NYC Public Schools Launch Next Generation Community Schools
New York City continues to advance innovative K-8 educational programming with the launch of Next Generation Community Schools (NGCS), a strategy to enhance the academic offerings of Community Schools. With support from the Robin Hood Foundation through the Fund for Public Schools, 20 K-8 New York City Community Schools have been selected to pilot NGCS, and NYC Opportunity and NYC Public Schools have commissioned the RAND Corporation (RAND) to evaluate the implementation of NCGS.
This new evaluation builds on the successful impact study conducted in 2019 of the NYC Schools Community Schools program. That evaluation, commissioned by NYC Opportunity and led by RAND, showed that the City’s Community Schools improve student attendance, on-time grade progression, and graduation rates, compared to non-community schools. Further, the study found that Community Schools reduce disciplinary incidents for elementary and middle school students. The study also found that Community School students in grades 3–8 had higher math scores.
Building on the success of this approach, NYC Schools continues to innovate on the model, and this new evaluation will assess some of these newly added strategies. As NYC Public Schools Chancellor David C. Banks stated in his announcement of the pilot program, NGCS is the next step in reimagining students’ experience with public schools. NGCS builds on the success of the Community Schools strategy by further emphasizing integration between Community Schools’ services and programs, and high-quality academics. NYC Public Schools has partnered with Relay Graduate School of Education, Bank Street College of Education, the Youth Policy Lab out of the University of Michigan and Change Impact to give the NGCS school teams extensive professional development and coaching to leverage community school assets and enhance instruction. RAND will investigate whether and how NGCS is achieving its goals and will seek to identify best practices with potential for replication across the City’s Community Schools network.
What are Community Schools?
NYC Community Schools are partnerships between schools and Lead Community Based Organizations (CBOs) in support of students and their families, and their communities. Community Schools maintain NYC Public Schools’ focus on “the whole student” by integrating school with youth development, family support, health and social services, and community development. They connect students and families with critical programs and services such as medical and mental healthcare, mentors, and expanded-day learning programs for students. NYC Public Schools launched Community Schools in 2014 with 45 schools; now the program has grown to 421 schools across the five boroughs.
Why do we need a “next generation” of Community Schools?
Although RAND’s 2020 study found positive impacts on students’ performance in math, it did not find any statistically significant improvements in English Language Arts. This points to a need for a deeper focus on rigorous academics to support students’ success. The Brookings Institution released a blueprint for the next generation of Community Schools in which schools more actively engage students as learners and offer rigorous, project-based curricula. The blueprint also urged Community Schools to further integrate academics with students’ lived experiences and communities through culturally responsive pedagogy.
Heeding this call to action, NYC Public Schools developed a NGCS strategy that adds three fundamental academic enhancements to the Community Schools model:
- Collaborative Leadership Development: Change Impact is leading this work by training the 20 community school teams in collaborative leadership practices and parent-teacher collaboration for student academic success.
- Instructional Leadership Development: Relay Graduate School of Education is offering professional learning and targeted coaching to the 20 community school principals, community school directors, and instructional leadership teams designed around the core capacities of a community school — collaboration, coordination, connectedness, continuous improvement — with a sharpened focus on instructional leadership and data-driven decision-making.
- Curricular Support/Enhancement: Bank Street College of Education and the Youth Policy Lab out of the University of Michigan are providing training and targeted technical assistance to support community-based organizations in the 20 community schools in implementing a game-based, early math curriculum in kindergarten classrooms during expanded learning time. This is being implemented in kindergarten.
These components will amplify classroom instruction by equipping Community School leadership, staff, and community partners with the knowledge and skills to collaborate, align, and strengthen their curricular and instructional practices across their various academic programs.
How does the NGCS pilot work?
NYC Public Schools and partners will design a comprehensive suite of supports for the 20 Community Schools selected to pilot NCGS. These Community School teams will now have access to high-quality learning sessions, site-based coaching, and ongoing professional support as they reimagine their schools with an enhanced focus on high-quality academics.
What are the goals of the implementation evaluation?
RAND will assess implementation of the NGCS pilot over the next two years. Their report, set to be released in 2026, will document successes and challenges, and offer recommendations to improve the model and its implementation. Additionally, the research findings will inform a possible adaptation of NGCS for grades 9–12, as well as a potential future impact evaluation of NGCS. NYC Opportunity will work with RAND and NYC Public Schools to support the dissemination of the evaluation findings, and implementation of the report’s recommendations.
