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School improvement has been a persistent concern for many urban school districts in the United States (US) for decades (King and Bouchard, 2011; Payne, 2008). Over the years, school improvement efforts in the US have focused on mainly improving in-school conditions like curriculum and instruction (Gay, 2002; Peters, 2011), organizational structures (Antrop-González and De Jesús, 2006), student absenteeism (Childs, 2017) and school culture (Holland and Farmer-Hinton, 2009). However, while very important, most in-school improvement efforts do not account for the complex and often contextually specific ways that racism, poverty and inequity impact student learning (Milner, 2013; Noguera and Wells, 2011), and neglect input from local, community-based actors on how to improve schools. Focusing on community members’ input about school improvement is essential because community is a critical lever for organizing people, challenging oppressive practices and acting collectively against inequities (Collins, 2010; Philip et al., 2013). Consequently, since most school improvement efforts lack community leaders’ perspectives, they disregard the myriad of ways that out-of-school, neighborhood-based factors like housing, healthcare, safety and nutrition influence the inequities that manifest inside of schools (Green, 2015; Khalifa, 2012; Milner, 2012; Scanlan and Johnson, 2015; Welner and Carter, 2013).
As such, there has been growing advocacy among civic actors, practitioners and scholars to reconsider school improvement as a broader community-based effort that is anchored in a local and contextual understanding of schools’ neighborhood milieu (Green, 2017; Hopson, 2014; Horsford and Heilig, 2014). However, to reconsider school improvement as a community-based effort requires broad coalition building among a variety of neighborhood stakeholders, especially community leaders (Khalifa, 2012; Miller et al., 2011) and school leaders (i.e. principals) because of their critical role in fostering equitable and authentic partnerships between schools and communities (Green, 2015, 2017; Cooper et al., 2011; DeMatthews, 2018; Epstein and Sanders, 2006; Ishimaru, 2013; Ruffin and Brooks, 2010; Watson and Bogotch, 2015). Despite the importance of local actors’ expert knowledge, most reform initiatives still largely have not included community leaders’ perspectives in school improvement efforts. This absence has in turn contributed to empirical and practical gaps in the literature and field.
The purpose of this study is to reconsider school improvement from the perspectives of community leaders who support students who attend urban schools in equitable ways....