Ann Ishimaru | University of Washington (original) (raw)

Papers by Ann Ishimaru

Journal of family diversity in education, May 17, 2023

Imagining systemic change can be a lot to ask of Black and Latinx families in urban communities i... more Imagining systemic change can be a lot to ask of Black and Latinx families in urban communities in light of long, sometimes intergenerational histories of marginalization and dehumanization in schools. For twenty years, CADRE (Community Asset Development Redefining Education) has been building the power and leadership of Black and Brown families in South Los Angeles "to protect and promote children's dignity, opportunity to learn, and self-determination, by being at decision-making and policy-making tables and having the tools to monitor accountability in policy implementation." When the community organizing group first engaged with the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC), CADRE had already successfully gotten the district to adopt new school discipline policies to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and had continued to monitor implementation (CADRE, 2017). However, the fundamental relationships and interactions between families and teachers in schools continued to reflect racist, dehumanizing ideologies entrenched in inequitable power dynamics. Maisie Chin, the Executive Director of CADRE, facilitated a series of codesign sessions with CADRE parents between 2017 and 2019 to not only surface these dynamics but to reimagine how parent-teacher conversations and interactions might be different. CADRE co-designers undertook role-playing and collective reflection to intervene in moment-to-moment interactions as a way to change broader systemic dynamics.

VUE (Voices in Urban Education)

Schools have not been the same since the COVID-19 pandemic forced educational administrators to c... more Schools have not been the same since the COVID-19 pandemic forced educational administrators to close their doors in the spring of 2020. Educators worked feverishly to provide instruction virtually and ensure their students had access to food and medical care, all while juggling the fact that their very own families and communities were in crisis. Confusing public health messages exacerbated by the politicization of masks and vaccines and the continued assault on Black lives, civil rights, and democracy put school leaders in a particularly challenging situation. Racial inequities and inequalities became even worse amid what Darity, Hubbard, and Wright (2022) referred to as "the pandemic divide, " reflecting the multiple impacts of COVID-19 on wealth, housing, employment, health, and of course, education (Douglass Horsford, et. al, 2021).

Journal of family diversity in education, Jan 31, 2022

Community, power, justice. These concepts have long been potent for me, not only as a scholar but... more Community, power, justice. These concepts have long been potent for me, not only as a scholar but also as a teacher, community organizer, cultural arts worker, mother, auntie, granddaughter, and Nikkei community member. To me, these concepts are anchored in questions about how we might become fully ourselves. How do we bring who we have been, what we know, and the community traumas, resilience, knowledge, and even privileges we now have to build a more just education and society? As a fourth-generation Japanese American, such questions are shaped by my family's culture and history, indelibly marked by our community's incarceration by our government during World War IIfor the crime of being ourselves. Despite the uncertainty and betrayal at that time, my people created community and schools in the camps, built new lives afterwards in the face of racism and hatred, and then catalyzed a redress movement to try to ensure that the same thing cannot happen again to another community. And MEGAN Miigwechiwendan. Be grateful. Gizhewaadizi. Be kind, generous. Minwaajimo. Tell a good story. Minobimaadiziwin. The good life. Nandagikendan. Seek to learn it. I come to this work, seeking to learn to live the good life, a just life, a sustainable life, as the mother of Ojibwe, Navajo, and Italian children, and in our ways, a mother and grandmother to many of my nieces and nephews who then extend my family to include Pima,

American Journal of Education, May 1, 2022

Educational Researcher

The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerb... more The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerbated existing racial injustices in schools and society. Although many have argued for a principled refusal to return to an inequitable “normal” (Roy, 2020), dominant models of educational improvement prioritize technical-rational approaches that often result in administrative racism in school systems, with little attention to the complexities of race, power, and privilege in addressing long-standing racial injustices. The need to address settler colonialism, anti-Black, and other intersectional racisms are far from new, but we argue that the confluence of these pandemics demands new roles for research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in education that aspire to transform systems beyond their current construction. In this article, we draw on the intersections between racial equity and RPP scholarship to propose key pivots for RPPs in working to foster educational justice in school systems. We...

