in schools, and families are seeing improvement in their interactions with schools.

Researchers Martha Abele Mac Iver, Joyce Epstein, and Steven Sheldon summarize the outcomes of their four-year partnership with an urban district aimed at improving the ways schools engage families during the critical transition to high school. They describe how schools put into practice the strategies learned in ongoing professional development, how family engagement practices changed, and what effects those changes had on students. Particular strategies include the use of an online parent portal and interactive homework assignments about the transition to high school.

Middle school teacher Michael Yell and education professor Geoffrey Scheurman discuss a decades-long partnership of ongoing professional development opportunities that involve teachers, university faculty, and teacher candidates working together to create personalized, meaningful, and sustained initiatives that enhance the growth and skills of all those involved. The resulting professional laboratory includes classroom collaborations, preservice teachers shadowing students, school/university exchanges, and the ability to take advantage of learning opportunities that arise organically. The results are reciprocal, inexpensive, ongoing, administrator-approved, and self-directed professional development experiences any teacher-professor duo can consider as they build their own laboratory.

Principal leadership is a crucial element in high-performing schools. Research reveals that principals are second only to teachers in impacting student achievement at school. Accordingly, how school leaders are prepared has received increasing attention in recent years. Drawing from the findings of recent reports highlighting exemplary programs and best practices, authors Bonnie C. Fusarelli and Lance D. Fusarelli identify several research-based best practices for improving principal preparation. They include recommendations to scale up best practices nationwide.

The University of Rochester and East High School in Rochester, New York, entered into a partnership in 2015, hoping to transform the school to prevent shut down by the state. Both partners were wary because of the district's failed attempts at reform and the history of similar partnerships elsewhere. A new state-level reform option allowed the partners to form an educational partnership organization (EPO) so that they could become equal partners with some autonomy from the district. The partners decided that to succeed, they would need to involve the community. They learned from listening sessions that the community wanted the school to remain open but also wanted everything about it to change. So, instead of taking an incremental approach, they chose to transform the school's structures, culture, leadership model, and curriculum and instruction. Valerie L. Marsh, Shaun C. Nelms, Sarah Peyre, and Joanne Larson describe how the university and the school worked together to transform East on all these fronts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the long-standing problem of teacher attrition. Some teachers have reported that they have considered leaving the profession because of a lack of advancement opportunities. Jennifer Wu-Pope explains how research-practice partnerships can play a role in retaining these teachers while leveraging their expertise in educational improvement efforts. Participation in research-practice partnerships could be offered as a professional advancement track option for teachers. Providing that option as a hybrid position in which teachers remain in the classroom for part of their day while using the rest of their time for research can be one way to address dissatisfaction among high-performing teachers.

Out-of-school programs can offer personalized and meaningful learning experiences that deepen students' knowledge and cater to their passions and interests, but it has been a painful reality that many such programs have been available only to students and families with privilege and resources. Karen Hammerness, Anna MacPherson, Preeti Gupta, Tramia Jackson, and Rachel Chaffee describe how the Science Research Mentoring Consortium in New York City gives students from underserved communities opportunities to engage in STEM activities alongside researchers at sites throughout the city. Students with a strong interest in and aptitude for science take classes after school or on weekends and conduct their own research with the support of mentors. The authors share the principles that undergird the program and that can be applied to similar mentoring partnership programs in other disciplines.

Amaya Garcia of New America talks with Kappan about grow-your-own programs, in which school districts partner with teacher preparation programs to recruit and prepare community members, often current students or school staff, to teach in local schools. A recent 50-state scan shows that there is a great deal of variety in how these programs are designed and implemented, and data on the effectiveness of these programs to address teacher shortages is still emerging. Garcia discusses some specific programs that appear especially promising.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners aimed at educational improvement and transformation through engagement with research. Yet RPPs can be challenging to implement, and even long running RPPs experience bumps in their work together. Caitlin Farrell, Laura Wentworth, and Michelle Nayfack discuss what conditions helped school district leaders and researchers from the partnership between Stanford University and San Francisco Unified School District be more or less successful in influencing school district policies and practices, and they share recommendations on how to develop or support conditions for successful partnerships.

