Bill de Blasio’s Community Schools Challenge

New York City has launched the most ambitious initiative ever in Community Schools, and many believe that success in America’s largest city could change the face of education nationwide.

The broad outlines of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan look something like this: Start with 94 of the city’s most troubled schools, add an hour of instructional time each day, pump in $150 million over two years, and turn each campus into a functioning Community School, where students can find support for the challenges they face beyond the classroom, from nutrition to mentoring to mental health.

With so much cash and political muscle behind the plan, expectations for a dramatic turnaround are running high — too high, I would argue. Constrained by the four-year political cycle, these freshly minted Community Schools have just three years to produce meaningful results (specifically, improved attendance starting in year two and better academic performance the year after that).

Nobody would ever call me a naysayer, but I just don’t believe we should expect measurable academic gains so quickly — at least not uniformly, and not on such a massive scale. This prediction is based on my experience with Communities In Schools (CIS), a national pioneer of the model now being adopted in NYC. Working primarily with students in poverty, CIS achieves an industry-leading graduation rate of 91 percent, plus significant improvements in behavior, attendance and academics.

Those are numbers that we’re very proud of, but we never get there overnight. Even with our well-established model, when we first arrive in a struggling school, we see initial pockets of improvement alongside inexplicable backsliding and other ambiguous data points.

In the beginning, progress isn’t linear or predictable, and that could be a real problem in a highly politicized environment like NYC. Without a reasonable timeline for success at scale, these shaky initial results could well be misinterpreted and touted as a failure, and the initiative could fall victim to the pressures of an election cycle. With other political leaders announcing similar Community School efforts across the country, the perception of failure in NYC would be a tragedy for the entire movement.

Some will argue that New York is a special case due to a combination of deep pockets and irresistible political will. It’s true that no other Community School experiment of this size has ever enjoyed so much support at the top, but in my experience, it takes time to align high-level support with the type of community leadership that drives change from the bottom up. Indeed, the heart of a community school is a grassroots partnership between community stakeholders, parents and schools.

To be successful, partners must embrace the vision of a more comprehensive role for schools that links education with community development. They must also learn how to collaborate across sectors. This requires that participants identify new ways of addressing the needs of a given school-community with available resources.

In short, becoming a community school is a developmental process.

The work of Ronald Heifetz reminds us that change of this nature requires a focused and sustained effort. According to Heifetz’s framework, leaders are tasked with two types of change: adaptive and technical. Adaptive change requires new learning and innovative solutions from stakeholders, while technical changes require leaders to apply known solutions to straightforward problems.

Becoming a successful community school involves adaptive change, and that is invariably more difficult to implement than technical change. People often must change their values, attitudes and behaviors before they can begin to develop the most effective solutions.

While the leaders of the NYC initiative have deployed powerful evidence-based strategies for a strong foundation, it is a shift in mindset at the grassroots that will lead to real progress — and that takes time.

In no way am I suggesting that Mayor de Blasio is foisting Community Schools upon an unwilling population. Indeed, the mayor has acknowledged that he takes his inspiration from the success of a few existing Community Schools that have already sprung up around the city, thanks to the efforts of organizations like the Children’s Aid Society.

So this is a model that does have support in many parts of the community, and the combination of cash and political conviction will certainly improve the chance for success in time. But money and muscle are both technical change, under the Heifetz framework — and that’s only half the battle. For this work, technical competency is necessary, but not sufficient. For instance, NYC is making major investments in training for various stakeholders, but adaptive learning doesn’t come from a professional development session. Instead, we should look at how principals are being empowered and supported to embrace this new approach and drive systemic change.

At Communities In Schools, we know from experience that principals and teachers eventually become our biggest supporters, but it might take time. Like so many stakeholder groups, they need to see consistent improvement over several years before they truly “own” the Community School model. When it comes to adaptive change, I’m not sure there is any shortcut for this process.

There are some smart, experienced folks running the NYC effort, and they understand that the challenges they face are both practical and political. On the specific issue of adaptive change, city leaders recognize the difficulty of a massive, top-down effort, but they also insist there are some big advantages to the mayor’s approach.

In addition to offering political leadership and financial support, Mayor de Blasio is at pains to weave Community Schools into the very fabric of the city’s social sector. Child Protective Services, Homeless Affairs, Parks and Recreation — practically every department that touches on children and families is being pushed to engage in the Community Schools experiment.

I have often written that public schools need to tear down the silos that separate them from the broader community, and Mayor de Blasio is doing that on a massive scale. In theoretical terms, it will be fascinating to see if this top-down approach to integrating systems will ensure permanence and shorten the time frame for adaptive change at the grassroots. When families and business owners and community leaders start interacting with schools in a whole new way, will it open up their imagination to the vast potential of the Community School model? I hope that it will.

With the full backing of city government, I think New York’s Community Schools could see quick improvement in metrics like engagement and attendance. But this initiative is being implemented in the city’s lowest performing schools, and our expectations should mirror this challenge. For a student who missed 20 days last year, 15 absences would be a sign of progress — and as with any large-scale reform effort, this type of incremental progress is what we ought to measure at first, not an ambitious end goal.

I’m also very concerned about the expectation for academic improvement in just one additional year. Even when metrics like attendance and detentions are moving in the right direction, can we expect an immediate jump in reading level and math scores? If we’re catching students on the downtrend, CIS data suggest the answer is no. It takes time to engage these students, create expectations, and halt their slide. Our research shows that students face a complex, uphill struggle, and without consistent, targeted interventions (known as Integrated Student Supports), they are likely to slide off track once again.

The fact is, three years is probably an unrealistic deadline for any major reform under the very best of circumstances. If New York has the patience and political will to work through pain of a difficult start, I’m certain that Community Schools will eventually lead to higher test scores and improved graduation rates. But the key word is “eventually.” We have to tamp down expectations for immediate results, or else we are dooming this experiment to failure — and we have failed our kids often enough already.