Dr. Sonya Horsford, faculty at University of Nevada Las Vegas, and I will lead a peer-reviewed special issue to be published by Urban Education to examine community-based reforms and their implications for educational policy and accountability.

Over the past several decades, there have been many, many community-based approaches in education that have shown promise. Recently, critiques of how community-based reforms, such as parent trigger, can be co-opted have come to the forefront in the policy discussion. To consider this and other concerns, this issue will include scholarship from diverse theoretical, methodological, and analytical perspectives on community-based reform efforts.

One potential topic of interest for the special issue is Community-Based Accountability, an alternative to the current top-down conception of No Child Left Behind. Here are an Executive Summary and the Key Features of Community-Based Accountability. Please forward and circulate widely. These are living documents and will be revised as feedback and comments occur.

Considering the saliency of community-based reforms in the currently policy and reform environment,  We look forward to reading your submissions. Please post, link, email and disseminate widely this special issue call.