Chapter 10: Advancing School Districts’ Policy Readiness for Partnerhips: A PK–16 Community Partnership

Community schools (CS) are a strategy that provides the infrastructure and “hardware” to intentionally integrate the essential components of professional development schools (PDSs). It is thereby critical to push the thinking about the nexus of PDSs and community schools from the individual school level to the level of district-wide reform. This chapter draws from research conducted on two large school districts in the northeast between the years 2000 and 2016. More specifically, there were 90 interviews conducted with policy actors in these two cities that grappled with adopting a district-wide community school policy. Through the lens of Kingdon’s (1995) multiple streams model, the findings from this research provide a conceptual framework that can be used to assess school-district readiness to move beyond a school-by-school context to a district-wide PDS/Community School initiative.