Reaching Out to Create a Movement

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin J. Blank
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Chief Executive ◽  
Community Schools ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Community School ◽  
New School ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
Chief Operating Officer ◽  
Current Concerns

In 1997, after their community school concepts received a cold shoulder at a school reform conference, Joy Dryfoos, C. Warren “Pete” Moses, and Ira Harkavy knew it was time for action. All three had been deeply involved in creating new school-community relationships. Joy Dryfoos had helped call national attention to the overlapping needs that put one of every four children at risk; her 1994 book Full-Service Schools outlined a community school approach to help meet those needs. As chief operating officer of The Children’s Aid Society (CAS), Pete Moses, together with CAS’s chief executive officer, Philip Coltoff, had helped bring the resources of one of New York City’s oldest child welfare agencies directly into neighborhood schools as part of a comprehensive educational approach. Ira Harkavy, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Community Partnerships, was creating opportunities for University of Pennsylvania students and faculty to work with, and learn from, students and residents in Philadelphia schools, using the community as a resource. All three knew from experience that community schools offered an effective strategy for building strong schools, strong families, and strong communities and that these were essential for learning. The group began thinking about how to jump-start a community school movement. After a second meeting a few weeks later, they were convinced that more like-minded people needed to be involved. They decided to hold a Community Schools Forum at Fordham University and invited about 30 people they thought would be interested. When 125 participants showed up, they knew they were on to something. This chapter tells how that experience helped launch the Coalition for Community Schools and its drive to put community schools at the center of a twenty-first-century education-reform agenda. In 1997 a “coalition for community schools” was a new idea, but community schools were not. Part of what drew so many to the Fordham summit was the opportunity to give new voice to time-tested approaches to connecting school and community and, participants hoped, to use them more broadly to address current concerns. John Dewey, whose ideas helped create community schools, observed that “the true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems.”

Introduction

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy G. Dryfoos
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Community Schools ◽  
Community School ◽  
New School ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Low Performance ◽  
Set Up

All of the contributors to this book are clearly in favor of community schools. We would like to see this movement grow rapidly or, as we often say, “go to scale.” This would mean that communities with high needs and low performance would be assisted in transforming their schools. The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) work is one of the streams that have come together to create a new field of full-service community schools. The CAS model has been strengthened by many adaptations throughout the country and overseas. A National Technical Assistance Center for Community Schools has been set up at Intermediate School (IS) 218 with facilities for orientation and training. More than 6,000 policy makers and practitioners from all over the world have taken the tour and observed the rich climate at this pilot school. The concepts of community schools do not necessarily sink in at first encounter; it sometimes takes a while for people to “get it.” The question often arises: Do you really expect the schools to do all of that? It is not well understood that the idea behind the community school movement is for schools to do less, not more! Partners such as CAS come into the building and take responsibility for health, social services, extended hours, and parent and community involvement. However, some school superintendents do get it; Thomas Payzant is a good example (see ch. 15 in this volume). Arne Duncan, head of the Chicago Public Schools, is another strong advocate: “We started with 20 community [school] centers this year [and] we want to add 20 each of the next five years so we will get up to 100 over five years. . . . [T]he Chicago School System cannot do this alone. . . . We have universities, local Boys & Girls Clubs, the YMCA’s, Jane Addams’ Hull House . . . helping to run our program with us.” The quest for appropriate space within schools for the core components is being addressed in large new school building initiatives around the country.

Looking to the Future

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy G. Dryfoos ◽  
Jane Quinn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Schools ◽  
Community School ◽  
Failing Schools ◽  
Staten Island ◽  
Dynamic Community ◽  
Poverty Levels

It may seem strange in a chaotic political period to say that the community school movement is alive, well, and growing. Yet such chaos can give rise to collaborative concepts. Out of adversity comes action, and that action is directed toward helping children succeed in an increasingly difficult environment of higher poverty levels, less health insurance, failing schools, more mental health problems, and a widening gap between social classes and races. It is not a pretty picture, but it is a challenging one. The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) is moving forward with its commitment to community schools. Although we thought we would stop at 10 school sites in New York City, during the 2003–2004 academic year we initiated three more—two in the Bronx and one on Staten Island. Our Technical Assistance Center is in great demand, hosting more than 600 visits in 2003 and responding to more than 500 requests for technical assistance. Also in 2003 we convened representatives from more than 60 of the national and international adaptation sites for a three-day practicum—a training and networking session at which we heard testimonials to success and stories about challenges. Many of the original adaptation sites have moved from one dynamic community school to a cluster of schools within their neighborhoods or districts. And some of these original adaptation sites have matured to the point of providing guidance to other schools that want to emulate their success. There are now more than 200 adaptation sites—community schools based on the CAS model—in the United States and other countries. We are often asked, “Just how many community schools are there in this country?” We have a reasonable census of CAS sites (13) and adaptations (215), but that is only the beginning of a count. The question is difficult to answer because there are so many versions of other models and so many schools without any of these components that nevertheless call themselves “community schools.” We have tried to construct a continuum along which schools can measure themselves.

