Once in a while, I make a big technical error while writing and/or posting on this blog. I made one yesterday. I wrote the first part of the blog, then accidentally posted it before it was finished.
So I’m going to summarize yesterday’s post and finish it here, although I recommend that you read part 1.
Yesterday’s post began by quoting from Rick Hanauer’s 2019 article in The Atlantic, titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.“
Rick, a wealthy venture capitalist who palled around with Bill Gates, realized that charter schools were not going to be the salvation of America, as so many of his friends believed.
He saw the light. The big problem that is ruining our society, he discovered, was not the schools, but economic inequality. Build a thriving middle class, he urged, and the schools will also thrive.
My reaction to his article was this: What do we need more of? Efforts to reduce poverty and to meet the needs of children and families. Understanding that test scores generate rewards for the wealthiest students and discouragement for the neediest. Awareness that “the achievement gap” between rich and poor never closes because standardized tests are normed on a bell curve; the bell curve, by its nature, is designed never to close.
What do we need less of? The misuse of standardized testing to rank children, teachers, and schools. The diversion of public funds from public schools to charter schools, homeschooling, cyber schools, and vouchers for nonpublic schools.
[This is where I pick up from yesterday’s unfinished post.]
With each book I wrote about privatization, I insisted that schools are vital institutions in educating children, but they can’t do it alone. In Reign of Error, I spelled out what I considered a life-course approach to improving the chances of giving children the education they need and deserve.
In the competition between public schools and charter schools, the only measure that outsiders consider is test scores. But that is not right. For many young people whose family lives are marred by deep poverty, it’s miraculous when they manage to show up for school. They choose to go to school, not to babysit a younger sibling, not to take a part-time job delivering to customers, not to hang out in the local park.
What kind of a school is that? The closest approximation of the school that I imagined is a community school.
What are community schools?
There is no standard model, but the overall goal is to serve the urgent needs of students and their families, be they health, nutrition, academics, social, or economic. Schools can’t cure poverty, but they can directly help those in poverty to lead a better life. We don’t measure health and nutrition by their effect on test scores, but we know they are crucial.
Community schools provide wraparound services to students and their parents. Those wraparound services include medical check-ups, dental examinations, screening for eyeglasses.
Community schools typically have a food pantry. They also maintain a closet with warm coats and clothing.
They have social workers who connect parents with resources they need: where to find jobs, how to find housing, how to access government programs designed for them, English language classes, and other services that help them.
Annie Lowery wrote a compelling article in The Atlantic about the importance of community schools. It is titled “The Program That’s Turning Schools Around.” The subtitle, which is misleading is “The key to closing the achievement gap may lie outside the classroom.” As I said before, the achievement gap may narrow, but it never closes, because bell curves never close. And this is not the purpose of community schools. Their purpose is to meet the needs of students and families. Being well-nourished and healthy is important and necessary, regardless of its relationship to test scores.
She opens:
On a chilly day before Christmas, Teresa Rivas helped a tween boy pick out a new winter coat. “Get the bigger one, the one with the waterproof layer, mijo,” she said, before helping him pull it onto his string-bean frame. Rivas provides guidance counseling at Owen Goodnight Middle School in San Marcos, Texas. She talks with students about their goals and helps if they’re struggling in class. She’s also a trained navigator placed there by a nonprofit called Communities in Schools.
The idea behind CIS and other “community school” programs is that students can’t succeed academically if they’re struggling at home. “Between kindergarten and 12th grade, kids spend only 20 percent of their time” in a classroom, Rob Watson, the executive director of the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me. If America wants kids to thrive, he said, it has to consider the 80 percent. Educators and school administrators in San Marcos, a low-income community south of Austin, agreed. “Tests and academics are very important,” Joe Mitchell, the principal of Goodnight Middle School, told me. “But they are secondary sometimes, given what these kids’ lives are like away from here.”
Along with mediating conflicts and doing test prep, Rivas helps kids’ families sign up for public benefits. She arranges for the nonprofit to cover rent payments. She sets up medical appointments, and keeps refrigerators and gas tanks full.
