About Books & Briefs
Welcome to our Books & Briefs page—a thoughtfully curated collection designed to both inspire curiosity and build deeper understanding. Here, you’ll find carefully selected books alongside concise briefs that highlight key insights and essential information, making it easy to explore topics in depth or grasp the essentials quickly.
Community Schools Revolution
The Community Schools Revolution tells the story of the powerful transformation that is occurring in thousands of schools.
Leading with Purpose and Passion
Imagine a place where everyone loves to learn and feels safe, connected, respected, and valued. In this place, adults and young people, teachers and families, and the school and community are partners in decision-making and promoting change. A Community School is all of this, a dynamic and vibrant place.
Building Community Schools: A Guide for Action
Community schools have always rooted their work in a solid body of research about what it takes to promote student success, including parental involvement in children’s education, rich and engaging out-of-school experiences, student wellness and family stability. Because the community schools strategy, on its face, makes sense–and because the evidence shows that it works–an increasing number of schools in the United States and abroad have adopted this strategy.
Using Performance Assessments to Support Student Learning: How District Initiatives Can Make a Difference
In this study, we investigated how districts and schools can build systems and structures for developing and implementing performance assessment initiatives across multiple sites.
Financing Community Schools: A Framework for Growth and Stability
When it comes to financing community schools, leaders must find partners and funding to provide services and resources to support the work of coordination and collaboration, which is referred to as the infrastructure of community schools throughout this brief.
Mapping Community Strengths and Assets
This resource describes how to take a strength- or asset-based approach and is a useful tool to help explore and capture the gifts, talents and strengths in your community.
Teacher-Powered Practices for Student-Centered Community Schools
Student-centered community schools are intentionally designed to align community partnerships, services, enrichment programs, and classroom learning around students’ strengths, hopes, and dreams. Foundational elements of student-centered community schools are collaborative leadership structures, teacher leadership, collective decision-making processes, and design-thinking. These elements result in collective identity, ownership, and agency of everyone in the school community especially students and families.