Although researchers have done effective work at describing the inequities that plague schools, they have been less successful at making headway in addressing them, largely because their work remains disconnected from the schools that have to try to use the research. Through research-practice partnerships, researchers are able to stay in touch with the educators on the ground, craft research questions with their actual problems in mind, and help them take action in response to the research. Daniel Potter, Erin Baumgartner, and Ruth N. López Turley describe how, through the Houston Education Research Consortium, researchers from Rice University launched an equity project to uncover inequities within Houston-area schools and track their progress in addressing them. And, because of the ongoing relationship, they were able to launch a research project looking into how the COVID-19 pandemic affected students and produce results while schools where they were still relevant.

State education agencies play critically important roles in promoting research use in education. They influence policy design and implementation, collect data about schools and districts, and can use their statewide reach to advance research use within the state agency and in districts. As Carrie Conaway explains, the states that have done the most to advance research use for systems improvement have built research infrastructures, used both existing research and local data to spur improvement, and formed close partnerships with researchers.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) provide opportunities for researchers to support school districts in addressing the complex challenges they face. Cynthia E. Coburn, William R. Penuel, and Caitlin C. Farrell situate RPPs in the history of educational research and discuss the needs they were designed to address. They then describe what contemporary RPPs are and what they do and close by discussing ways that RPPs can contribute to educational improvement and transformation.

In the past decade, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have grown in number and reputation. Stephanie Brown and Annie Allen describe the varied ways partnerships facilitate more sustained and productive relationships between researchers and practitioners. They share key findings from a comparative case study of three different types of RPPs focused on mathematics instructional improvement conducted by the National Center for Research in Policy and Practice (NCRPP) and make recommendations for how partnerships can build more authentic bridges between research and practice.

It is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic will have a devastating effect on students in need. Barnett Berry calls for greater cross-sector collaboration among schools, universities, nonprofits, and other organizations that serve children to help meet the needs that already exist and that will arise as the pandemic continues. He describes the work of ALL4SC at the University of South Carolina, which leverages the university's resources to support children and teachers.

Education policy makers often encourage public schools to form partnerships with community organizations, businesses, and higher education institutions. In theory, such partnerships can help struggling schools gain resources that they are unable to acquire through local, state, and federal funding mechanisms. However, as Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell explains, the schools with the greatest need are not the most likely ones to form partnerships. The likelihood of forming partnerships tends to be linked not with the intensity of a school's needs but, rather, with the strength of the school's existing social network -- which tends to favor schools that already have more advantages. Schools have greater success forming partnerships if they already have established partnerships, if they have close connections to potential partners, if there's limited competition for partners, and if they are part of a dense network where it is easy to find connections to potential partners.

The isolation that has historically plagued the teaching profession has particularly harmful effects on novice teachers who need the guidance, wisdom, and encouragement of other educators. In recent years, however, social media tools have helped many teachers connect with colleagues and build robust professional learning networks (PLNs) beyond their schools and districts. In this article, the authors describe their experiences using Twitter with preservice teachers to jump-start their PLN development. Through Twitter, preservice teachers interact with program alumni and in-service educators, and the teacher education program is able to build a stronger connection with their partners in the field.

Social workers in schools provide benefits not just for struggling students, but for the entire school community. But, the authors argue, school social workers are often relegated to monitoring IEPs and doing basic casework. By using skills and values that have long been fundamental to social work practice, school social workers can advocate for, develop, and assume leadership in providing services that bring together the school, the family, and the community to meet students' needs.

Communities around the country are converging on a new approach to raising achievement for low-income children. This approach draws on two reform movements: (1) full-service community schools that provide wraparound health and social services to children and families, and (2) Prenatal through Grade 3 initiatives to improve quality, alignment, and coordination across early childhood and early elementary education. Examples in Cincinnati, Omaha, and Multnomah County demonstrate how communities can develop effective, results-oriented partnerships among elementary schools, community-based preschools, and other early childhood organizations.

Moving from a traditional school district to one that embraces a community schools model requires fundamental shifts in organizational structure and practices. Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation in southern Indiana and Vancouver Public Schools in Vancouver, Wash., are two districts that have navigated this change. Leaders from those districts describe their efforts to learn from data, build community support and staff buy in, leverage assets, build infrastructure, develop policies and procedures, and plan for sustaining their initiative.

Asheville City Schools and Buncombe County Schools in Asheville, N.C., have partnered with the United Way of Asheville and Buncombe County to develop strategies for responding to the emotional and mental health needs of middle school students in those districts. More than 40 community partners have joined their efforts, which include a focus on resilience and mindfulness.

