UCLA Center for Community Schooling

The UCLA Center for Community Schooling is a campus-wide initiative to advance university-assisted community schools.  In partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District, we aim to  disrupt historical inequalities and reimagine schooling as a public good that prepares all students to succeed in college, careers, and civic life. The UCLA Community School opened in 2009 and the Mann UCLA Community School partnership began in 2016. The UCLA Center for Community Schooling was created to study and share the work of these schools and join with others to unite the K-12 community schools movement with higher education civic engagement reforms.

UCLA Community School

Located in Koreatown, UCLA Community School is a TK-12 span school and serves approximately 1,000 students from the local neighborhood. It is one of six Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, co-located on the former site of the historic Ambassador Hotel.

Mann UCLA Community School

Located in South Los Angeles, Mann UCLA Community School currently serves 500 students in grades 6-11 and will graduate its first cohort in 2021. The school opened in 1926 and has a rich legacy as a neighborhood middle school.

Research and Evaluation

The Center supports a portfolio of research-practice partnerships (RPPs) designed to inform practice, ensure accountability, and create knowledge. RPPs are reviewed and approved by school-based research committees and address a range of topics, including:  college access, self-assessment, translanguaging, immigration, universal design for learning, integrated data systems, teacher leadership, student agency, and more. 

Annual reports track and share the progress of the partnership. Using locally developed core competencies to frame outcome measures and locally-developed data dashboards, annual reports provide the university and the public with a summary of achievements and areas for growth.

Partnership Highlights

Envisioned as sites of research-based teaching and learning, the UCLA Community Schools serve as residency sites for the university’s Center X Teacher Education Program as well as pipelines for future employment. Approximately half of the teachers at the UCLA Community School were educated at UCLA and share Center X’s social justice vision and commitment to culturally-sustaining pedagogy. About a third of the faculty serve as mentor teachers each year and guide the development of novice teachers in a gradual release of responsibility, co-teaching model. Given its community-based K-12 bilingual program, rooted in the home languages and cultures of local families, the school serves as a unique site for preparing bilingual teachers and studying innovative approaches to language instruction. Teachers at both schools also participate in Center X’s longstanding professional development communities, such as the UCLA Writing Project and the UCLA Computer Science Project, to develop and refine their pedagogical practice.

Links

For more information

Karen Hunter Quartz
quartz@ucla.edu