Creating and Sustaining Effective K-12 School Partnerships: Firsthand Accounts of Promising Practices

Although teachers, school counselors, and administrators are all situated within educational settings tasked with supporting students' educational development, rarely do these professionals have sufficient opportunities to learn from and collaborate with one another before entering these schools. Unfortunately, many of these professionals are unaware of the primary and secondary responsibilities their peers and colleagues assume. What's worse, this lack of insight potentially compromises the extent to which educational leaders can forge effective partnerships that benefit students from the most alienated, disenfranchised and marginalized communities (e.g., Black children in under-resourced schools). While the educational discourse has included recommendations for maximizing interactions between these educational professionals, the collective voices of teachers, school counselors and administrators in regards to these issues has not been adequately examined. Thus, this book is a compilation of manuscripts and studies that explore partnerships and strategies educators and educational leaders use to produce positive socio-educational outcomes for Black students in various contexts. "Creating and Sustaining Effective K-12 School Partnerships: Firsthand Accounts of Promising Practices" is unique because it illuminates examples of effective school-community partnerships that foster positive student outcomes. "Creating and Sustaining Effective K-12 School Partnerships: Firsthand Accounts of Promising Practices" is intended as a practical text for committed educational leaders, at different professional points (e.g., practicing teachers, pre-service school counselors and teachers), who are eager to transform the current educational trajectory of Black children through interventions that show promise. Contents include: (1) Learning From Our Past: Lessons about Radical Community-School Partnerships from the Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School (Gwendolyn Baxley and Michael Davis); (2) Preparing Black Males for Collegiate Success: Exploring Black Males' Experiences in Precollege Summer Programs (Derrick R. Brooms); (3) Building Partnerships With Multiple Districts: The Role of the Residency Instructor (Donald Easton-Brooks and Karen J. Kindle); (4) Creating Sustainable School Based Relationships (Simone Gibson, Thurman Bridges, and Sabree Barnes); (5) Over Aged, Under Credited and College Ready: How a Transfer High School Utilizes Partnerships and Pre-College Interventions to Prepare Their Students for College and Beyond (Nakia M. Gray-Nicolas); (6) Let's Talk About It: Black Students' Participation in Cogenerative Dialogue in a Mathematics Classroom (Lateefah Id-Deen and Cynthia Balthazaar); (7) Forgotten Stakeholders: Mobilizing Across Divides to Create a Community-Based Educational Program (Shana N. Riddick); (8) Lending a Hand to Support Successful Trajectories of Black Students (Ward Randolph and Tracy Robinson); (9) Enhancing Student Outcomes through Partnerships for Student and Parent Support Systems (G. Roger Sell); and (10) Black Student Achievement and Critically Conscious Practitioner Inquiry in the Early Years: A Partnership in Toronto to Strengthen our Promising Practices (Nicole West-Burns and Karen Murray).