While the blog is on summer vacation, we’re sharing past posts about the many ways City Connects helps students thrive.
This week, we look at leading-edge research from the Center for Thriving Children published in the past 12 months. The research addresses timely and complex questions impacting education and the nation: when, why, and how opportunities matter; how to more effectively address child poverty; the intersection between out-of-school factors impacting children’s readiness to learn and school turnaround efforts; the role of integrated student support in shaping students’ experiences in school, and, in a separate study, what that can mean for schools’ enrollment and fiscal challenges.
The Power of Opportunity: The Center for Thriving Children Launches Growing Opportunities Lab
November 6, 2025
There’s a powerful link between access to opportunities in childhood—like high-quality child care, excellent classroom instruction, and structured after-school activities—and educational attainment and success in early adulthood. Eric Dearing, Executive Director of the Center for Thriving Children, is a leading expert on the impact of opportunity. His research over the past two decades has emphasized the power of families, early education and care, and neighborhood supports to bolster achievement for children growing up in poverty. Now Dearing and his team have launched the Growing Opportunities Lab, a key component of the Center for Thriving Children that will reframe their work through the lens of opportunity.
“It’s a misnomer to define the differences in achievement between children as achievement gaps, because it’s not an achievement issue, it’s an opportunity issue,” Dearing said. “With more opportunities, kids have better math and literacy skills, better attitudes towards school, stronger connections with teachers, and are more likely to report being hopeful about their futures. All of those things matter for how far they go in their education. But there is also something more robust that happens when children are exposed to opportunities throughout their life. They land in a culture and community of thriving that surrounds them like a river. The current of opportunity is something that’s bigger than any one of those individual impacts on a child,” said Dearing.
The Growing Opportunities Lab has a three-pronged approach to improving developmental and educational opportunities for children: research when, how, and why opportunities matter; investigate how government policies impact opportunities for children; and partner with practitioners to bring more opportunities to more children. READ MORE
Behind the Research: Comprehensive Student Support Promotes School Turnaround, Academic Gains
December 12, 2025
The persistence of underperforming schools is one of the most significant challenges in American K-12 education today. Policymakers have long worked to overcome this issue by putting into place “school turnaround” initiatives, which often focus on restructuring classrooms and replacing staff in the hopes of producing improved student learning outcomes. These efforts have not always been successful, in part because they overlook out-of-school factors that significantly impact student learning like food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, or unstable housing.
New research from the Center for Thriving Children investigates how a targeted comprehensive support system, like City Connects, impacts academic achievement during the turnaround process. By looking at outcomes from Springfield Public Schools in Massachusetts—where some underperforming schools adopted City Connects and others did not—researchers found evidence that implementing City Connects during the school turnaround process led to significant improvements in student academic performance. Schools that adopted City Connects showed an increase of 0.163 standard deviations in math and 0.139 standard deviations in English Language Arts. These gains correspond to increases in learning typically associated with at least one-third of a full year of in-school instruction.
“For policymakers that intend to improve schools and address achievement gaps, it’s important for them to know that in order for schools to have effective restructuring, they have to combine this effort with interventions that can address student out-of-school factors. A multi-tiered intervention tailored to a student’s specific needs is very important to achieve the academic goals of restructuring,” explains senior researcher, Haibin Jiang, of the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children. READ MORE
Evidence highlighted in the Progress Report shows that students in City Connects schools have stronger academic effort and behavior, higher report card scores, attendance, and academic achievement, and are more likely to graduate from postsecondary institutions. The evidence also shows that City Connects students are less likely to repeat a grade, be chronically absent, or drop out of high school. City Connects is now serving thousands of students in public, charter, private, and Catholic schools across nearly 30 U.S. cities and towns and in 18 schools in Dublin. READ MORE
May 7, 2026
Enrollment in traditional public schools has been declining for almost a decade, spurred on by declining birth rates and an increase in school choice options. A growing body of research finds that non-academic factors now figure prominently in parents’ decisions to send their children to charter and private schools or opt for homeschooling. A new report from the Center for Thriving Children explores the use of City Connects as a method for recruiting and retaining students in public schools.
“There is already a lot of evidence that with City Connects, math scores go up, ELA scores go up, high school graduation and attendance go up. People can sense that, it’s going to make them more attracted to the school and less likely to leave,” said Illia Polovnikov, Researcher at the Center for Thriving Children and the lead author of the report. “Emerging research is showing that parents are caring about a lot more than test scores as well—parents want their kids to be safe, they want them to have activities that maybe they can’t afford to do outside school. So when City Connects brings in all these services and gets kids engaged, it has a real value. City Connects actually changes the school and how parents and kids perceive the school.”
By comparing City Connects schools to schools with similar enrollment trajectories that did not adopt City Connects, researchers found that City Connects led to a 5-7% increase in enrollment. This translates to an average of 15 to 20 additional students per school, and roughly $225,000-$300,000 in preserved annual revenue in Massachusetts. READ MORE
