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Education

Strengthening schools through large-scale dialogue and collaborative action.

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Montgomery County Public Schools Study Circles on education, fall 2007

Today, when we consider the new challenges confronting education--and our whole society--it seems especially difficult to know what we should expect from our schools. Challenges such as the gap in student achievement, violence and racial and ethnic tensions have a powerful and immediate impact on our schools. What do we want our students to know and be able to do? What can schools do to help them achieve these goals? What can we do, as a community, to help improve education?

Community members and schools need to work together to make education in their community all that it can be. Dialogue-to-change programs can help people build the trusting relationships necessary for long-term change. People from diverse backgrounds and experiences develop trust, understand each other's experiences, and work together on solutions.

Tools

Discussion Guide: Helping Every Student Succeed: Schools and Communities Working Together
2002
A four-session discussion guide to help schools and communities improve academic achievement for all students.

Research: Grad Nation Guidebook
A guidebook to help communities tackle the dropout crisis, 2009
Grad Nation is your road map to playing a key role in this critical effort to tackle the dropout crisis. ...

Video: Hopkinsville, Ky., residents make strides in improving police-community relations
2010
After receiving an action grant through the Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative, participants in the Hop-Town Our Town program decided ...

Video: Stratford, Conn., residents address racial equity issues in policing, education, and town leadership
2010
In 2006, following the arrest of two African Americans—a teenager and a town councilman, Stratford, Conn., launched community-wide dialogues on ...

Video: Addressing the student achievement gap through dialogue and action
2010
Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland serve students from more than 164 countries speaking 134 languages. For almost a ...

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Stories

News Article: Dr. King's unfulfilled dream of school integration
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in the transformative power of school integration. He would be dismayed by America's present day paradox: the rapidly expanding racial diversity of our society accompanied by the increasing segregation of our urban schools.

News Article: Crossing barriers to create a vision and action plan together
Language, culture, and location can all be barriers to working together as a unified community. See how the Westside neighborhood of Santa Barbara, Calif., faced all three of those challenges in their dialogue-to-action program.

News Article: The perfect storm of opportunity
Making decisions as a community isn't always easy, but the town of Portsmouth, N.H., is up to the challenge. Identifying education as a top priority, they are working to bring people from all different sectors to the table: "The path to becoming a model of excellence in education will be elusive without the participation of the broader community."

News Article: New formula for local democracy mixes old and new
“Portsmouth Listens” started out as a temporary effort to address a single problem, and over 10 years, has become a sustained arena for dealing with a wide range of community decisions and challenges.

Success Story: Long-time project in Syracuse, N.Y., tackles student achievement gap
In one of the nation's longest running dialogue-to-change programs to address racism and racial inequalities, Syracuse (N.Y.) residents are concentrating their efforts on the student achievement gap. Syracuse is one of eight communities that participated in the Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative.

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