The Brookings Institution reported on a big increase in federal funding for technical assistance for community schools along with the priorities for funding. Unlike charter schools, community schools operate under the supervision of public school boards; they are not operated or owned by private entrepreneurs; they seek to strengthen public educations, not compete with it or replace it. Unlike the federal Charter Schools Program, which provides $400 million + in start-up funds, the funding for community schools is for technical assistance, not basic costs. The CSP has been riddled by waste, fraud, and abuse, and many federally funded charters never open.
The U.S. Department of Education recently announced a notice inviting applications for the Full-Service Community Schools Program to provide high-quality academic, integrated health and social service, and engagement support for all students. The grant program continues to reflect steady increases in the federal appropriations process from an initial $5 million in fiscal year 2009, to $25 million in 2020, $30 million in 2021, $75 million in 2022, and a proposed substantial increase of $468 million in 2023. The exponential growth in investments signals a consistent interest and confidence in community school strategies as a powerful approach to whole-child educational transformation of schools and communities. Similarly, dedicated state funding opportunities in Maryland, New York, and Californiareflect a growing body of evidence from decades of implementation expertise about how community school strategies—when supported and sustained—can leverage the assets and voices of the full community to support student success.
The Community School Forward national task force welcomes this support of community schools as a strategy to increase youth and community voice, ensure rigorous community-connected instruction, extend learning opportunities and improve school climate, health, and mental health, and college and post-secondary student outcomes. The task force recognizes that while funding is necessary to continue to accelerate the growth of community schools, increasing it alone will not directly result in effective community school partnerships and strategies. High-quality technical assistance must be provided to practitioners. The task force project team developed a national needs assessment to gain a clearer picture of what type of community school technical assistance is needed across the country.
WHAT DOES COMMUNITY SCHOOL TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE ENTAIL?
The Children’s Aid National Center for Community Schools (NCCS) is a practice-based technical assistance provider that has supported the startup, scaling, and sustainability of community school initiatives across the country and internationally, NCCS has seen what happens with (and without) strong and consistent guidance and capacity building. We define technical assistance as the process of building the capacity of community school stakeholders to start, scale, and sustain transformational community schools. Informed by a comprehensive needs and assets assessment and guided by a plan jointly developed with the client, technical assistance includes organizing communities of action, facilitating connections, and providing the relevant tools and skills.
In early 2022, in anticipation of technical assistance needs of new and developing community school practitioners, NCCS—in partnership with the Brookings Institution, the Learning Policy Institute, and the Coalition for Community Schools—conducted an assessment of community school practitioners and experts to gauge emerging needs and best practices in implementing community schools and technical assistance. The findings of our inquiry provide important guidance for the Full-Service Community Schools program and other initiatives focused on expanding and deepening effective community school strategies. In our report, “Community Schools Forward: Technical assistance needs assessment,” we summarize the findings of a national study exploring community school technical assistance needs and assets and recommend that technical assistance providers prioritize:
- Model clarity for all stakeholders – ensuring all stakeholders have the same conceptual understanding of community schools and their role within the model.
- Structures and systems for community voices – developing mechanisms that invite democratic processes within a community school.
- Structures and systems for collaborativeleadership – systems and processes that reinforce distributed leadership and collaborative decisionmaking.
- Asset-based thinking – cultivating a perspective that focuses on the strengths of the students, families, and community.
- Sustainability – navigating braided funding and “telling the story” to public and private funders in a way that accurately reflects the work; developing a model or network that is supported by the community and leadership, and not vulnerable to leadership changes.
- Reimagining systems for equity – reviewing existing school processes and structures to determine if the current approach is meeting all student, family, and community needs. Changing those systems that are not meeting the needs of all stakeholders.
- Data systems – developing systems for data collection and analysis that capture accurate data that is connected to identified outcomes and is aligned with a logic model.
- Data culture and continuous improvement – creating a positive and collaborative environment where problems can be identified and solved using data and inquiry.
Additionally in our report, practitioners shared the most impactful strategies that community school decisionmakers and partners can prioritize as part of their developmental process.
