School, Family and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action - Brossura

"School, Family, and Community Partnerships is a one-stop survival guide for anyone engaged in starting or improving partnership programs. The detailed, practical information links research findings to effective practices in a most helpful way." (Jane Grinde, Director, Bright Beginnings/Family-School-Community Partnerships)

"The research base is evident, and the second edition of the handbook is designed to help educators actually get things done. Everything is included to launch an effective Action Team and to develop a program that links family involvement to school improvement and student achievement." (Arty Dorman, Director of Family & Community Involvement)

"The second edition of the Handbook for Action is full of advice, good examples, and information for leaders in elementary, middle, and high schools―all based on research. This is an important resource for anyone trying to improve partnerships that support student achievement."  (Wendy Harwin, School-Family-Community Partnerships Project Coordinator)

"Some texts, by their very structure, invite the reader to flip back and forth between chapters rather than read in published order. School, Family, and Community Partnerships is that type. [It] is a programmatic, hands-on resource providing realistic strategies." (Marc Space, Superintendent The School Administrator, January 2003)

Joyce L. Epstein is director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships and the National Network of Partnership Schools, principal research scientist in the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR), and professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She has over 100 pub­lications on the organization and effects of school, classroom, family, and peer environments, with many focused on school, family, and community connec­tions. In 1995, she established the National Network of Partnership Schools to demonstrate the important intersections of research, policy, and practice for school improvement. She serves on numerous editorial boards and advisory panels on family involvement and school reform and is a recipient of the Academy for Educational Development’s 1991 Alvin C. Eurich Education Award and the 1997 Working Mother’s Magazine Parent Involvement in Education Award for her work on school, family, and community partnerships. Her most recent book, School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Preparing Educators and Improving Schools (Westview Press, 2001), aims to add the topic of family and community involvement to courses for future teachers and admin­istrators. She earned a PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University.