Editor's Introduction
Catherine R. Cooper and Patricia Gándara

In industrialized countries, students' pathways through school to work have been described as an "academic pipeline." Democracies hold an ideal of access to educational opportunities by choice and advancement by merit, but in reality, as students move through primary and secondary school to college, the numbers of ethnic minority and low-income youth in the academic pipeline shrink. The studies in this volume, all conducted through CREDE, the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence, address the academic pipeline problem by focusing on three key themes: (1) understanding how access to schooling is enhanced or curtailed by sociocultural factors; (2) identifying ways the academic pipeline can be kept open for diverse students, and (3) helping students bridge their worlds of families, peers, schools, and communities.

The approaches found in this set of articles elucidate students' social worlds with multi-level, developmental perspectives on students, their relationships, institutional settings, and cultural communities. Rather than seeing diversity as a liability or deficit from the mainstream, this new "cultural bridges" research reveals both resources and challenges by mapping the factors---personal, relational, institutional, and cultural---that help students navigate across their worlds and stay in the academic pipeline. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used by these researchers, often in the same study. We envision this volume contributing to both policy and practice in local, state, and national settings where concerns for making diversity work are at the top of schools' and youth organizations' agendas.

In the articles by Adger and by Collignon, Men, and Tan, the authors map the terrain of community-based organizations (CBOs) that work with diverse communities and elucidate how one such organization serving Southeast Asian immigrants helps bridge native and American cultural forms and structures. These articles add richly to a meager literature on community-based organizations and their contributions as cultural brokers and critical support systems. Adger surveyed 31 organizations and conducted site visits at 17 to provide descriptive analyses of (1) the types of CBOs that partner with schools; (2) the nature of the partnerships that are forged; (3) the kinds of work that they do, and; (4) the factors that contribute to success and failure in these relationships. Adger finds that relationships between partnerships and schools vary from integrated to complementary. Partnerships ran alternative schools, full-service schools, and programs complementing schools' academic programs. The work that partnerships do varies across students' age and grade. At pre-school through middle school, partnerships often focus on parent and family involvement in children's education and provide social services to ensure children are prepared for and supported through school by family and community. At the secondary level, partnerships provide tutoring, school-to-work internships, and programs promoting leadership skills and higher education goals; they also discourage pregnancy and drugs that mitigate educational success for these students.

Collignon and her colleagues focus on Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Vietnamese students in Rhode Island schools. Students from these communities are at risk of educational failure because of differences between the expectations of the schools and students' languages, cultural practices, socioeconomic status, and other legacies of war in their families' homelands. The study examines (1) factors in the multiple cultures---home, school and community---of Southeast Asian students in Rhode Island which prevent or promote their academic achievement; and (2) features of collaborations between community- and school-based programs which impact school achievement. The work of the CBO is based on a belief that by working together, these entities can provide value-added services to students and families in the target population. Their joint activities broker understanding of effective educational practices across generations, languages, and cultures. To focus on student achievement and benefits from these relationships, the project initially sought data about Southeast Asian populations. Finding little, the project generated its own, thereby building a foundation for both understanding and evaluating the community's needs and the effectiveness of the organization in meeting those needs. To make transparent how such an organization promotes its goals, the article describes a specific activity setting for studying features of productive partnerships supporting student success: the Southeast Asian Summer Academy of the Socio-Economic Development Center for Southeast Asians (SEDC) in the Providence School District.

The articles by Azmitia and Cooper and by Gándara, Gutiérrez, and O'Hara focus on European American and Latino adolescents as they journey through adolescence in middle and high schools. Both articles take a developmental perspective, analyzing students' attitudes, relationships, and achievement over time. These articles trace how families, peers, communities, and schools interact with these students to both support and impede their academic progress and aspirations. Azmitia and Cooper put the question succinctly: Are peers good or bad for the academic outcomes of Latino and European American youth? They find that the answer to this question is that they are both-–good and bad. Their critical contribution is in describing how peers affect the academic trajectories of their fellow students and in suggesting what schools and programs can do to tip the balance in favor of good. Azmitia and Cooper describe the increasing solidarity that students in special academic programs come to feel with other students who have shared the same experiences over time. Shared experiences and shared goals can provide the basis for supportive and affirming peer relations that lead to successful postsecondary outcomes.

