Evaluating school-community participation in developing a local sustainability agenda

Increasingly, international and national statements are calling for the development of local sustainability scenarios within partnerships between schools and their communities. The present study addresses the question of reciprocity in such partnerships, by comparing the sustainability agendas underlying schools' educational programs to the sustainability agendas of the students' parents. The study was conducted among four urban school-community systems in Israel, implementing sustainability education. The results revealed a lack of reciprocity. Schools and parents belong to two different populations, with different sources of influence. Schools' agenda seems to be mostly influenced by ministerial centralization. Schools' and parents' sustainability agendas were compared against the 15 perspectives of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development International Implementation Scheme. Parents' agendas were highly compatible with the perspectives, whereas schools' educational programs, focusing mainly on environmental science, lacked compatibility with the perspectives. The suitability of the perspectives to school settings is questioned.