Journal of Family Diversity in Education

In this paper, we share findings from Family Leadership Design Collaborative’s (FLDC) multi-year ... more In this paper, we share findings from Family Leadership Design Collaborative’s (FLDC) multi-year work, which comprised 10 co-design collaboratives engaged in historicizing their experiences and imagining transformative possibilities for education together. Using knowledge and interaction analysis (e.g., diSessa, Levin, & Brown, 2015) we examined collaboratives’ conceptual ecologies (Kelly & Green, 1998) to develop an empirical typology of collaboratives' theories of change (Tuck & Yang, 2018), or the broader aims and the who, what and how of their change-making conversations in community design circles, a first step of solidarity-driven codesign (Ishimaru et al., 2018). Across a diverse range of geographically, linguistically, and racially diverse families and communities, we intentionally rooted the design conversation in an initial set of principles in order to move beyond status quo problem-solving and open social dreaming spaces towards collective changemaking. We found: 1) ...

VUE (Voices in Urban Education)

The global pandemic opened a portal for a different paradigm of educational leadership to emerge.... more The global pandemic opened a portal for a different paradigm of educational leadership to emerge. Reaching beyond only critique of the Conversations in Urban Educationentional, color-evasive leadership research and practice, we share how our leadership of a systems-focused preparation program turned to ancestral knowledges, relationality, and cultural practices embedded in Indigenous, Black and other communities of color to lead possible transformative futures with the youth and families owed a profound educational debt. The program shift enabled the practitioner leadership students to take up their leadership as a humanizing, liberatory practice that works toward familial relations with their students and families. We frame this journey "through the portal" and share exceResearch Perspectivests from the public pedagogy of two students as they build from their own Expressions in Urban Educationeriences as Black leaders who do not simply resist or fight unjust systems, but ...

Learning Policy Institute, Apr 30, 2021

The purpose of this report is to share aspects of the experiences and priorities of Black familie... more The purpose of this report is to share aspects of the experiences and priorities of Black families — including their culturally affirming practices — and of educators to enable Seattle Public Schools to improve instruction, support, and equity for students and families during remote learning (and beyond).

Phi Delta Kappan, 2022

Educational leaders are facing unprecedented challenges that many do not feel prepared for, espec... more Educational leaders are facing unprecedented challenges that many do not feel prepared for, especially when it comes to promoting equity. Ann Ishimaru explains that an expansive view of leadership that incorporates historically marginalized youth, families, and communities will enable schools to better serve all students. Schools have a history of focusing on managerial and administrative expertise and ignoring the expertise within the communities they serve, but Ishimaru offers examples of initiatives that have sought to bring more people — especially people of color— into leadership with positive results.

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2014

Background/Context Faced with rapidly changing demographics, districts are increasingly looking t... more Background/Context Faced with rapidly changing demographics, districts are increasingly looking to partner with parents to support and improve student learning. Community organizing holds promise for pursuing educational equity through the development of low-income parent participation and leadership, but previous research has focused primarily on the use of structural social capital theory in qualitative studies to understand school-based organizing mechanisms and impacts in traditional urban centers. Focus of Study The aim of this study was to examine whether district-level organizing efforts might be associated with improved parent-school relations in schools and how such efforts to build a new relationship may be enacted and negotiated at the school level within the context of a district-organizing group collaboration in a “new immigrant” destination. Research Design This mixed-methods sequential explanatory study used social capital and the concept of institutional scripts to q...

Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 2015

Researchers and educational leaders have long debated the appropriate roles and forms of family e... more Researchers and educational leaders have long debated the appropriate roles and forms of family engagement in education. Although, in recent years, scholars have sought to understand how racially and linguistically diverse communities should participate in their children’s education, the field has struggled to recognize and engage families’ expertise and disrupt the dynamics of inequity that shape disengagement. In this article, we highlight recent understandings regarding the development of disciplinary identities and cultural practices in learning to offer new approaches to the field of family engagement for conceptualizing the untapped potential of nondominant family knowledge and cultural practices in learning settings. By highlighting examples from mathematics learning that center families as legitimate sources of knowledge, we suggest avenues for engaging diverse family leadership in co-designing equitable learning environments that foster students’ empowering disciplinary ide...

Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 2018

Researchers and practitioners of family engagement have long called for a move beyond conventiona... more Researchers and practitioners of family engagement have long called for a move beyond conventional deficit-based family-school partnerships. In response, a burgeoning movement in the field has sought to identify and enact new forms of collaboration with nondominant families and communities, in terms of both change-making andthe process of research itself. In this article, we bridge the fields of family engagement and design-based research to conceptualize and illustrate a solidarity-driven process of partnership we undertook with families and communities of color, educators, and other researchers towards community-defined wellbeing and education justice. We offer community design circles as a methodological evolution aimed at reclaiming the central agentic role of families and communities of color in transforming educational research and practice. We illustrate three co-design dimensions with vignettes from a national-level participatory design research project called the Family Lea...

Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 2019

The current study examined the role formal leaders can play in creating routines and practices to... more The current study examined the role formal leaders can play in creating routines and practices to foster and sustain organizational leadership of equity-focused teams of educators, parents, and students in schools. Using a case study methodology, we explored how a Black female K-8 school leader steeped in social justice leadership work and a white female middle school leader new to social justice leadership engaged collectively with a team of educators to build organizational capacity to identify racial, ability, and other group-based student disparities and develop equitable practices at their respective school sites. We present three key findings based upon analysis of 22 videotaped observation meetings and 27 interviews with principals and members of each equity team. Drawing on a framework of organizational leadership for equity developed by the authors, we first describe principal-initiated routines to foster professional learning that normalized an "equity" framing of educational disparities. Second, we share routines that resulted in broadening conceptions of leadership from positional authority, as well as routines that reinforced the principal as the individual with power. Finally, we highlight emerging but limited organizational routines to support sustained engagement of teams with equity-focused data over time to inform ongoing iterative improvements. We discuss the critical role of social justice-focused leaders in establishing these routines toward developing the capacity of others across a school to sustain equity-based improvement work. The most recent revisions to the national educational leadership standards call out equity and cultural responsiveness as a core leadership responsibility (NPBEA, 2015). Yet expectations for addressing race, class, ability, and other disparities in student outcomes exceed the current capacity of leadership in K-12 public schools (Furman, 2012; McKenzie et al., 2008). The emerging research on improving equitable leadership practice in educational organizations suggests that developing such capacity requires schools and systems to engage in new, collective learning to transform cultures and practices (

American Educational Research Journal, 2016

Families are key actors in efforts to improve student learning and outcomes, but conventional eng... more Families are key actors in efforts to improve student learning and outcomes, but conventional engagement efforts often disregard the cultural and social resources of nondominant families. Individuals who serve as cultural brokers play critical, though complex, roles bridging between schools and families. Using an equitable collaboration lens with boundary-spanning theory, this comparative case study examined how individuals enacted cultural brokering within three organizational contexts. Our findings suggest a predominance of cultural brokering consistent with programmatic goals to socialize nondominant families into school-centric norms and agendas. However, formal leadership and boundary-spanning ambiguity enabled more collective, relational, or reciprocal cultural brokering. These dynamics suggest potential stepping stones and organizational conditions for moving toward more equitable forms of family-school collaboration and systemic transformation.

education policy analysis archives, 2017

What would leadership standards look like if developed through a lens and language of equity? We ... more What would leadership standards look like if developed through a lens and language of equity? We engaged with a group of 40 researchers, practitioners, and community leaders recognized as having expertise on equity in education to address this question. Using a Delphi technique, an approach designed to elicit expert feedback and measure convergence around a question of interest, these leaders participated in three rounds of data gathering. In Rounds One and Two, the 40 participants described and then rated leadership practices they believed to be most likely to mitigate race, class, and other group-based disparities between dominant and nondominant students. In Round Three, 14 of these experts participated in focus group sessions, using the findings from the first two rounds to ultimately converge around 10 high-leverage leadership practices for equity. Findings highlight the importance of leadership centered on countering systemic and structural barriers that maintain disparities, ...