Lowery points out that the Trump administration is cutting the federal programs that support community schools:
But the country is veering in the other direction. The White House has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from a free-school-meal initiative, ended a $1 billion grant covering mental-health counseling, and revoked $170 million from the federal community-schools program, which helps cover the salaries of hundreds of workers like Rivas. Other whole-child initiatives might lose financing if they are found to fall under the Trump administration’s DEI rubric. At the same time, the White House is reducing financial support for low-income families, cutting more than $1 trillion from SNAP and Medicaid.
The United States wants schools to act as a “great equalizer,” yet socioeconomic differences among students remain the central drivers of student outcomes. Community schools can’t prevent homelessness, pay for health insurance, or stop parents from getting deported; they cannot construct a strong safety net. Still, they can help to close the gap.
Lowery writes about one long-lived program called Communities in Schools, which has been active for half a century and serves 2 million students in 26 states. she notes that CIS is three times the size of Headstart.
The nonprofit has a few unusual qualities. For one, it doesn’t apply rigid criteria or means tests in determining who gets help, and doesn’t provide a set menu of benefits to students and families. The model is adaptable.
In some districts, navigators focus on violence prevention or absenteeism. In San Marcos, they focus on behavioral health. Inside schools, CIS staff members created lamp-lit, womblike rooms, stocked with fidget toys and snacks, where kids can calm down and talk about their feelings. Some middle-school girls told me that Rivas helped them with “drama and stuff”—meaning “girls fighting over boys.” One boy who was having trouble sleeping and had a 69 average in math told me that Rivas was helping get his eyes shut and his grades up. “You only need one more point!” she said, beaming…
CIS workers help families navigate existing public programs. “The traditional economist view would have been, Just give people cash. They’ll figure out what to do with it,” Goldman told me. But decades of studies have found that families in crisis don’t know that help is out there, possess limited capacity to research complex social-safety-net initiatives, and are averse to signing up for benefits, given the stigma. Community schools take paperwork away from stressed-out families and put it on trained employees.
Jeff Bryant has been writing about community schools for years. Jeff is chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a messaging center for progressive education policy.
Jeff recently published an important article about Trump’s draconian cuts to programs that support community schools.
Jeff spoke to educators at Curie High School in Chicago, who complained about the cuts and their effects on students.
Chicago schoolteacher Claudia Morales may have been reflecting the feelings of most Americans about life under the Trump presidential administration when she told Our Schools, “Every day, there’s yet another abuse. It’s scary. And it’s coming from our own government.” In her work as a bilingual program teacher and bilingual coordinator at Curie High Schoolin Chicago Public Schools (CPS), she’s been witness to one trauma after another.
“First, there were the funding cuts the Trump administration made,” said Morales, referring to the federal government’s decision to withhold more than $4 billion in funds for public education at the start of the 2025-2026 school year. CPS was particularly hit hard by the cuts, with the district losing millions it had counted on to pay for staffing positions and programs.
“Then we had ICE invade,” Morales recounted, noting that the Archer Heights neighborhood, where most of her students come from, was one of the communities targeted by the federal government’s immigration crackdown. The Trump administration’s decision to rescind the protected status that prohibited immigration raids at schools and student gathering places, like bus stops and playgrounds, made her school’s largely Hispanic student population—many of whom are recent immigrants—especially vulnerable.
“And now this,” she concluded. “This” is the December 2025 announcement from Trump’s U.S. Department of Education, signed by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, to withhold some $380 million in federal funding that was previously granted to schools from the department’s full-service community schools (FSCS) program. The initiative provides support for the planning, implementation, and operation of the community school approach to school improvement. The community school approachtransitions traditional schools from being strictly academic institutions into community hubs that provide student and family support services based on resources and voices of the surrounding community. The strategy is showing promise in improving student outcomes nationwide, but that seems irrelevant to current federal officials.
As a result of the funding cut-off to Chicago schools, according to Morales, Curie will lose money it needs to pay for tutors, after-school programs, parent education courses, and academic support for students who struggle with learning. These are programs and services parents specifically asked the school to provide, said Morales.
The loss of funding for in-school and after-school tutors will be especially damaging to the students’ academic achievement, according to educators at Curie.
When it comes to the most vulnerable students and their families, the Trump administration seems determined to make their lives harder and to cut the federal programs in which they rely.
Diane Ravitch's blog 