What’s working in Cincinnati and Boston
Not closing schools. Not firing teachers.
Not charters.
Not vouchers. Not diverting tax
revenue to private and religious schools.
Not Teach for America
Not more tests with more negative consequences.
Partnering
with non-profits to provide a wide range of coordinated intervention,
prevention, enrichment and remedial services to kids – like their middle-class
peers take for granted in well funded school districts.
American Public Media’s Marketplace featured the Cincinnati
Tackling poverty along with reading
and arithmetic
Part
one: It's never too early for a good start in education Video runtime: 6:10
Kai Ryssdal: Education is the great equalizer. It's historically
the path out of poverty in this country. But how do you get poor kids to do
well in class if they're not getting enough to eat at home? Or they need
glasses? Or their parents can't help them with their homework at night?
What if you took care of a lot of the stuff that's supposed to happen
outside school in school?
In the second of two stories on education and poverty, Marketplace's Amy
Scott takes us to a school in Cincinnati
“Cincinnati’s community learning centers are revitalizing the city’s
neighborhoods, bringing families back into public schools and instilling a new
sense of hope in neighborhoods where students often gave up on their education.
Many share the vision of an education system that serves children from the
early years through their transition to post-secondary learning and careers.”
Selected Results from Cincinnati
- Since adopting the CLC
strategy,
- CLCs are demonstrating
improvement. In 2007–08, only 30.8 percent of CLCs had a rating of
continuous improvement or higher; in 2010–11, 73.1 percent of CLCs
achieved that distinction.
- High school graduation
rates climbed from 51 percent in 2000 to 83 percent in 2009.
- The achievement gap
between African American students and white students narrowed from 14.5
percent in 2003 to 4.3 percent in 2009.
The Community Learning Center
Institute
The Community Learning Center Institute leads the ongoing engagement of
the Greater Cincinnati community in the development of all schools as community
learning centers, each with a set of financially self-sustaining, co-located
community partnerships responsive to the vision and needs of each school and
its neighborhood.
Here’s a similar successful community based program in Boston
What Works: Boston
Twenty years
of “school reform” via vouchers, charters and tax credits has not shown them to
be systematically any more effective than traditional public schools when it
comes to educating high poverty populations of kids. Here’s an
alternative approach that bears closer scrutiny by education policymakers at
the state and federal levels:
“The City Connects team has been collecting and analyzing data for
10 years that demonstrate their approach to addressing non-school factors
significantly improves academic performance and narrows the achievement gap.
Briefly, their students are doing better on standardized tests, have less retention in grade and chronic absenteeism, and are less likely to drop out of school than students who are never
part of City Connects.”
More on Turning Schools
Around
Education
Week Public Engagement & Ed Reform Blog By Stu Silberman on November 6,
2012 8:45 AM
In
a recent blog post about turning
around chronically low performing schools, I stressed the critical importance
of principal leadership in making such turnarounds possible.
In
response, I heard from staff at City Connects, a non-profit
organization that addresses out-of-school factors that affect learning (hunger,
homelessness, violence, etc.) in the Boston and Springfield , MA
At
City Connects, trained School Site Coordinators work with teachers and school
staff to look at the whole child across four domains: academics,
social/emotional/behavioral, health and family. Together, they identify the in-
and out-of-school factors affecting every student and match students to
community- and school-based services and enrichment activities most appropriate
for their individual strengths and needs. The current work is in K-5/K-8 schools with
pilots underway for early childhood and high school models.
The
results they report are impressive. For a cost of less than $500 per child,
they are helping to break through achievement gaps. I believe this program (and
others like it), in conjunction with strong development of principals, should
be replicated around the country to help turn around chronically low-
performing schools.
Here’s the website for City Connects…..
Welcome to
City Connects
We
are an innovative school-based intervention that revitalizes student support in
grades K-8. City Connects collaborates with teachers and school staff to
identify the strengths and needs of every child. We then create a uniquely
tailored set of intervention, prevention, and enrichment services located in
the school and community designed to help each student learn and thrive. By
address the in- and out-of-school factors that impact children, we help
students succeed in school.
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