In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education released a report — A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform — which set out to “define the problems afflicting American education and to provide solutions.” For decades, it helped to set the agenda on American education policy.
Now, some forty years later, Stanford University’s Hoover Institution has issued a follow-up report — A Nation at Risk at 40 — which shares national educational challenges and promising solutions, including City Connects.
The new report is a collection of essays that consider “lessons to be learned from the past forty years of reform” and from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
City Connects is featured in an essay titled “A Survey of Whole-Child School Reforms,” by Maria D. Fitzpatrick, an economics and public policy professor at Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy.
While Fitzpatrick argues that research has yet to validate a “silver bullet” approach to helping children thrive in school, she cites City Connects as an example of a program that provides “wraparound services” and has had “positive findings in evaluations.”
Specifically, Fitzpatrick points to six “key factors” of City Connects:
• our use of “program-specific software” to track our work, and
• our practice of bringing many services into schools
“The range of services it is possible to connect students with is extensive,” Fitzpatrick says of City Connects. “It includes before-school and after-school programs, enrichment opportunities, health and wellness programs, social skills interventions, academic support or tutoring, family assistance, and family counseling.”
Offering advice to policymakers who are considering a whole child approach, Fitzpatrick says:
“It may be the case that, in some districts, a whole-child model seems like the best available intervention. In these settings, care should be taken to determine the needs and goals of the school or district; clearly articulate these for the community; choose a whole-child model focused on the relevant outcomes with research evidence validating its effectiveness; provide adequate resources to support the implementation; and commit to a process of continual evaluation and a willingness to change directions or to abandon the model if it is not effective.”
“In this case, the most promising whole-child reform reviewed here is the wraparound services model, such as the City Connects program. In part, this is because the model is not a one-size-fits-all model that is trying to improve the outcomes of all children with an intervention in a particular area. Instead, it is a model of providing direct, data-driven, personally tailored support to each student using existing academic and broader resources.”
Read the full report here.
