The Inability to Do Right

If you hang around K-12 education in this country long enough, like most other things, what comes around goes around.

The Atlantic recently published a piece titled “The Program That’s Turning Schools Around.” It’s a story about how important non-profits like Communities in Schools and others are when it comes to providing wrap-around services for kids – kids who are mostly black, brown, and poor. Wrap-around services provide support like food and housing access, health care providers, and the like to help kids and families survive daily life.

“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 12^th 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 school.’”

“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.”

“A new study demonstrate that such efforts have long-term effects. Benjamin Goldman, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell, and Jamie Gracie, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, evaluated data on more than 16 million Texas students over two decades, examining data from the Census Bureau and IRS, as well as state records on academic outcomes. They found that they introduction of CIS led to higher test scores, lower truancy rates, and fewer suspensions in Texas schools. The program bumped up high-school graduation rates by 5.2 percent and matriculation rates at two-year colleges by 9.1 percent. At age 27, students who had attended a CIS school earned $1,140 more a year than students who had not.”

CIS was created in 1977 to empower students with communities of care and support so they can achieve their dreams. Today, Communities in Schools work in over 3,500 schools and serve over 2 million students across the nation every year. More importantly, there are other groups like CIS that are doing similar work with similar results.

So you might ask – if CIS and groups like them are so successful giving kids wrap-around support so that they can focus more on academic achievement, why aren’t more traditional K-12 districts using these services more?

When I worked in the Houston Independent School District, CIS was one of our most successful partners. But two reasons limited their impact.

First, one of the first items to be cut out of the school district’s budget was Communities in Schools and other providers like them. The district didn’t assign budgetary importance to their services, like the time wrap-around services were cut in favor of fixing roofs and other deferred maintenance needs.

Second, most school districts don’t play well in the proverbial sand pile when it comes to partners. School districts want to make the final decision, even when their partners might have far greater experience with the subject at hand.

Third, and we’ve talked about this before, school districts are notoriously bad at making a commitment to do the things that research tells them work. There are plenty of examples from most K-12 school districts that the top decision-makers don’t do what they know is right. Usually, there is some sort of adult agenda that prevents research-based decision-making from taking place.

When I read The Atlantic article, it reminded me of why a new learning system has to be created – because the current traditional system just isn’t ready to make a commitment to the things they know are good for kids.

Til tomorrow. SVB