The following suggestions offer different actions you and your organization can take to have your voice heard about the impact of Community Schools. They range from educational to advocacy to lobbying that can be used at the local, state, and/or federal levels. Even if your representative is not on a decision-making committee, they still have a vote, and every vote counts! It is up to your discretion to decide what action(s) are best for you and your organization.

To make the process of reaching out to your members of Congress as easy as possible, we’ve provided two templates, one for a phone call and one for an email message, to use when you contact them. We encourage you to personalize the message so that they know how these federal dollars have made a difference in the lives of your students.

The 2025 state-level legislative season is coming to a close, and there are emerging trends that impact Community Schools, family engagement, and related whole-child and youth development strategies. Over 60% of governors are promoting two or more education priorities, namely, workforce alignment and career and technical education (CTE), education funding alternatives, school choice, and cell phone bans. This brief overviews these trends.

An overview of evidence showing how Community Schools are a highly effective strategy for improving student success by integrating academic supports, family engagement, and community partnerships.

This article examines two teachers' efforts to re-organize their science teaching around issues of environmental and food justice in the urban community where they teach through the pedagogical approach of community-oriented framing. We introduce this approach to teachers' framing of phenomena in community as supporting students' framing of phenomena as personally and locally relevant. Drawing on classroom observations of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, we took an analytic approach that characterized features of classroom discourse to rate community-oriented framing at the lesson level. Results show that teachers framed phenomena as both social and scientific, and as rooted in students' lived experiences, with classroom activities designed to gather localized and personalized evidence needed to explain or model phenomena. We also share examples of how Black and Latinx students took up this framing of phenomena in their classroom work. By providing a detailed description of the launch and implementation of activities, findings illustrate how community-oriented framing supported teachers in posing local questions of equity and justice as simultaneously social and scientific, and helping students perceive science learning as meaningful to their everyday lives. Community-oriented framing offers a practical means of designing locally and socially relevant instruction. We contribute to justice-centered science pedagogies by conceptualizing transformative science learning environments as those in which students understand their goal in science class as understanding, and later addressing, inequities in how socioscientific issues manifest in their community.

This brief highlights lessons learned from New Mexico’s investment in community schools. Drawing on profiles of three sites that received state implementation grants, we find that community schools implementing the key practices at the center of New Mexico’s community schools framework are seeing improvement across a range of indicators, including growth in test scores, increased graduation rates, reduced chronic absence, increased student engagement and connectedness, improved school climate, greater access to mental and physical health care, and stronger family engagement. Key to achieving these outcomes were state investments to support hiring school coordinators and to provide professional development and technical assistance. These findings suggest ways that New Mexico can sustain this new model and improve implementation in the future.

In 2022, nearly 13.8 million students in the United States were classified as chronically absent, a number roughly equivalent to the populations of Massachusetts and Indiana combined. Chronically absent students are those who have missed 18 days of school or more. This isn’t a blip; rather, it’s part of a pandemic-related trend: Nationally, the number of chronically absent students jumped from 15% in 2018 to 28% in 2022. And, although schools saw a small decline in absenteeism in 2022–23, preliminary data collected from states as part of the Return to Learn Tracker indicate that more than 26% of students were still chronically absent last year.

The California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP) was envisioned as a transformational whole-child reform that would help integrate several other multi- billion dollar state initiatives. Based on implementation data from the CCSPP’s first two years, this research brief presents six key findings.

This white paper was developed to help frame statewide deliberation about the use of multiple measures, including local measures, to capture the quality of implementation and outcomes of the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP). As outlined in the legislation, the CCSPP will be evaluated using state-mandated measures (e.g., attendance and graduation rates) yet there are many other measures that could be used to capture important processes and outcomes of local community schools (e.g., performance assessments, civic engagement measures). We describe an approach that combines state and local measures to inform the development, monitoring, and improvement of community schooling across California.

The goal of the series is to inform readers about the education-related stances of the nation’s two major political parties, drawing upon the Republican and Democratic parties’ national platforms and on Project 2025. Q&A participants were selected on the basis of their research expertise on the topics they have been asked to address. In addition to describing the parties’ positions, each expert is providing background information, with a focus on summarizing research findings.