To reform education, look beyond the schools

By Michael Johanek

Drive 45 minutes northwest from inner-city Baltimore to suburban CarrollCounty. In the population around you, the percentage of low-birth-weight babies drops by half, the infant mortality rate falls by more than two-thirds, and the juvenile arrest rate plunges by 80 percent.

At the same time, the high school graduation rate more than doubles.

Yes, schools should be heldaccountable for the success of their students. But it’s dangerously naive to ignore the fact that the community where children grow up dramatically affects their chances for success in school.

If we want more children to succeed, then, why would we limit reforms to a single institution in the community—the schools?

We know from decades of research that things happening beyond the schools’ wallscause two-thirds or more of the variation in student achievement. Butmost of our policy solutions for narrowing persistent achievement gaps—high-stakes testing and accountability, charter schools, data systems—are aimed at the schools in isolation from other youth and family services.

As long ago as 1899, John Dewey, the pioneering educational philosopher and reformer, wrote that “all waste is due to isolation.”In particular, Dewey worried that schools were ignoring children’s life experiences, and teaching lessons that weren’t relevant to the lives their children led.

In more than a century, too little has changed.

Boredom, disconnection and irrelevance contribute powerfully to students leaving school—a pernicious waste estimated at $192 billion per cohort of 18-year-olds. By design if not intent, schools waste resources through their isolation from the lives of their students and families, and then spend additional resources in programs intended to fight the “crisis” of dropouts, low graduation rates, chronic absences, and disengaged youth.

My Penn GSE colleagues Heather Rouse and John Fantuzzo recently looked at second-graders in Philadelphia to see how their life experienceswere connected to poor educational achievement in early childhood. The numbers are striking; by second grade, 20 percent had already experienced homelessness; they had suffered abuse at four times the national average; and 70 percent lived in poverty. Among African-American boys, more than a third had been exposed to toxic levels of lead. All of these factors were associated with poor educational outcomes. “These findings,” Rouse and Fantuzzo write, “underscore the injustice of holding public educators solely responsible for the educational well being of our most vulnerable children.”

Internationally, schools in wealthier U.S. communities rival or exceed those of “competing” top nations; our high-poverty schools, however, rival those of underdeveloped countries. The gap is much larger than many of our competitors tolerate, dragging down the average that makes the headlines. More than in other countries, socioeconomic disadvantage appears to explain the student performance patterns we see on tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). These facts suggest that we must find a way to mitigate the educational effects of living in high-poverty neighborhoods.

Yet politicians contemplating school reform still tend to see schools in isolation from the context in which they operate, and our school reform agenda continues to treat schools separately from other institutions that serve the same families and students. Students and families in high-poverty neighborhoods have to navigate isolated social service agencies, none of which, the schools included, has a complete enough picture of their lives.

The present fiscal crisis is an opportunity to revisit the wasteful isolation of schooling from context. Around the country, several examples show us the way.

  • In Jefferson County, Kentucky, an award-winning public partnership calledNeighborhood Place brings together the school district, social service agencies, and community organizations to plan how to support their overlapping client families.
  • In Port Chester, New York, the schools created partnerships to address health, language barriers, afterschool needs and teacher preparation.
  • In Hampton, Virginia, youth leaders work side by side with adults in city planning, parks and recreation, neighborhood associations and the schools.
  • Nationally, the federal Promise Neighborhoods initiative supports programs that break down the walls between schools and social service agencies to give students “cradle-to-career” support.

Each of these reforms goes beyond a narrow focus on schools toward a less wasteful, more integrated strategy to help young people in troubled neighborhoods succeed.As Congress looks for ways to improve or even replace No Child Left Behind, these are the kinds of successful programs they should build on.

Michael Johanek is a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, where he is Director of the Mid-Career Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership and Co-Director of the Inter-American Educational Leadership Network.