*School Community Relationship, *Socioeconomic

This paper, a review of recent literature dealing with the politics of school-community relations, attempts to order and analyze the main themes, identify the participants and settings, and describe the research approaches of the literature. One school of thought views education as separate from political concerns and maintains that schools should relate to the community only on particular issues about which decisions must be made. The more prevalent viewpoint studies schools within a political context and observes processes of decisionmaking to see how schools are run. Participants in school-community relations include school boards, superintendents, influentials, and citizens. Settings have become important as researchers adopt the viewpoint that school-community relations should be examined within their societal contexts. Unfortunately, the relative newness of research in school-community relations has caused a divergence of research methods, and the conseent generalizations lack unanimity. (Author/JP)