Show me your budget, the saying goes, and I’ll show you your priorities. If that adage is true, then President Joe Biden’s first budget request for the U.S. Department of Education signals a significant departure from the education policy priorities of previous presidential administrations.
And not just a shift from the priorities of the Trump Administration, which was expected, but also from those of the Obama years. It’s a welcome sign that the era of blaming teachers for low test scores may finally be coming to an end.
The program’s grants help schools address factors outside of schools that affect learning.
Obama’s first budget request for the Department of Education, submitted to Congress in 2009, was all about fiscal austerity and accountability. It called for cutting Title I funds—the federal government’s program to support high-poverty schools—and shifting $1 billion from that program to grants for highly disruptive federal interventions in “low-performing” public schools (read: schools with low test scores).
Other budget priorities included controversial teacher pay-for-performance programs and extra resources targeted just to high schools—all “while holding down spending,” Education Week reported.
Biden faces a difficult economic climate, as did Obama, this time caused by a pandemic, and the fact that his party’s majorities in Congress are much thinner than those that Obama enjoyed at the start of his first term.
Yet Biden’s first budget submission is much more progressive than what Obama offered, calling for more than doubling Title I from its current $16.5 billion to $36.5 billion, as Chalkbeat reported. Other notable proposals from Biden include: more money for early childhood education; an approximately 20 percent boost of $2.6 billion for educating students with disabilities; and $1 billion to help schools hire more counselors, nurses, and mental health professionals.
Biden also signaled his administration may be radically changing the federal government’s approach to improving academic outcomes in schools by tucking into his proposals a major increase in funding for supporting and expanding the Department of Education’s Full-Service Community Schools Program.
That program’s budget languished at a miniscule $30 million and was, in fact, canceled altogether for fiscal year 2021 due to COVID-19’s impact on schools and communities, according to a letter from acting director Elson Nash. Yet Biden’s budget would boost funding for FSCS by $413 million, an almost fourteen-fold increase, to $443 million, according to Chalkbeat.
Why give more funding to an obscure federal program? Turns out there’s a good reason. Actually, lots of them.
The Full-Service Community Schools Program provides funding for schools that have adopted a model that makes local schools a hub for a broad array of services for children and families, as its website says, “particularly for children attending high-poverty schools.”
The program’s grants help schools address factors outside of schools that affect learning, such as nutrition and physical activity, health and dental care, mentoring and youth development, adult education, and family financial and mental health.
Such services, often called wraparound services, seek to improve academic outcomes for students by addressing conditions in the school’s surrounding community, which are caused, primarily, by poverty. The community schools approach also calls for providing students more learning opportunities, engaging families and the community in ongoing communications, and giving teachers, parents, and students more involvement in developing school policies and programs.
Past grantees from the Full-Service Community Schools Program have included the Pasadena Unified School District, which used its $2.5 million grant to respond to “holistic needs” in the community through “hubs of services.” Another grantee, the Karnes City, Texas, Independent School District, used its $2.2 million grant to create and expand “pipeline services” that address juvenile crime prevention and rehabilitation; social, health, nutrition, and mental health; and family and community engagement.
Typically, grant applicants state their academic goals. The application from The United Way of Buffalo and Erie County, New York, for example, committed to raising math and English language arts proficiency rates and enrolling more students identified as “at-risk” in intervention programs. Such goals are accomplished by addressing student, family, and community needs through various behavioral, health, counseling, youth development, and family engagement services.
During the Obama years, considered the heyday of “education reform,” the preferred route to better academic outcomes was to make schools and teachers more accountable for academic results. Those seeking to address the underlying causes of low achievement—such as poverty, childhood trauma, racism, or family dysfunction—were accused of making “excuses” for low achievement.
“When will we stop making excuses for poor performance?” asked Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, in a speech at Hampton University in 2010. In an address to the National Urban League in 2010, he called for “rejecting the old excuses for why kids can’t learn.”
As I wrote in an opinion piece that got picked up by The Washington Post in 2013, the “no excuse” term originated from a belief that too many schoolteachers who blamed poor student performance on factors outside their control—including a lack of funding, parent indifference, or poverty—were using the “age-old excuses” to divert attention from the supposed “real” cause of low achievement: bad teaching.
The Obama Administration, through its policies like Race to the Top, incentivized states to adopt a “no excuse” approach to school improvement that punished schools and teachers for low test scores and enforced a command-and-control governance by central offices in local, state, and federal governments.
Due to the primacy of “no excuse” thinking, an idea like community schools—with its emphasis on educating the whole child and directing school resources to community needs and interests—got scant attention.
During the Obama years, legislation to fund the Full-Service Community Schools Program was introduced in 2011 and submitted again in 2014, but it never passed out of committee. Then, in 2015, two amendments to the Every Student Succeeds Act, a successor to No Child Left Behind, authorized a full-service community schools grant program and made program coordinators an allowable use of federal funds.
Under Obama, the program’s budget was a mere $9.7 million in 2015 and $10 million in 2016. In his final budget for 2017, Obama called for no increase. Under Trump, Congress managed to boost funding for the program to $30 million, where it stands today.