To build and maintain a genuine partnership between the school and those it serves requires sophisticated leadership. Leaders can develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to create effective community schools, and they should do so purposefully, choosing to learn, model, and practice successful strategies in all aspects of their work. Such leadership is valuable in every kind of school, not just in those that fully embrace the community school approach.

School districts experience considerable pressure to continuously improve, and the pursuit of improvement typically leads to the adoption of new -- and purportedly more effective -- initiatives. Often districts engage consultants to help navigate the selection and implementation of an initiative, and while these partnerships can prove fruitful, they present a set of challenges that are often underestimated by districts. Districts can increase the likelihood of an initiative's effectiveness by asking a few key questions before embarking (or not) on the initiative. In particular, districts need to attend to issues of coherence, capacity, and commitment.

What does it take to sustain a productive partnership between a public school system and local cultural institutions? This article describes the genesis, evolution, and continued success of a long-term partnership between the New York City Department of Education, the American Museum of Natural History, and seven other leading cultural institutions, promoting inquiry-based science instruction in local middle schools.

The Mitchell Scarlett Teaching and Learning Collaborative (MSTLC) is a vigorous, six-year-old partnership between two Title I schools--Mitchell Elementary School and Scarlett Middle School in Ann Arbor, Mich.--and the teacher education program at the University of Michigan. MSTLC was formed between educators who had related but quite different problems to solve: As the schools began to collaborate in 2010, the Ann Arbor Public Schools needed to address the achievement gap in its two lowest SES and lowest-achieving schools relative to other district schools, and the University of Michigan needed a school site where teaching interns could learn to teach diverse students and where it could implement and refine its newly reformed, practice-based elementary teacher education curriculum.

The shift from the No Child Left Behind Act to the recently authorized Every Student Succeeds Act could beckon a renaissance of K-12 arts education in the U.S. Over the past decade, NCLB's increased emphasis on accountability testing in core subjects has coincided with a notable decline in school-based arts exposure. Recognizing this trend and anticipating its consequences, many school districts and arts education advocacy organizations have been tackling this challenge through innovative, community-based partnerships that leverage existing arts education resources, bringing local arts organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and philanthropic efforts together to provide enriching opportunities for students in high-need schools. These partnerships provide models that schools, districts, and states could adopt to strengthen their arts programs.

In June 2016, the Mastery Collaborative completed its first year as an official program, working with more than 40 public middle and high schools across the five boroughs of New York City to improve, document, and advocate for mastery-based teaching and learning. The collaborative has eight Living Lab schools that practice schoolwide mastery; most Mastery Collaborative schools are Active Members, who may be earlier on in the progression toward schoolwide mastery. In this article, teachers and students share their experiences with mastery learning, and the Collaborative offers several insights to schools interested in implementing the approach.

District leaders often feel that working with researchers is not mutually beneficial. Researchers do not provide enough practical guidance, and they are often unable to present their findings in time to inform district decision making. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a potential new strategy for addressing these challenges. RPPs are long-term, mutual collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving district outcomes. By focusing on real-time district challenges, RPPs can lead to research that is informative, timely, and relevant to district stakeholders.

Educators are realizing that individuals working in isolation can't adequately address the teaching and learning problems that face us today. Collective action networks are needed. Sharing networks use collective energy to support individual action and agency, whereas execution networks typically address complex problems that require sustained collective action to resolve. One kind of execution network--networked improvement communities (NIC)--can be of great value to educators as they tackle complex problems of practice. The story of the formation of the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTEP) illustrates how catalyzing an NIC is different from forming a sharing community and why a formal infrastructure is required for sustained collective action.

Teaching Residents at Teachers College (TR@TC) is an 18-month program that prepares teachers for high-needs schools in New York City in two areas: teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and teaching students with disabilities. Student teachers, called residents, spend a year working with a mentor teacher. Mentors play three roles: teacher, field-based teacher educator, and learner. With the program entering its sixth year, there are several lessons learned. Mentors need guidance on how to teach adults, general education teachers have an important role to play, it's crucial to identify partnership schools, and positioning mentors as experts enriches the program as a whole.

For years, researchers have been working in school districts conducting studies that produce findings. Because educational research and the practice of education are centered in very different institutions with different expectations, incentives, and cultures, the connections have been tenuous at best. Meanwhile, there is increasing demand for data-based decision making--careful analysis of information on what works and what doesn't. A shift toward using systematic research to guide practice requires new kinds of connections between the institutions in which researchers and practitioners work. It means creating new partnerships, new capacities within these institutions, and a new, shared culture. This article shares a decade of experience doing just that. The two institutions are the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and the San Francisco Unified School District.