Read the full report.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Every Student Succeeds Act gave us ESSA Community Schools. There are pros and cons, but once a district takes the grant money, they welcome lots of “partners” who are “stakeholders” and will have a say in local control. These community schools will work with Wall Street as they make bets for social impact bond investing on student outcomes (which is why teachers are the data collectors we have become). Districts will also outsource as much as possible, as we are currently seeing. ESSA passed with bipartisan support. Both sides seem to work together when it allows public tax dollars to go to private pockets. http://whatsthebigideaschwartzy.blogspot.com/2020/07/blog-post.html
In reading through the report, I read that most of the recommendations were about team building and collaboration within school districts. The data collection requirement could lead to associations with corporate grifters, though. I didn’t see anything too specific about what type of data is acceptable. Data can be as simple as keeping statistics on school attendance, disciplinary actions, student scores and graduation rates. If a school district is required to report an analysis of more detailed statistics, it could always make contract with an institution of higher education instead of a private company.
You nailed it! This is nothing new (your blog post is Dec 2020) and has been quietly waiting in the wings for the infrastructure (testing data bases) to be put in place. Covid helped move it along by putting more children online with online learning platforms. The name sounds so warm and inviting…..Community Schools.
Exactly. The marketing of ed reform is top shelf. Even the districts where the venture capitalists live are being infiltrated by ESSA money/grants & community schools, and parents and community members are distracted by the progressive parts. They are missing so much.
I share your concern.
And, at the very bottom of the article, we get to the rub: more money for data systems, more invalid data leading to derived from invalid tests based on backward and puerile, almost entirely (in ELA) content-free skills lists laughably referred to as “standards.”
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you start treating everything as if it were a nail.
When education policy makers start talking about the “data” they are using, there’s your signal that they haven’t a freaking clue what they are talking about. Here’s why:
This stuff I discuss in that short essay really, really, really, really, really matters. We have been basing education decision making on pseudoscience. It’s long past time to stop doing that.
Forget your invalid “data” from your invalid tests. Use your money to make sure that kids have warm coats and food in their bellies and eyeglasses amd band and science and art equipment and classroom libraries and library libraries with librarians.
cx: more invalid data derived from
I agree, but I doubt there is any way around data collection. Even man years ago data was always part of the process for federal and state grants. However, there is both hard and soft data. Soft data may include parent, student and community surveys, for example. The grants I have been part of always required data, and it is the only way to demonstrate that what was done made a difference. That is why the whole charter school “blank check” system boggles my mind. Look at the result: waste, fraud, embezzling, sweeps contracts and nepotism! Some big time grifters and their paid-off politicians made that crooked arrangement.
To hell with “DATA”*!!
*Capitalized to indicate the absurd reliance on invalid and false data.
The secret sauce of community schools is community. Here’s what that does not mean: having people from the outside come in and, in exchange for a few dollars, impose more pseudoscientific test-based “accountability” so that they, from their distant perches, can have reports to look at. It means actually meeting community needs. Are these kids hungry? Do they have at home children’s books that they own? Do they have a safe place to study? Can they afford the soccer uniform? Stuff that actually freaking matters to local public schools in poor communities.
How about generating some “data” on these things? How many children’s books are in each kid’s home? How many hours a week is the kid read to? How often does this kid see an eye doctor? What is this kid eating for breakfast? How many other kids are in his or her classroom? How many trade books are in that classroom? What can be done to improve these numbers?
I understand the concern, but who would gather that data? Is it voluntary or coerced?
Man, think of the outrage from the anti-BIG GUBMINT crowd. And think of the outrage from those of us who resist others telling us how to raise our own children. Like with the polygamy post. So what? Who cares what the adults do with each other? Now, verified abuse is one thing, but, like the Amish or Mennonites, Orthodox Jews, and/or other fundamentalist sects in whatever religion who choose to raise their children different than most “modern” Americans, they are free, at least according to our Constitution, to do so. Who are you to say what is allowable?
