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Evaluation of community-campus partnerships is a contested topic and, in many ways, is still at an early stage of development. With growing momentum behind community-university collaboration and increased pressure to document the positive impact of universities, there is a pressing need for research and innovation in this area. Many community engagement professionals are looking for new and creative approaches to evaluating partnership work -- approaches that capture the work's depth, complexity, and values and can be used to foster learning, community accountability, collaboration, and systems change. This article proposes six promising directions for research and practice related to evaluating campus-community partnerships. They emerged as themes from an interactive CUMU Community Engagement Evaluation Huddle session at the annual CUMU conference. Drawing on the collective knowledge of Huddle participants, we identified the following directions: (1) evaluating systemic racism; (2) community-driven evaluation; (3) community impact and benefit; (4) evaluating relationships; (5) alignment of stakeholders; and (6) blended approaches. We offer these directions, key questions, and examples from the field as a first step toward a field-wide agenda for advancing evaluation in a critical, participatory, community-based spirit. [Note: The issue number (4) shown in the citation on the PDF is incorrect. The correct issue number is 3.]

We share school leaders' perspectives on Zoom videos concerning the needs of immigrant and refugee families in Title I schools. In these videos, participants crafted and shared personal narratives about their leadership experiences during the COVID-19 era of education. Rooted in participatory design research methods, the process of designing these videos were both a research project and an intervention to assist families and school leaders to better understand each other. We present a close analysis of administrators' perspectives and describe how our codesigned video methodology enabled participants to coconstruct new meanings of school-community relationships during the pandemic through a radical care framework. We conceptualize these reimaginings as aperturas--cracks in the dominant family engagement paradigm that allow us to collectively work towards transformative ends which we term community-centered school leadership. We conclude the article with recommendations for how both school leadership and research can approach and reimagine family engagement post-pandemic.

Over the past 50 years, colleges and universities have taken on increasingly important roles as anchor institutions in U.S. cities, partnering with local communities to promote development and well-being. Such community-campus partnerships rely on the work of community engagement professionals (CEPs), staff tasked with administering, coordinating, supporting, and leading engagement efforts at institutions of higher education. The preliminary competency model for community engagement professionals (Dostilio et al., 2016) lays out the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and commitments needed to perform this work. However, place-based approaches to engagement have been underrepresented in the emerging literature. The authors contribute to this conversation with a case study of partnership management work at University Neighborhood Partners at the University of Utah. Through this case, we highlight key competencies for engaging in place-based community development, suggest additional competency areas for the model, and explore how an understanding of CEP competencies is enriched and complicated by staff positionality.

News media play a significant role in the education policy arena, informing the public about pressing issues and influencing how such issues are prioritized and understood. For this reason, researchers are increasingly raising concerns about how much attention news media give to education, which topics are covered, and how topics are addressed. In this article, the authors advance this growing body of research through a quantitative content analysis of the topics in national television news coverage of pre-K-12 (early childhood through high school) education in the United States over the past 35 years. The authors present their typology of education topics, providing a foundation for future research in this area, and analyze major trends. This article also serves as an introduction to a new data set: 2,322 abstracts, representing all substantial education news coverage from the three major evening news networks, included as an online appendix.

Commentators have observed a "discourse of derision" in news coverage of the US education system, but the contours of this discourse are not well understood. This article pairs quantitative content analysis with qualitative framing analysis to sharpen the conceptual and empirical focus of the discourse of derision as an object of study. We theorize four components of this discourse--tone, assessments of quality, teacher voice, and criticism of teachers--and analyze them in a representative sample (n = 602) of broadcast television evening news stories from 1990 to 2015. Our findings reveal that the discourse of derision is a common but not overwhelming feature of television news, occurring primarily through negativity in tone and assessments of quality.

