Community Schools and Equity: Changing Systems

Posted by Coalition for Community Schools on June 1, 2015

To create fairness of opportunity and to advance ideas that allow all students, families, and communities to thrive, it is our civic and moral responsibility to own up to the problems in our society and invest in equity-driven strategies. We must address poverty, social justice, and education together. We need a comprehensive approach to our most complex problems. Honest conversations about the relevance of poverty and race in our nation’s educational challenges are vital.

“You can’t focus on one [problem] without the other,” says Dr. Monica Medina, Interim Director of the Center for Urban and Multicultural Education at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) School of Education. “In order for us to be effective, we must look at the complexity of these issues from multiple perspectives.”

This was the core message of the Coalition’s recent webinar, “Community Schools and Equity: Changing Systems,” and speakers touched on the intersection of race, poverty, income, class, family circumstance, and culture in educational inequities. “I think that’s what makes the community school strategy so powerful,” says Ena Li, Education Director of the United Way of the Bay Area. “It acknowledges and merges all of these critical factors.”

Read more and get link to the Community Schools Equity Framework.

http://coalitionforcommunityschools.blogspot.com/