Journal of family diversity in education, May 17, 2023

Imagining systemic change can be a lot to ask of Black and Latinx families in urban communities i... more Imagining systemic change can be a lot to ask of Black and Latinx families in urban communities in light of long, sometimes intergenerational histories of marginalization and dehumanization in schools. For twenty years, CADRE (Community Asset Development Redefining Education) has been building the power and leadership of Black and Brown families in South Los Angeles "to protect and promote children's dignity, opportunity to learn, and self-determination, by being at decision-making and policy-making tables and having the tools to monitor accountability in policy implementation." When the community organizing group first engaged with the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC), CADRE had already successfully gotten the district to adopt new school discipline policies to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and had continued to monitor implementation (CADRE, 2017). However, the fundamental relationships and interactions between families and teachers in schools continued to reflect racist, dehumanizing ideologies entrenched in inequitable power dynamics. Maisie Chin, the Executive Director of CADRE, facilitated a series of codesign sessions with CADRE parents between 2017 and 2019 to not only surface these dynamics but to reimagine how parent-teacher conversations and interactions might be different. CADRE co-designers undertook role-playing and collective reflection to intervene in moment-to-moment interactions as a way to change broader systemic dynamics.

VUE (Voices in Urban Education)

Schools have not been the same since the COVID-19 pandemic forced educational administrators to c... more Schools have not been the same since the COVID-19 pandemic forced educational administrators to close their doors in the spring of 2020. Educators worked feverishly to provide instruction virtually and ensure their students had access to food and medical care, all while juggling the fact that their very own families and communities were in crisis. Confusing public health messages exacerbated by the politicization of masks and vaccines and the continued assault on Black lives, civil rights, and democracy put school leaders in a particularly challenging situation. Racial inequities and inequalities became even worse amid what Darity, Hubbard, and Wright (2022) referred to as "the pandemic divide, " reflecting the multiple impacts of COVID-19 on wealth, housing, employment, health, and of course, education (Douglass Horsford, et. al, 2021).

Journal of family diversity in education, Jan 31, 2022

Community, power, justice. These concepts have long been potent for me, not only as a scholar but... more Community, power, justice. These concepts have long been potent for me, not only as a scholar but also as a teacher, community organizer, cultural arts worker, mother, auntie, granddaughter, and Nikkei community member. To me, these concepts are anchored in questions about how we might become fully ourselves. How do we bring who we have been, what we know, and the community traumas, resilience, knowledge, and even privileges we now have to build a more just education and society? As a fourth-generation Japanese American, such questions are shaped by my family's culture and history, indelibly marked by our community's incarceration by our government during World War IIfor the crime of being ourselves. Despite the uncertainty and betrayal at that time, my people created community and schools in the camps, built new lives afterwards in the face of racism and hatred, and then catalyzed a redress movement to try to ensure that the same thing cannot happen again to another community. And MEGAN Miigwechiwendan. Be grateful. Gizhewaadizi. Be kind, generous. Minwaajimo. Tell a good story. Minobimaadiziwin. The good life. Nandagikendan. Seek to learn it. I come to this work, seeking to learn to live the good life, a just life, a sustainable life, as the mother of Ojibwe, Navajo, and Italian children, and in our ways, a mother and grandmother to many of my nieces and nephews who then extend my family to include Pima,

American Journal of Education, May 1, 2022

Educational Researcher

The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerb... more The realities of a global pandemic coupled with economic, climate, and racial crises have exacerbated existing racial injustices in schools and society. Although many have argued for a principled refusal to return to an inequitable “normal” (Roy, 2020), dominant models of educational improvement prioritize technical-rational approaches that often result in administrative racism in school systems, with little attention to the complexities of race, power, and privilege in addressing long-standing racial injustices. The need to address settler colonialism, anti-Black, and other intersectional racisms are far from new, but we argue that the confluence of these pandemics demands new roles for research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in education that aspire to transform systems beyond their current construction. In this article, we draw on the intersections between racial equity and RPP scholarship to propose key pivots for RPPs in working to foster educational justice in school systems. We...

Journal of Family Diversity in Education

In this paper, we share findings from Family Leadership Design Collaborative’s (FLDC) multi-year ... more In this paper, we share findings from Family Leadership Design Collaborative’s (FLDC) multi-year work, which comprised 10 co-design collaboratives engaged in historicizing their experiences and imagining transformative possibilities for education together. Using knowledge and interaction analysis (e.g., diSessa, Levin, & Brown, 2015) we examined collaboratives’ conceptual ecologies (Kelly & Green, 1998) to develop an empirical typology of collaboratives' theories of change (Tuck & Yang, 2018), or the broader aims and the who, what and how of their change-making conversations in community design circles, a first step of solidarity-driven codesign (Ishimaru et al., 2018). Across a diverse range of geographically, linguistically, and racially diverse families and communities, we intentionally rooted the design conversation in an initial set of principles in order to move beyond status quo problem-solving and open social dreaming spaces towards collective changemaking. We found: 1) ...

