Community Schools: Steady Improvement for Students and Support for Families
A test-score-yardstick and a short time line—those are the tools we use these days to evaluate school improvement. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top gave us four approved plans for school “turnaround,” and if the school wasn’t turned around quick enough, the most stringent of the four was imposed—closure.
Policy makers have assumed that school turnaround could be neat, quick, and cheap only to discover that the solution too often made things worse for the students and their communities. Rachel Cohen, writing for The American Prospect, describes the impact of school closures on neighborhoods—specifically in Chicago where 50 schools were closed at the end of the 2012-2013 school year: “While black students were 40 percent of Chicago’s school district population in 2013, they made up 88 percent of those affected by the closures.” “(T)hree years later, Chicago residents are still reeling from the devastating closures—a policy decision that has not only failed to bring about notable academic gains, but has also destabilized communities, crippled small businesses, and weakened local property values. With the city struggling to sell or repurpose most of the closed schools, dozens of large buildings remain vacant, becoming targets of crime and vandalism throughout poor neighborhoods.” “In Chicago… 87.5 percent of students affected by closures did not move to significantly higher-performing schools.”
A mass of social science research demonstrates the correlation between students’ standardized test scores and their families’ economic circumstances. Recognizing the futility of the school turnaround plans that pretend it is easy to raise test scores, New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has instead been turning schools in the poorest neighborhoods into full-service, wraparound Community Schools with health and dental clinics and services for parents located right in the school building. Here is how the Children’s Aid Society, the huge social service agency in NYC that has been supporting the development of Community Schools, Community Schools: Steady Improvement for Students and Support for Families | janresseger: