Community Schools and Teacher-Powered Schools are both equity-enhancing strategies rooted and guided by the notion that the people in the schools are best positioned to shape their vision for school transformation, collectively alongside students, staff, families and broader community. 

As a century-old approach, Community Schools in the U.S. were created as spaces that could disrupt the inequitable conditions created by poverty, racism, and segregation. By creating resource-filled schools that could provide access to a range of necessary services such as health clinics and food pantries, community schools attend to the conditions that allow students to be successful in schools.

Through an assets-based approach, community schools fundamentally shift our thinking from deficit mindsets to uplifting local knowledge and by embracing the diversity of our students’ backgrounds, home life, languages and lived experiences. At the core, community schools ensure that foundational needs are met and students in their whole selves are affirmed in schools.

Having taught in a teacher-powered community school, I know these two models are not in opposition to each other, but rather mutually-enhancing in generating powerful outcomes for young people. Both teacher-powered schools and community schools help us pay attention to how we do the work of schools. They are about amplifying the voices of those who have been marginalized and are places where innovation is the result of collective problem-solving. 

 At the heart, teacher-powered schools are about sharing power—meaningfully collaborating and designing the systems needed to undo hierarchical models of learning and leadership. Teacher-powered educators who are seasoned in these models invite us to reimagine the role of teachers as leaders and decision-makers, and to envision schools where teachers joyfully teach and are supported to stay in the profession.

To be a teacher-powered school means having autonomy in areas of school decisions. In certain cases, formal autonomy agreements between the school, LEA, and teacher’s union outline the parameters, as in Los Angeles and Boston Pilot Schools. In other examples, autonomy is designated as a result of local and state policy win, such as Minnestora’s state-governed school law. Though more current and robust research is underway, there is evidence to support that teacher-powered models improve outcomes for students and cultivate greater student voice and academic performance. 

As I have learned from having spent over a decade in teacher-powered school and from teacher-powered educators across the country, it matters that teachers are provided with the professional autonomy to collectively lead their schools. It makes sense that in any school reform effort, we learn from strategies that are truly community-focused and community-led.