[Ohiogift] Public Education NewsBlast - March 24, 2016

[Art Snyder]

                  ?                    March 24, 2016 - In This Issue:
       We know what works
  Through community schools, gains
  A school the community 'dreamed up,' sustainable
  A day in the life
  Six essential strategies
  Bridging the community
  Organizing society's resources
                                            We know what works

In an article in Bright Magazine, Kyle Serrette writes that a "United States where every public school is a community school would be a very different place... Your bank, local architect, grocery store, hospital, and other institutions we associate with being part of the broader community outside our schools would be deeply integrated into them." The concept is intuitive, Serrette says: In most strapped schools, a principal lacks time to find appropriate community partners, let alone conduct an analysis of needs. Schools adopt a random-partner strategy, which is no strategy at all. A community-school strategy, on the other hand, puts one person in charge of determining a school's ever-evolving needs. With a granular understanding, partnerships can be scaled, connecting schools with similar needs and pairing those that could benefit from each other's strengths. We know what works, Serrette says: culturally relevant and engaging curricula; an emphasis on high-quality teaching over high-stakes testing; wraparound supports, such as health care and social and emotional services; positive discipline practices, such as restorative justice; parent and community engagement; and inclusive school leadership committed to making the community-school strategy integral to a school's mandate and functioning. With recent passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, funds are explicitly available for essential elements such as community school coordinators, needs assessments, and after-school programming.
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 Through community schools, gains
A February 2012 quantitative analysis from the Center for American Progress of California's Redwood City School District's five community schools, which offered 250 programs, services, and events in 2010-11, shows that English-learner students with consistent program participation showed gains in English language development scores. In elementary grades, these gains were tied to family engagement, but continued gains during middle school were associated with frequent extended-learning program participation. Feeling supported at school was linked to students' motivation and academic confidence, both of which were associated with gains in achievement in math for all students and English language development scores for English learners. The report therefore recommends expanding community schools, and, in the current economic climate, urges policymakers at state and federal levels to foreground community schools as an efficient, cost-effective way to leverage scarce resources through citywide partnerships and community-school initiatives. Policymakers should streamline multiple and fractured funding sources to foster common goals, and encourage crucial family engagement by inviting parents to partner in a variety of opportunities both at school and at home. Policymakers can facilitate data collection and analysis by clarifying and aligning regulations on data-sharing at federal and state levels. More
A school the community 'dreamed up,' sustainable
In a profile of the community schools initiative underway in Austin, Texas, Patrick Michels of The Texas Observer describes the Webb Middle School's program of discipline policies built on restorative justice, early college partnerships, daycare programs and mobile clinics for student mothers, new mental health and trauma support programs, on-campus English classes for parents, and new band, orchestra and dance troupes. From 2010 to 2015, Webb went from being the lowest-performing middle school in Austin ISD to one of its best, with an enrollment that has grown 55 percent. At nearby Reagan High School -- also a community school -- enrollment has more than doubled, and its graduation rate has improved from 48 percent to 85 percent. The initiative has been undertaken by Austin Voices for Education and Youth, which continues to build bridges between the schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, and has expanded its efforts to two more Austin high schools and the middle and elementary schools that feed into them. The group has a team of bilingual social workers and community organizers who help families work with school administrators and other support services to design neighborhood schools around shared priorities. "At the end of the day, the school that emerges is the one that the community dreamed up, and that's what I think makes it sustainable," says Allen Weeks of Austin Voices.?More
A day in the life
Community school directors are key to Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan for revitalizing 94 of New York City's low-performing schools, writes Patrick Wall in The Atlantic. The article follows a day in the professional life of Fiorella Guevara, community school director at M.S. 50 in Brooklyn, where one in 10 students passed last year's state English tests, and 40 percent of students are chronically absent. Guevara's role requires switching from nurse to counselor to administrator, Wall writes. She checks in on a bilingual class and comforts a student with an icepack, then drops in on a peer-mediation class she started earlier this year. "My day-to-day is ensuring that the vision we've laid out is going," she explains. "Also, troubleshooting when there's something that's not going right with the plan." Guevara next sits down with the principal and representatives from a non-profit that runs art and theater lessons at the school, and later reviews attendance data with the principal and administrators, pooling ideas around ways the school can offer services on site. She then meets with a teacher to plan an alternative to parent-teacher conferences, whereby parents can attend three workshops throughout the year and be informed of the skills that students must learn, with tips for helping. Finally, Guevara steps in for a missing art teacher, and closes out her day.?More?related