Background: Promise scholarship programs designed to increase college access and success are proliferating across the country. However, little research has investigated how such programs are implemented or how differences in program design, such as the inclusion of merit requirements, could affect the success of these initiatives. Project/Research Design: This study is part of a randomized control trial examining outcomes of the Degree Project (TDP), a $12,000 promise scholarship for students in a Midwestern urban school district. TDP was designed with GPA and attendance merit requirements in order to understand the impact of a targeted scholarship design. Purpose: We set out to understand how school staff tasked with implementing the Degree Project scholarship made sense of the program, its merit requirements, and data on students meeting those requirements and how this sensemaking may have affected the attitudes and actions of staff in ways that could alter the impact of the program on students. Data collection/Analysis: Over the first two program years, we conducted interviews in over 90% of treatment schools (year 1 N = 17; year 2 N = 15). Using theories of sensemaking and attribution, we analyzed how staff used data from the merit requirements as evidence to frame the program as a success or failure. Findings: We find that some school staff used data on the number of students still on track for the scholarship as evidence that TDP was succeeding or--more often--failing. Moreover, they mainly attributed this success or failure to characteristics of the students themselves and rarely to their own work practice. Staff who saw the program as failing were in schools that already had lower academic achievement, and there is evidence that they took fewer actions to support student access to TDP than did staff in higher-performing schools. Conclusions: These findings raise concerns that staff sensemaking around TDP may be reinforcing low expectations of students and deficit discourses of youth from low-wealth communities of color, as well as stratification of access to college-related support. Additionally, it raises important implementation and equity concerns about both promise programs' use of merit requirements and data use in schools in general.

Amid concerns about the decreasing political engagement of young people, scholars and policy makers have begun discussing the "civic achievement gap," disparities in civic capacity between low-income students and Students of Color and their White, wealthier counterparts. While this scholarship raises important issues, it often relies on a narrow view of civic engagement, downplaying alternative forms of civic activity and the variability of civic life across contexts. This can lead to deficit-based models of civic education that bypass the opportunity to tap into the many less-visible ways youth, particularly those from low-income Communities of Color, are already engaged in civic life. In this article, Paul J. Kuttner offers as an alternative approach, "youth cultural organizing," which engages young people in catalyzing change in their communities through the arts and other forms of cultural expression, drawing on shared cultural resources. He presents a theoretical framework for this culturally sustaining civic engagement pedagogy based on a case study of the organization Project HIP-HOP, and he explores the potential of the arts and hip-hop culture as asset-based spaces within which to engage young people in civic life.

Arts education does more than transfer the skills and knowledge needed to create artistic works. It also helps to shape young people's orientations towards participation in the cultural life of their communities. In this article, Paul Kuttner argues for reframing arts education as a process of developing cultural citizenship. Cultural citizenship, a concept from political theory and cultural studies, is concerned with the development of diverse cultural practices and identities alongside full participation in cultural and political life. Using this lens, we can look at different forms of arts education and ask, "What types of cultural citizens are these programs developing?" Building on the work of civic education scholars Westheimer and Kahne (2004), Kuttner suggests a few initial types before delving into a fuller description of what he calls the "justice-oriented cultural citizen." This concept is illustrated with data from an ethnographic case study of one arts organization that is developing such citizens: Project HIP-HOP, a Boston-based youth organization that trains young artists as cultural organizers who can use their art to catalyze change in their communities. This reframing of arts education as a form of civic education helps to situate artistic practices in their larger socio-political contexts, while contributing to an ongoing dialogue about the role of arts education in supporting participatory democracy and social change.

Comics have long been a focus of scholarly inquiry. In recent years, this interest has taken a methodological turn, with scholars integrating comics creation into the research process itself. In this article, the authors begin to define and document this emerging, interdisciplinary field of methodological practice. They lay out key affordances that comics offers researchers across the disciplines, arguing that certain characteristics—multimodality, blending of sequential and simultaneous communication, emphasis on creator voice—afford powerful tools for inquiry. The authors finish by offering some questions and challenges for the field as it matures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]