Community Schools in Action

2005 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Low Income ◽  
School System ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Community Schools ◽  
Community School ◽  
After School ◽  
Road Map

A community school differs from other public schools in important ways: it is generally open most of the time, governed by a partnership between the school system and a community agency, and offers a broad array of health and social services. It often has an extended day before and after school, features parent involvement programs, and works for community enrichment. How should such a school be structured? How can its success be measured? Community Schools in Action: Lessons from a Decade of Practice presents the Children's Aid Society's (CAS) approach to creating community schools for the 21st century. CAS began this work more than a decade ago and today operates thirteen such schools in three low-income areas of New York City. Through a technical assistance center operated by CAS, hundreds of other schools across the country and the world are adapting this model. Based on their own experiences working with community schools, the contributors to the volume supply invaluable information about the selected program components. They describe how and why CAS started its community school initiative and explain how CAS community schools are organized, integrated with the school system, sustained, and evaluated. The book also includes several contributions from experts outside of CAS: a city superintendent, an architect, and the director of the Coalition for Community Schools. Co-editors Joy Dryfoos, an authority on community schools, and Jane Quinn, CAS's Assistant Executive Director of Community Schools, have teamed up with freelance writer Carol Barkin to provide commentary linking the various components together. For those interested in transforming their schools into effective child- and family-centered institutions, this book provides a detailed road map. For those concerned with educational and social policy, the book offers a unique example of research-based action that has significant implications for our society.

Campus in English or campus in shock?

English Today ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinhyun Cho
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
New York Times ◽  
International Media ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
English Only ◽  
Local Students

With the acceleration of globalization, universities in East Asia are increasingly under pressure to compete internationally, and ‘internationalization’ of tertiary education in the region has topped the education reform agenda of each government (Mok & James, 2005). In an effort to join the league of world-class universities and attract international students, East Asian universities have expanded the number of English-medium lectures (EMLs) offered as part of their internationalization strategy, and no country has embraced the move more than Korea (Newsweek, February 26, 2007). As of 2010, all the classes at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are conducted in English only and 93 percent of classes at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), the nation's two best science and engineering universities, with rates of EML averaging around 10 to 30 percent among the top 7 universities in Korea as of the first half of 2008 (Chosun Ilbo, March 10, 2008). Reforms of Korean universities characterized by the introduction of EMLs have been praised by many local as well as top international media such as theNew York Timesand theScience Magazine. Often lost amid the hype, however, are the challenges facing local students in learning complex material in English, a language which most have learned only as a foreign language and to limited levels of proficiency. This article compares opinions expressed in the mainstream media with those from university presses run by student organizations that have been most active in expanding English-medium programs by analyzing articles related to EMLs. The aim of this comparative research is to find out if there are any observable differences in views presented by these two types of print media, in an attempt to shed light on the move to EMLs in this exclusively monolingual country.

Evaluation of Children’s Aid Society Community Schools

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heléne Clark ◽  
Clareann Grimaldi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Data Management ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Management System ◽  
Program Improvement ◽  
Community Schools ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
Data Management System ◽  
Intermediate School

Evaluation has been a central part of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) community schools work since the opening of the first school. From 1993 through 1999, a collaborative team from Fordham University’s Schools of Education and Social Services conducted process and outcome evaluations of the CAS work, with a focus on the first two schools, Intermediate School (IS) 218 and Primary School (PS) 5. Subsequently, CAS hired ActKnowledge, an independent research firm affiliated with the Center for Human Environments at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), to continue the evaluative work by building on the Fordham findings while using a different (theory of change) approach. Concurrent with the hiring of Act Knowledge, CAS contracted with a technical group called CitySpan Technologies to provide a data management system designed to organize accurate and current information for both program improvement and evaluation. This chapter will review the approach and findings of the earlier Fordham evaluation and then describe the current community schools evaluation, with a focus on its data management system and theory of change approach. CAS began evaluation at the start of implementation because they believed then, as now, that community schools are a model for education reform and that sustainability depended on learning lessons from the start.

scholarly journals The Welfare Effects of Coordinated Assignment: Evidence from the New York City High School Match

2017 ◽  
Vol 107 (12) ◽  
pp. 3635-3689 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu ◽  
Nikhil Agarwal ◽  
Parag A. Pathak
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
York City ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Welfare Effects ◽  
Student Preferences ◽  
Deferred Acceptance ◽  
School Assignment

Coordinated single-offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform. We show that uncoordinated offers in NYC's school assignment mechanism generated mismatches. One-third of applicants were unassigned after the main round and later administratively placed at less desirable schools. We evaluate the effects of the new coordinated mechanism based on deferred acceptance using estimated student preferences. The new mechanism achieves 80 percent of the possible gains from a no-choice neighborhood extreme to a utilitarian benchmark. Coordinating offers dominates the effects of further algorithm modifications. Students most likely to be previously administratively assigned experienced the largest gains in welfare and subsequent achievement. (JEL C78, D82, I21, I28)

Fetal Growth and Development, edited by Harry A. Waisman, M.D., Ph.D., and George R. Kerr, M.D. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, 320 pp., $17.50

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-505
Author(s):  
Clement A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Fetal Growth ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
New School ◽  
Developmental Physiology

When William Windle published his Physiology of the Fetus, in 1940, he referred to Preyer's Specielle Physiologie des Embryo, published 65 years before that, as "long the only source of summarized knowledge concerning the activities of embryos and fetuses of many species." Dr. Windle then noted how "within the last decade of two" or some 40 years after Preyer, "interest has revived and a new school of developmental physiology has come into being . . . (though) . . . few biologists are aware of all that has been accomplished."

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