Joyce Epstein

Joyce L. Epstein is director of both the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships and the National Network of Partnership Schools, and a research professor of education and sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on how leadership at the district and school levels affects the quality of a school’s programs on family and community involvement and on results for students. In all of her work, she is interested in the connections between research, policy and practice.

She has over 100 publications on family and community involvement. These include School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, Third Edition (Corwin Press, 2009), which guides partnership program development, and School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Preparing Educators and Improving Schools, Second Edition (Westview Press, 2011), a textbook for college courses for future teachers and administrators. Two co-authored books for practitioners are Multicultural Partnerships: Involve All Families and Family Reading Night (Taylor and Francis, 2012 and 2015, respectively).

She was named a fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2009 and received the 2009 Elizabeth Cohen Award for Applied Research from AERA’s Sociology of Education Special Interest Group. In 1995, she established the National Network of Partnership Schools, which provides professional development that enables school, district and state leaders to establish, strengthen and sustain research-based programs on family and community involvement linked to student success in school.