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.