Teaching is complex; teachers and school leaders crave more meaningful collaborative experiences to make sense of that complexity. However, the structural, cultural, and historical factors involved with schooling impede the extent to which teachers can collaborate. Teachers spend five to six periods of the day teaching classes, largely working in isolation from each other; their remaining time is spent tending to administrative tasks, answering emails, or grading. For schools to work around the persistent structural constraints to establish a sincere and thoughtful collaborative culture they must approach collaboration differently. Collaborative cultures emerge from authentic and relevant problem solving. Teachers will see collaboration as an integral feature of their work when the problems they are asked to solve are specific to their practice, are common to a majority of teachers in a particular school, and when solving the problem demands they collaborate with colleagues.

A vision statement and call to action from Deans for Impact--a group of deans committing themselves to a set of principles intended to elevate the performance of educator preparation programs and the status of teachers. Their objectives include: Develop a consensus around a professional knowledge base for teachers; create a tighter connection between K-12 systems and schools of education; require states to make data available to programs and the public about teachers prepared by each institution; aim the research lens inward to evaluate and identify the most effective elements teacher education; rethink structures and incentives in higher education institutions to create entities that are more nimble and receptive to change; and develop a strong professional network for schools of education leaders that connects them to peers and helps them lead change within their institutions.

The University of South Florida has designed and initiated a two-year teacher residency program that intends to meld classroom preservice teacher instruction with work in classrooms with children from low-income and urban backgrounds. The Urban Teacher Residency Partnership Program is a joint effort between the University of South Florida and Hillsborough County Public Schools. Six elementary schools are part of the program. Clinical preparation is central to the program. So is collaboration between USF faculty and the Hillsborough school district. The author calls for more study and research into the residency model for preparing preservice teachers.

Four New Jersey school districts worked together to increase student achievement by applying a number of strategies focused on getting traditionally underrepresented students to take more AP courses. The districts are members of the New Jersey Network of Superintendents (NJNS), comprising 15 superintendents who work together to develop systemwide approaches to educational equity. Contrary to some parents' expectations, placing more students into AP courses did not result in their being watered down nor in test score declines overall. All four districts reported success in increasing access without significantly affecting average scores. Nonetheless, challenges persist, including ensuring access to AP classes is and continues to be equitable.

The Swiss model of high school matches students with career employment, jobs, and education. The system offers lessons to how the U.S. might create partnerships between business and education and also make high school more interesting and engaging for students.

Community schools have a long history of helping students succeed in school by addressing the problems they face outside of school. But without specific data on students and the full range of their needs, community schools cannot be as effective as they would like to be. Driven by the desire to make more data-informed decisions, the Children's Aid Society worked with City Connects, a program based at Boston College's Lynch School of Education, to gather data, assess it, and develop more creative ways to meet the full range of children's and their families' needs.

The author outlines the many ways in which schools may partner with businesses, higher education institutions, and nonprofits to provide students with training, jobs, and enrichment that that otherwise would not receive. The author speaks from her experience as founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy and years of working to effectuate school-community partnerships.

Expectations for parent involvement in their children's education have risen dramatically over the last 20 years. The demands now placed on parents to evaluate and select educational options for their children, to act as advocates for their children, and to support increasingly demanding academic standards have never been greater. Strong partnerships between home and school can increase opportunities for students. Understanding the nature of these significant changes and how parents may be affected by them is a critical first step.

As society expects children and youth today to explore content-area topics in depth and to develop critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills, out-of-school settings are becoming increasingly important to individual learning. These settings, which include libraries, museums, digital media, and after-school programs, are evolving into extended classrooms. In this context, it is no longer appropriate or fruitful for educators to focus family engagement solely on what happens in school; educators must reimagine this concept within the many opportunities now available for anywhere, anytime learning.

Culturally responsive parent-school relationships require educators to consider the cultural practices and understandings of families as a necessary condition of greater academic achievement. The establishment of healthy parent-school relationships is a complex and dynamic process. A school-community overlap, with a priority given to community sensibilities and histories, will help schools sustain positive relationships with parents. If communities have experienced racism or other forms of marginalization, they may become distant or uncooperative. What's more, most educators feel they were hired to teach, not to perform community outreach. But in the absence of school outreach to their communities the strengthened relationships between schools and parents that increase the educational opportunities for children are often lost.