Gándara and her colleagues investigate the differences in the ways that Latino and European American youth experience schooling, peers, and relationships with parents over the critical identity-forming years of high school in a rural and an urban high school. The authors find that the context of schooling –rural or urban—exerts a significant influence on the formation of postsecondary aspirations, independent of ethnicity. Thus, on some dimensions, the fact that a student is Latino or White is less important than that she goes to school in a rural environment. Risks are also very different in these two environments. The urban environment offers all the traditional risks that strike terror in the hearts of parents–drugs, alcohol, pressure for sexual experimentation, and gang activity. But the somewhat more protected rural environment, in which there are no anonymous students, offers its own kind of risks—ignorance of opportunity and restricted visions of the "possible self." Ultimately, however, being a student of color adds additional risks and limits academic opportunity. Gándara and her colleagues explore these risk factors and describe ways students attempt to construct their academic identities through the eyes of their peers, families, and communities.

The articles by Durán, Durán, Perry-Romero, and Sanchez and by González, Andrade, Civil, and Moll shift the focus from the school as the context of activity to the community. Each article looks at structured activities in the community that have the potential to contribute, sometimes in unexpected ways, to the academic competencies of Latino youth. Durán and his colleagues describe a project centered on developing computer-based literacy and empowerment for low-income Latino parents and their school children. Small groups of parents were invited to participate and interact with their children on computers in an after-school setting. In addition to documenting the process of helping parents learn skills to support their children's learning, the project sought to evaluate the extent to which parents also learned practical computer skills. Pre- and post-project assessments showed statistically significant gains in parents' knowledge of computers. Embedded formative performance assessments, ethnographic data, field notes, and video data were also used to trace processes through which parents and children worked together to learn technology skills and apply them to publishing. As parents and children were guided with planning, drafting, writing and editing computer-based texts in joint publication, the project itself became a new community-based organization fostering literacy and bridging community, homes, and schools. Thus, the Duran et al. article points the way to an innovative model for involving parents in their children's education, while profiting the experience themselves in very tangible ways.

González and her colleagues offer an example of how community knowledge can be tapped to strengthen the academic experiences of Latino youth. Drawing on the long-term study of "funds of knowledge" in local communities, González and her colleagues apply the model to an investigation of the mathematical potential of Latino households. The authors describe ways women participating in a sewing circle use and model sophisticated mathematical knowledge that might otherwise be unacknowledged by schools and even by their own children. They find that the same women who may be viewed as lacking the competency to help their children in the study of mathematics in fact use mathematical concepts in their daily work. The authors note, however, that while other classroom knowledge domains such as literacy and language arts may draw in a rather straightforward fashion from households, mathematical knowledge may not be so easily incorporated. Thus, the article investigates the ways in which household mathematical knowledge may be translated into practices that support children's academic development. In so doing, this work contributes significantly to our understanding the potential for families and communities to be involved in practical ways in supporting the educational trajectories of diverse youth.

Finally, Henze focuses on broader themes of racial prejudice, segregation, and the potential for schools to serve as allies in the quest for better inter-group relations. Henze poses the question whether schools can serve such a function, given their history of social reproduction of inequality, and notes that she is not alone in questioning whether this is a realistic possibility. Nonetheless, she describes the experience of "Cornell" school, which deals simultaneously with the need to provide language instruction for children who do not speak English sufficiently well to access the core curriculum and the need to integrate children across ethnic groups to break down tensions and suspicions fostered by segregation. Henze points out the real tensions between competing goals and methods that have no easy resolution. However, she also describes innovative classroom teaming and parent involvement classes that allow parents, as well as students, the opportunity to come to know each other across ethnic lines. Her message is one of realism, but also of hope. Henze suggests that by paying attention to the difficult task of bridging families, schools, and communities we can, indeed, create a more equitable society, and that schools may play a significant role in this enterprise.

Finally, in each of their commentaries on this special issue, García and Epstein enrich our perspectives by placing the articles in broader context of emerging coalitions among researchers, policymakers, educators, and community members. García juxtaposes examples of innovative diversity policies and practices in corporate business with the studies of this volume to illuminate the multidimensional "holographic" processes that build communities as full partnerships among their stakeholders. Epstein's thoughtful analysis of designing bridges across home, school, and community delineates some of the new structures, processes, and practices available from the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence, the National Network of Partnership Schools, and other coalitions on behalf of diverse students, families, and communities. We hope this volume stimulates the further growth of such coalitions.

Acknowledgment

This work was supported under the Education Research and Development Program, PR/Award No. R306A60001, the Center for Research on Education, Diversity and Excellence (CREDE), as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students (NIEARS), U.S. Department of Education (USDoE). The contents, findings and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of OERI, NIEARS, or the USDoE.