School Leadership for Authentic Family and Community Partnerships

<p>School leaders are increasingly called upon to pursue meaningful partnerships with families and community groups yet many leaders are unprepared to meet the challenges of partnerships to cross cultural boundaries or to be accountable to the community. Alliances are needed among educators families and community groups that value relationship building dialogue and power-sharing as part of socially just democratic schools. This book brings together research perspectives that intersect the fields of leadership and partnerships to inform and inspire more authentic collaboration. </p><p>Contributors from the fields of educational leadership family engagement school-community partnerships and education for social justice come together to examine the role of educational leaders in promoting partnerships as a dimension of leadership for social justice. The volume offers a mix of empirical conceptual and reflective chapters with research representing qualitative quantitative and mixed methods approaches in urban suburban and rural schools. The chapter Conversations with Community-Oriented Leaders includes candid advice from district and school-level administrators on this under-documented aspect of leadership. Situating leadership for partnerships within the leadership literature this book proposes a model for addressing tensions embedded in home-school relations and leading schools toward more authentic relationships with stakeholders. This collection of original scholarly articles will be a unique resource for new and aspiring administrators and for researchers in both the fields of leadership and school-family-community partnerships. </p>