Today's classrooms emphasize helping students learn not just for the sake of learning but to become prepared to join the workforce. While teachers across the U.S. know students must be ready for college and career, many may not be sure exactly which skills, competencies, and lessons they need to teach to prepare and animate students for the world of work. Meanwhile, employers look to schools to nurture and empower savvy job candidates of the future--young adults prepared with the skills and critical dispositions necessary for the jobs they have to offer. So how do we bridge this gap? Lesson2Life is a professional development partnership between the Arizona K12 Center at Northern Arizona University, Arizona Public Service, and local businesses and chambers of commerce throughout the state. It is designed to be an exemplar program that gives teachers real-world insight into today's workforce. They can then give their students the skills and information necessary to be successful when they seek careers of their own.

The author is a middle school principal who has spent a decade working on improving literacy among his largely socio-economically disadvantaged student body. Experience and research have shown, the author says, that a successful effort to bridge the literacy gap between children who live in poverty and middle-class students requires a concerted effort by multiple school agencies, nonprofits, foundations, and others to provide the academic support and extracurricular opportunities they need but otherwise won't get.

Effective family-school collaboration is essential for promoting students' success at school, but collaborative relationships must be proactively developed and intentionally nurtured. These relationships are particularly critical when children are struggling behaviorally or emotionally. Strategies for building effective relationships are reviewed.

Building effective school community partnerships requires recognition of barriers along with time and commitment from both the school district and community agencies to overcome those barriers. It may seem overwhelming to fully address each of the challenges while attempting to implement each element of effective school partnerships all at once, but it is necessary to ensure that the partnership is truly collaborative, effective, and improves mental health outcomes for children and youth.

Scholarship that moves from research into practice shares characteristics that make it visible to teachers, friendly to their worldview, practicable for realities of K-12 schools, and easily sharable. That doesn't mean however, that it's good or effective. Connecting research and practice is important work, if only because it has the potential to improve outcomes for students. For too long educators have allowed themselves to believe that connecting research and practice is unrealizable. Too many decisions in K-12 education are informed by instinct and anecdote, and the results of those decisions are often highly problematic. But there is a less obvious payoff that would have more far-reaching consequences, and that is a common sense of purpose among key stakeholders. It is not impossible to imagine a world in which unions, state and federal offices, schools of education, districts, school administrators, and classroom teachers engage in genuine partnership for the sake of advancing a shared aim. Though such common ground has been elusive, connecting research with practice is a uniquely alluring opportunity. It may not promise quick fixes or easy solutions, but it does promise an agenda for collectively moving forward, armed with knowledge.

This article opens with a thought provoking question--When it comes to defining teacher leadership, how much do we limit ourselves by assuming that the way teachers work today must always be the way teachers work? The author points out that pioneering groups of public school teachers across the United States are advancing a new definition of teacher leadership: "teacher partnerships." As such, they are securing autonomy to collectively make decisions that influence their whole school's success. Educators and advocates have created and embraced professional learning communities (PLCs), hybrid roles, and teacher-led professional development. In some places, teachers can individually become curriculum specialists or project and team leaders. Teachers can even pursue a teacher leader certification to qualify them for such roles. These are excellent teacher leadership opportunities. The very existence of schools where teachers call the shots, and the ways in which teachers are using this opportunity, signal that we can consciously move past our assumptions about the limitations of teachers' working arrangements.

A public, Catholic, and charter school in Boston all work together to share their strengths and learn from each other in an effort to deliver the best education for all of their students. The arrangement is called the School Performance Partnership, and it is a grantee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Committed to being a charter school with a professional learning community that empowers teachers, New Mexico's South Valley Academy (SVA) staff transformed its state evaluation process into a practitioner action research process (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007). While teachers self-diagnose growth needs and play active roles in improving their own practice, SVA's new model holds teachers accountable for addressing student performance challenges and requires classroom-generated data for measuring student learning as a result of teaching practices. Using artifacts as evidence collected by teachers and an action-research timeline built into the school calendar that allows for collaboration and feedback, the rigorous evaluation process both nurtures and measures teaching effectiveness. New Mexico requires teachers to submit annual professional development plans (PDPs) that include improvement objectives, action steps, and measures of desired results. This article describes how to develop a PDF rubric, the necessary skills needed to develop a manageable and relevant PDP, the steps needed to build a culture of feedback and improvement, and the effect of the PDP model on staff culture.