I was simply pointing out that it would be possible to gather actual “data” about stuff that actually matters, concrete facts about kids’ lives rather than the BS data from the invalid tests. Sociologists do the kinds of studies I listed from time to time. And there could be safeguards that require that the data be aggregate, not particular. We already know graduation and pass rates. We don’t need to pay consultants millions and millions to create dashboards to report these. And we certainly don’t need freaking dashboards to lull people into thinking even more than they do now that the numerical info generated with these tests is valid.
We didn’t tell parents how to raise their children. We helped them understand a complicated system that they didn’t understand in order to better serve their children. We explained and assisted; we didn’t dictate or preach. We exposed them to resources that were available, and we even helped them to access them.
Awesome, RT! All of these comments of yours on this thread. Bowing low to you here!!! Seriously.
Community schools are excellent. Data dashboards are for generating consulting fees.
But I look at the lists of people on these committees and what I see is same-old, same-old: the same folks who sold out to develop the utterly invalid national standardized tests based on the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list, the same folks who touted that stuff that was, prima facie, nonsense.
I did see Jitu Brown’s name on the list.
I didn’t like the fact they used the hackneyed “reformy” word: disrupt. I prefer the term, equitable change. We should eschew the language of so-called reform.
Ofc they used the term disrupt. These thought leaders. These saviors with their “data” dashboards!
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/becoming-an-edupundit-made-ez/
All this completely abstract, deformy language about disrupting silos and whatever is simply the contemporary equivalent of hocus pocus (from the Latin hoc est corpus meum, this is my body)–it’s language that purposefully muddies the waters to make them look deep (to use Nietzsche’s phrase). Here, my send-up of its equivalent in business, from which education borrows so many of its extremely bad ideas, one of the latest of which is “data dashboards,” which all go back to the consultancy dashboard business that sprang out of Kaplan and Norton’s article in the Harvard Business Review in 1992, “The Balanced Scorecard–Measures That Drive Performance.” It always takes the education guru set decades to pick up on this stuff and then damagingly misapply it to education.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/06/26/centcom-dxs-ts-kpis/
Here’s the 411 on Ed Deforms, in four words:
Profoundly negative unintended consequences
Here’s the scoop on dashboards. Back in 1992, Norton and Kaplan published that article in the Harvard Business Review that argued that businesses typically judge performance based on financials (income statements, balance sheets) but that these are “lag measures,” backward looking. They suggested that businesses should add metrics in three other areas, in addition to Financial: Customers, Internal Processes, Knowledge and Growth. And then there emerged, in responses, an enormous consultancy business in creating for C-level executives “Data Dashboards” with, ideally, real-time metrics in each of these four areas: what Norton and Kaplan called “A Balanced Scorecard.” And that’s what happens in education. People partially hear about something that happened over in business or linguistics or whatever and then misapply it to schools,, teaching, learning, and school administration. So, a benchmark, which in business meant a measured high rate of performance that provided a goal to be reached (e.g., the shortest read-write time for a hard drive) became any interim assessment. So, educators borrowed “benchmarks” from business, barely understood the concept, misapplied it, and kids ended up losing enormous amounts of instructional time taking invalid “benchmark tests” to see how they were “progressing” toward “demonstrating proficiency” on actual standardized tests.
Sounds to me like another group of saviors is ready to provide Security-Heightened Information Technologies and act as Change Agents, not only Architecting the Roadmaps and the Enterprise-Enablers, the Communications Plans and Transformation Plans, but also Facilitating and Fast Tracking the Action Items over the Event Horizon to effect Fundamental Disruptions of Existing Paradigms using Best Practices to achieve via Cross-Functional Deployment and Data Dashboards new Centers of Excellence!!!
LMAO. I’m getting too old to read another example of this hooey.
Tell me one freaking concrete actual thing that you are going to do for one kid or teacher. Anything real that makes any freaking difference.
Well, I’m going to make sure that every kid in Chicago or Buffalo has a warm coat this coming winter. Well, I’m going to make sure that every elementary school kid in these cities has a bookshelf of kids’ books THAT HE OR SHE OWNS at home. Well, I’m going to make sure that every one of these kids has a safe place to go study in the evening, with access to homework helpers. That kind of real.
