Just Schools: Building Equitable Collaborations with Families and Communities

By Ann Ishimaru  (Teacher’s College Press, 2019)

Ann Ishimaru’s Just Schools has been a welcome and significant influence at The Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center. We loved this book so much upon reading it that we immediately recommended it for book study with some of our communities of practice and developed a reflection guide to accompany discussions.

Ishimaru achieves something in this book that evades many authors: the ability to convey complex and aspirational ideas in a way that is both easy to understand and grounded in practice. Just Schools develops the concept of equitable collaboration, which emphasizes giving access to the role of educational leader to non-dominant families in schools as part of moving toward “a culture of shared responsibility.” Ishimaru’s work is significant as it gives strategies for adapting family engagement systems in ways that reduce power differentials not only between families and the school, but also between dominant and non-dominant families in the school community.

Just Schools’ power lies not only in the concepts it introduces, but in how they are illustrated through case studies, providing a tangible sense of how schools can adapt their agendas to center family and community concerns and allow families to lead in seeking solutions and next steps.

This article appears in the May 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 8, p. 7.