Chapter 5: Community-School-University Partnerships as Catalyzing Reform in Districts and Across the State: The University-Assisted Community Schools Project in Knoxville, Tennessee

How can we make universities more responsive to community needs? Take, for example, the issue of urban school reform. Policymakers and educational leaders have attempted ad nauseam to improve aspects of schooling within their school, often resulting in a “tinkering” toward incremental improvement (at best) (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Universities are positioned to be change agents for public education, but, for a variety of reasons, schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) have not been as relevant for the work of actually improving schools (Labaree, 2004). The perception (and perhaps reality) is that SCDEs have become increasingly disconnected from the world of practice in the race for increased prestige within the academy, which undervalues practitioner/scholar interaction. This is the realm of “practically applicable scholarship,” which is perceived to be less rigorous and therefore not as valued by top-tier academic journals (O’Meara, Eatman, & Petersen, 2015). This is a kind of reward structure that facilitates and deepens the practitioner/scholar divide.