Want to be able to pay for that? Get rid of the standardized testing, which is pseudoscience, like astrology or phrenology.
My district decided to invest in greater equity in the 1980s. We did it on our own by doing exactly what is described in the report. We did tons of outreach to poor families and hired community liaisons, that not only translated, they drove parents to social services offices or met them in school buildings. The PTA did its part by helping with field trip money, instrument rentals and uniform rentals. Teachers ran a football pool to help buy glasses for needy students. High school staff filled out college applications with poor students and their parents. Everyone pitched in, and it took a village. The payoff was tremendous! So many poor ELLs and Black American students graduated from college or skilled trades and have decent careers today.
Based on the post and the comments, I think I would tend to agree with Bob. Open-ended legislative language like this is intended to allow bureaucrats or people with narrow interests into the room to refine who the winners and losers will be. And this will set the policy for years to come, with only incremental change possible until the next wave of reform legislation that may become law.
This is especially sinister if there is specific language detailing what data and how it should be collected. Why be specific here and vague everywhere else? You don’t have to be The Shadow to know the answer to that standardized test question. (We’ve got to keep these cultural references alive!)
Whoops, that was a general comment, not directed to you RT.
It is difficult for poor students to study in crowded homes. We ran a homework center at all our schools after school four days a week. We introduced parents and families to the public library through our language liaisons and teachers.
Awesome. The things you describe are NOT
“However, many feel hindered by not
having a consistent stream of data from their school
and/or external partners. Barriers cited included not
being able to access student-level data due to federal
privacy laws such as the Family Educational Rights and
Privacy Act (FERPA), or not having data infrastructure in
place that enables reliable and efficient collection and
analysis. Practitioners desire a system with a studentlevel dashboard that dynamically provides information
at the individual or sub-group levels on metrics such
as attendance and grades, as well as enrollment and
participation in services.”
To quote the report. What I see in this is more of the same with the language changed. This time the glittering generality at the top of the page, in the title, is Community Schools (a good thing, yes, indeed), but the down-and-dirty detail is the same-old, same-old. More Deformy data, but now in more intrusive “dashboards.” So, the now 20-year-old dashboard thing from the business world finally gets implemented on the Education Carnival Midway. Been there, done that. Take a really bad idea from business, water it down, misunderstand and misapply it to education, with lots and lots of unintended negative consequences. Yeah, this is what kids and teachers in community schools really need–more people in think tank groups across the country and more people in district offices looking at dashboards.
Excuse me, but I think I’m going to be ill.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping-2/
Notice that absolute generality and vagueness of the language used in these reports and prospectives. It’s all from 50,000 feet. NOTHING is concrete. Except, more data. More outside committees. Dashboards.
Where’s the barf bag.
It’s difficult for poor students to study in crowded homes. Amen.
Kids need books that BELONG TO THEM, that are theirs. Amen again.
Concrete, practical stuff with concrete, practical possible solutions. Precisely what I don’t see in any of this.
What I do see, YET AGAIN. More saviors swooping in with their blithering abstract hype and their requirements for “data.” And, of course, their consultancy invoices.
Because wherever in education there are reports full of blithering generalities in highly abstract language, the reams of consultancy invoices are not far behind.
The main objective must be to better serve students. There must be direct services baked in, not simply data collection. There are already some schools that seem to be getting good results using the community model. If it is done correctly, it will be so much better than test and punish. I hear your valid concerns, particularly about the possibility of trying to turn into another corporate charade. The barbarians are at the gates! We know that. The fact that my district did this successfully without any corporate involvement shows it can be done.
While I am heartened to see increased funding for public schools, I can’t help but be a little skeptical about NCCS, which appears to getting free promotion via this post. The fact that they feature a pull-quote from Arne Duncan on their website is a big red flag for me. More information about their funding would be in order. NEA has a Community Schools Institute with similar services. Why not also feature them? https://www.nea.org/student-success/great-public-schools/community-schools
Good point!