School Social Work and Community Schools: Interrogating Aligned Fields with Critical Systems Theory

The community schools movement has grown substantially in the last decade, fueled in part by significant federal investments in these strategies. As a strategy, community schools aim to utilize the school as a hub of community development, typically by providing integrated student academic and social supports, afterschool and enrichment programs, family and community engagement, and collaborative leadership.

Scholarship on community schools often appears in school social work journals, and school social work scholars have called for our profession to make stronger conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions to community schools literature. Despite the potential alignment between the fields, critical dialogue between them is still lacking. Furthermore, since some of the most impactful social work scholarship on community schools, significant updates have been made to both fields, through a new framework for community schools, as well as an updated model of school social work practice.

Drawing from critical systems theory, this presentation aims to introduce community schools as a strategy to build equity in schools, interrogate the alignment and conflicts between social work and community schools, and identify shared directions for both fields.

First, the presentation will conceptualize community schools through a critical systems perspective. Critical systems theory merges systems theory with a critical social science perspective, acknowledging that system components, subcomponents and processes and self-maintenance are not inherently neutral, but reflect historical power dynamics and oppression. We argue this conceptualization provides novel interpretations of the assumptions behind community schools, as well as some of the successes, challenges, and shortcomings of community schools. Specifically, the argument will be made that the recent model offers much in acknowledging the inputs to and actors within the system, but it is unclear about its theoretical underpinnings and may be insufficient to ensure the advancement of justice and equity. Doing so highlights crucial gaps to be addressed by complementary fields and models.

Second, the presentation will examine the alignment between community schools and school social work. The recent “National School Social Work Practice Model 2.0” centralizes equity, and thus has significant value to community schools. However – like any model – it presents its own set of theoretical limitations and assumptions in need of critique, many of which are illuminated with a critical systems approach. Such areas include the need to address internal conflict, internal and how external resource allocation and energy expenditure can advance equity in complex, sometimes coercive systems.

If community schools aim to advance equity and social justice, our field of school social work has much to offer, including minimizing problematic gaps and enhancing clarity, while attending to limitations in our own approaches. Such discussion is especially important in light of the current sociopolitical environment, where major funding streams for community schools previously housed in the U.S. Department of Education are at risk, and initiatives to advance equity and social justice broadly are under attack. Community schools offers a hyper-localized strategy to mobilize resources specific to community needs, and school social work can help ensure ongoing movement towards equity and social justice.