Theory and Practice of School Communities

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Abstract
This article describes a study of a school community established within a larger high school as part of a district-wide effort to organize high schools into collections of smaller learning communities. The author presents an ecological framework of school communities that specifies their features across multiple dimensions and levels of schooling. The framework provides a scheme for bringing the entire organization into line with the concept of school communities and a guide for describing and assessing their functioning. Student- and teacher-survey measures were assembled and administered to gauge school community processes and goals specified in the framework. The findings indicated that students in the school community perceived their school environment and instruction in a manner more consistent with the framework than students in either the unrestructured school or magnet programs. School community teachers' relations with colleagues and students were also more consistent with the framework than other teachers 'relations.

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