Six essential strategies

A new report from the Center for Public Democracy outlines six essential strategies for community schools, and lists key mechanisms to implement them. Drawing on research, the report recommends engaging, challenging, culturally relevant curricula; high-quality teaching in place of high-stakes testing; wrap-around opportunities such as health care, eye care, and social and emotional services; positive discipline practices, such as restorative justice and social- and emotional-learning supports; authentic parent and community involvement, with full community participation in planning and decision-making; and a leadership committed to making the community-school strategy integral to a school's mandate and functioning. Community schools can implement these strategies through the mechanisms of: an asset and needs assessment of and by both school and community; a strategic plan defining how educators and community partners will use assets to meet specific student needs; the engagement of partners who bring expertise to implement the building blocks of community schools; and a community school coordinator whose specific job is to facilitate development and implementation of the strategic plan in collaboration with school and community members/partners, ensuring alignment of solutions to needs. The report also profiles several community schools across the country where these model strategies are being used to achieve transformational results.?MoreWith better data, better impact

The community schools model is predicated on turning schools into neighborhood hubs where multiple partners deliver a range of services and supports to students, families, and community members, so the model's proponents are now seeking easier access to data, writes Benjamin Herold for Education Week. "Wouldn't it be great if an afterschool coordinator knew something about students' attendance, and teachers knew which of their students were getting tutoring or mental health services?" asks Reuben Jacobson of the Coalition for Community Schools. But technology that would allow information-sharing at scale is still in its infancy. Some community schools have begun to develop web tools, data-sharing infrastructures, and dashboards to allow for mapping community assets, targeting specific services to students and families needing them most, reporting on program impacts, and predictive analytics (around identifying potential dropouts, for example.) More typical, however, are one-off, manually created files. Yet in spite of the complex legal, technical, and logistical hurdles that flow from the process, sites across the country are experimenting and making inroads. Cincinnati; Evansville and Fort Wayne, Indiana; Oakland, California; New Haven, Connecticut; the New York City Public Schools; and Oshkosh, Wisconsin are all using applications of varying degrees of sophistication to map student data with services and resources.?More
Bridging the community
"I'd always held firm to the conviction that, if you showed kids you cared, racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides would fade into insignificance," writes veteran teacher Brock Cohen in The Washington Post. Cohen returned to the classroom as an instructional coach after receiving his doctorate in education, but elected to teach one high school class since he missed direct instruction. He was unprepared for the lack of connection he found with his students, and its ramifications for classroom management and learning. "In all my years of teaching predominantly Latino and Armenian students, racial and cultural differences never seemed to be an obstacle in developing rapport or spurring academic engagement," he says. Yet "regardless of how many hours of purposeful prep time I put in, how deliberate I was about creating time and space within instructional activities for personalized instruction, and how clear and structured my expectations, norms, and procedures were," he found no short-term means to establishing the type of learning environment that made it possible for all his students to thrive. "We like you," one student publically explained. "We just don't respect you... You're not from here. You're not from the 'hood." After this exchange, Cohen reports noticeable positive shifts in attitude and behavior among his students, but it led him to ask whether there was one component unaccounted for in research on how kids learn in the classroom, an element that truly enabled student-teacher relationships in distressed communities to flourish: time.?More?related     Organizing society's resources

As schools work to bring more opportunities to their students through lengthened days, they have forged deeper and sometimes unlikely arrangements with organizations that traditionally provided simple after-school programming, writes Kathryn Baron in a February 2015 article in Education Week. "It's really a joint enterprise with partners who have separate expertise and slightly different missions converging their work to get the results that are important to us both," said Martin Blank of the Institute for Educational Leadership, which houses the Coalition for Community Schools. "We have to think differently about the way we organize society's resources to get kids what they need." These broad new partnerships with community organizations reflect a growing recognition that disadvantaged children and teenagers need greater resources to succeed than any one school or nonprofit alone can provide. Under this collaborative model, community organizations are part of a strategic planning process that offers seamless transitions to enrichment activities that complement what students learn in class. The U.S. Department of Education is currently seeding many of these deeper collaborations through grants from the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, the Full Service Community Schools program, School Improvement Grants, and Race to the Top district grants.?More                                       
 

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