Caring school communities

There recently has been a renewed appreciation of the importance of social context to effective schools. This article describes an ongoing program of research on schools as caring communities. The research spans about a decade and a half and involves a diverse set of elementary schools from across the United States. The findings indicate that sense of school community can be enhanced for both students and teachers, that it is associated with a wide range of positive outcomes for both, and that the potential benefits of enhancing school community may be greatest in schools with large numbers of economically disadvantaged students. At the same time, it is noted that enhancing community has the potential for producing negative as well as positive outcomes, and that the content of the community values is of critical importance. Overall, the concept of school as community appears to provide a powerful framework for looking at educational practice and guiding educational reform efforts.