The current (and ongoing) debate about different “brands” of education reform excludes one key element: when students carry external barriers with them into the classroom, they cannot be effective learners. Teachers’ abilities, too, to be effective facilitators of learning are compromised by needing to first overcome student barriers (ranging from mental health issues to family and community stressors to the impacts of a lack of access to preventative healthcare).
Education reform and school reform will not work without adults working together to address the needs that children and young people have and that impede their learning. Community schools across Chicago are successfully working to remove these barriers, and we encourage the district, under its new leadership, to build on their successes.
Mayor-Elect Emanuel’s new education team seems poised to tackle the challenges facing the Chicago Public School district, from the $700 million-plus budget shortfall, to the need to meaningfully extend the formal school day, to the district’s responsibility to ensure that all students in the district (whether they attend neighborhood schools or charter schools) have access to a high-quality education.
But the plans that the new team has for school reform will fall short without also incorporating strategies to ameliorate the challenges students face. Incomin CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and the rest of the CPS leadership team need to create the partnerships among schools, community-based organizations, and families necessary to ensure that the barriers to learning that students face are removed.
The community school model provides the best infrastructure through which to forge and sustain community/school/family partnerships. As the history of community school work in Chicago demonstrates, implementing the community school model leads to improved student achievement, higher attendance rates, and increased and sustained family and community engagement.
Realistically speaking, the district could implement nearly any in-school-day reforms and without coupling those changes with removing the barriers that students bring with them into the classroom, reforms won’t be nearly as effective as they could ? and should ? be.
The Federation for Community Schools and its members encourage the Mayor-Elect and the CPS leadership team to not just continue the district’s support for community schools, but to expand its support and the initiative across the district. The district needs to refocus its efforts entirely on children and on what students need to succeed ? implementing the community school model brings the resources of communities to bear on those challenges.
— Melissa Mitchell, Associate Director, The Federation for Community Schools, Chicago