VUE (Voices in Urban Education)

The global pandemic opened a portal for a different paradigm of educational leadership to emerge.... more The global pandemic opened a portal for a different paradigm of educational leadership to emerge. Reaching beyond only critique of the Conversations in Urban Educationentional, color-evasive leadership research and practice, we share how our leadership of a systems-focused preparation program turned to ancestral knowledges, relationality, and cultural practices embedded in Indigenous, Black and other communities of color to lead possible transformative futures with the youth and families owed a profound educational debt. The program shift enabled the practitioner leadership students to take up their leadership as a humanizing, liberatory practice that works toward familial relations with their students and families. We frame this journey "through the portal" and share exceResearch Perspectivests from the public pedagogy of two students as they build from their own Expressions in Urban Educationeriences as Black leaders who do not simply resist or fight unjust systems, but ...

Learning Policy Institute, Apr 30, 2021

The purpose of this report is to share aspects of the experiences and priorities of Black familie... more The purpose of this report is to share aspects of the experiences and priorities of Black families — including their culturally affirming practices — and of educators to enable Seattle Public Schools to improve instruction, support, and equity for students and families during remote learning (and beyond).

Phi Delta Kappan, 2022

Educational leaders are facing unprecedented challenges that many do not feel prepared for, espec... more Educational leaders are facing unprecedented challenges that many do not feel prepared for, especially when it comes to promoting equity. Ann Ishimaru explains that an expansive view of leadership that incorporates historically marginalized youth, families, and communities will enable schools to better serve all students. Schools have a history of focusing on managerial and administrative expertise and ignoring the expertise within the communities they serve, but Ishimaru offers examples of initiatives that have sought to bring more people — especially people of color— into leadership with positive results.

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2014

Background/Context Faced with rapidly changing demographics, districts are increasingly looking t... more Background/Context Faced with rapidly changing demographics, districts are increasingly looking to partner with parents to support and improve student learning. Community organizing holds promise for pursuing educational equity through the development of low-income parent participation and leadership, but previous research has focused primarily on the use of structural social capital theory in qualitative studies to understand school-based organizing mechanisms and impacts in traditional urban centers. Focus of Study The aim of this study was to examine whether district-level organizing efforts might be associated with improved parent-school relations in schools and how such efforts to build a new relationship may be enacted and negotiated at the school level within the context of a district-organizing group collaboration in a “new immigrant” destination. Research Design This mixed-methods sequential explanatory study used social capital and the concept of institutional scripts to q...

Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 2015

Researchers and educational leaders have long debated the appropriate roles and forms of family e... more Researchers and educational leaders have long debated the appropriate roles and forms of family engagement in education. Although, in recent years, scholars have sought to understand how racially and linguistically diverse communities should participate in their children’s education, the field has struggled to recognize and engage families’ expertise and disrupt the dynamics of inequity that shape disengagement. In this article, we highlight recent understandings regarding the development of disciplinary identities and cultural practices in learning to offer new approaches to the field of family engagement for conceptualizing the untapped potential of nondominant family knowledge and cultural practices in learning settings. By highlighting examples from mathematics learning that center families as legitimate sources of knowledge, we suggest avenues for engaging diverse family leadership in co-designing equitable learning environments that foster students’ empowering disciplinary ide...

Journal of Family Diversity in Education, 2018

Researchers and practitioners of family engagement have long called for a move beyond conventiona... more Researchers and practitioners of family engagement have long called for a move beyond conventional deficit-based family-school partnerships. In response, a burgeoning movement in the field has sought to identify and enact new forms of collaboration with nondominant families and communities, in terms of both change-making andthe process of research itself. In this article, we bridge the fields of family engagement and design-based research to conceptualize and illustrate a solidarity-driven process of partnership we undertook with families and communities of color, educators, and other researchers towards community-defined wellbeing and education justice. We offer community design circles as a methodological evolution aimed at reclaiming the central agentic role of families and communities of color in transforming educational research and practice. We illustrate three co-design dimensions with vignettes from a national-level participatory design research project called the Family Lea...

Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 2019

The current study examined the role formal leaders can play in creating routines and practices to... more The current study examined the role formal leaders can play in creating routines and practices to foster and sustain organizational leadership of equity-focused teams of educators, parents, and students in schools. Using a case study methodology, we explored how a Black female K-8 school leader steeped in social justice leadership work and a white female middle school leader new to social justice leadership engaged collectively with a team of educators to build organizational capacity to identify racial, ability, and other group-based student disparities and develop equitable practices at their respective school sites. We present three key findings based upon analysis of 22 videotaped observation meetings and 27 interviews with principals and members of each equity team. Drawing on a framework of organizational leadership for equity developed by the authors, we first describe principal-initiated routines to foster professional learning that normalized an "equity" framing of educational disparities. Second, we share routines that resulted in broadening conceptions of leadership from positional authority, as well as routines that reinforced the principal as the individual with power. Finally, we highlight emerging but limited organizational routines to support sustained engagement of teams with equity-focused data over time to inform ongoing iterative improvements. We discuss the critical role of social justice-focused leaders in establishing these routines toward developing the capacity of others across a school to sustain equity-based improvement work. The most recent revisions to the national educational leadership standards call out equity and cultural responsiveness as a core leadership responsibility (NPBEA, 2015). Yet expectations for addressing race, class, ability, and other disparities in student outcomes exceed the current capacity of leadership in K-12 public schools (Furman, 2012; McKenzie et al., 2008). The emerging research on improving equitable leadership practice in educational organizations suggests that developing such capacity requires schools and systems to engage in new, collective learning to transform cultures and practices (

American Educational Research Journal, 2016

Families are key actors in efforts to improve student learning and outcomes, but conventional eng... more Families are key actors in efforts to improve student learning and outcomes, but conventional engagement efforts often disregard the cultural and social resources of nondominant families. Individuals who serve as cultural brokers play critical, though complex, roles bridging between schools and families. Using an equitable collaboration lens with boundary-spanning theory, this comparative case study examined how individuals enacted cultural brokering within three organizational contexts. Our findings suggest a predominance of cultural brokering consistent with programmatic goals to socialize nondominant families into school-centric norms and agendas. However, formal leadership and boundary-spanning ambiguity enabled more collective, relational, or reciprocal cultural brokering. These dynamics suggest potential stepping stones and organizational conditions for moving toward more equitable forms of family-school collaboration and systemic transformation.

education policy analysis archives, 2017

What would leadership standards look like if developed through a lens and language of equity? We ... more What would leadership standards look like if developed through a lens and language of equity? We engaged with a group of 40 researchers, practitioners, and community leaders recognized as having expertise on equity in education to address this question. Using a Delphi technique, an approach designed to elicit expert feedback and measure convergence around a question of interest, these leaders participated in three rounds of data gathering. In Rounds One and Two, the 40 participants described and then rated leadership practices they believed to be most likely to mitigate race, class, and other group-based disparities between dominant and nondominant students. In Round Three, 14 of these experts participated in focus group sessions, using the findings from the first two rounds to ultimately converge around 10 high-leverage leadership practices for equity. Findings highlight the importance of leadership centered on countering systemic and structural barriers that maintain disparities, ...

"The persistent failure of public schooling in low-income communities constitutes one of our nati... more "The persistent failure of public schooling in low-income communities constitutes one of our nation’s most pressing civil rights and social justice issues. Many school reformers recognize that poverty, racism, and a lack of power held by these communities undermine children’s education and development, but few know what to do about it. A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform argues that community organizing represents a fresh and promising approach to school reform as part of a broader agenda to build power for low-income communities and address the profound social inequalities that affect the education of children.

Based on a comprehensive national study, the book presents rich and compelling case studies of prominent organizing efforts in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Denver, San Jose, and the Mississippi Delta. The authors show how organizing groups build the participation and leadership of parents and students so they can become powerful actors in school improvement efforts. They also identify promising ways to overcome divisions and create the collaborations between educators and community residents required for deep and sustainable school reform. Identifying the key processes that create strong connections between schools and communities, Warren, Mapp, and their collaborators show how community organizing builds powerful relationships that lead to the transformational change necessary to advance educational equity and a robust democracy."