With Biden’s new budget proposal, which gives community schools such a sizable funding boost, the President seems to be signaling that it’s time to address the real reasons for low academic performance.
Despite a lack of funding, roughly 5,000 community schools, financed through small grants and bootstrap efforts, were in operation by 2018, according to the Center for American Progress. Some of the results have been impressive.
Moreover, the pandemic—which has placed an immense stress on local food banks and other community resources—has likely burnished the reputation of the community schools approach.
When schools went virtual, parents had to scramble for school-provided services including full-time daycare, free or low-cost meals, academic instruction, laptops and Wi-Fi, and access to extracurricular activities like music, theater, and sports. Many parents, especially those who didn’t have reliable connections to the Internet, were effectively cut off from their communities.
Based on a series of reports on community schools I wrote for Our Schools, there’s ample evidence that community schools responded to this disruption much more effectively than their counterparts. When the pandemic struck, these schools already had onsite coordinators, counselors, nurses, and social workers, as well as existing partnerships with care agencies in their communities.
“We were 100 percent better able to make the transition [caused by COVID-19] because of the community schools model,” Catherine Gilmore, a community schools coordinator in Hillsborough County (Tampa), Florida, told me for an article last year.
Third-grade teacher Henry Jasso, in Doña Ana Elementary School in Las Cruces, New Mexico, said, “Because our school has built partnerships with various organizations and individuals, we have resources, people, and organizations that want to help our community.”
“Our twelve community schools were the exemplars in responding to the pandemic,” added Milwaukee school board member Bob Peterson.
In an August 2020 article in NEA Today, a publication of the National Education Association, Senior Writer and Media Specialist Cindy Long noted, “Community schools were better prepared for [the] COVID-19 crisis.” In her account, three schools practicing the community schools model—Potter Elementary Community School in East Tampa, Florida; Club Boulevard Humanities Magnet and Community School in Durham, North Carolina; and Brooklyn Landmark Elementary School in New York City—responded to the crisis by expanding food pantries, organizing call centers, providing families with devices to connect to the Internet, and connecting families to city services that offered relief on utilities and other bills.
“They all ramped up their services when the pandemic hit,” Long writes, “and were positioned to do so easily” because of their community schools approach.
Now that most schools in the country have reopened for in-person learning, community schools will likely continue to have advantages, because they are able to transition their resources and personnel more easily from crisis mode to addressing their students’ longer-term trauma.
Further, because community schools often build in afterschool and summer learning programs, field trips, and other opportunities for extended learning time, these schools may be better prepared to address the lags in curricular knowledge and academic skills that are bound to be an outcome of the pandemic’s prolonged disruption.
Undoubtedly, the pandemic has brought clearly into focus the critical needs of low-income students and their families and the imperative to address those needs through systemic solutions like community schools.
Summing up that change in perspective, Xavier Cason, the director of community schools and school transformation for public schools in Durham, North Carolina, told me earlier this year, “Back in 2016, people were saying that schools had to focus mostly on academics. Now people have come to realize the focus had to be on educating the whole child.”
Anecdotal evidence aside, research supports the community schools approach. A 2017 study by the Learning Policy Institute and the National Education Policy Center found that “well-implemented community schools lead to improvement in student and school outcomes and contribute to meeting the educational needs of low-achieving students in high-poverty schools.”
The study identified four common features of the approach: integrated services, family and community engagement, expanded learning time, and collaborative leadership. It found that these four features, when effectively implemented, “increase the odds that young people in low-income and under-resourced communities will be in educational environments with meaningful learning opportunities, high-quality teaching, well-used resources, additional supports, and a culture of high expectations, trust, and shared responsibility.”
Another study, published in 2020 by RAND, examined results of schools using the community schools approach in New York City, where the program was introduced in 2014. The researchers found that, after five years, schools using this approach showed higher rates of attendance, graduation, and math achievement, as well as fewer in-grade retentions, dropouts, and disciplinary actions.
According to the Center for American Progress, every $1 invested in a community schools program in New York City delivers an additional $12 to $15 in social value—a measure not only of revenues generated and costs avoided, but also of “qualitative impact.”
The idea that community schools might offer a better approach to school improvement has caught on with some members of Congress, too. In October 2020, three Democratic U.S. Senators—Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), and Chris Van Hollen (Maryland)—introduced the Full-Service Community School Expansion Act of 2020 calling for an initial investment of $3.65 billion over five years to “plan, implement, expand, and support full-service community schools serving low-income students.”
None of this is to say that the tendency to blame teachers and schools for low test scores, while refusing to address societal and political factors that negatively impact learning, will quickly fade away. In many communities, the backlash against teachers and school leaders wanting to keep school buildings closed for health and safety reasons during the pandemic was acute (although, polling shows, driven much more by the resentment of white affluent parents rather than parents of color), and multiple news outlets have reported that more Americans have “given up” on public schools.
But clearly Biden has not, and by throwing more funding behind an expansion of the community schools program, he is showing that he is listening to what teachers say they need rather than blaming them.
Congress must change its mindset, too; after all, there’s no excuse not to.