Closing Two Achievement Gaps: Nominees for Practice and Policy Innovations

Abstract

Worldwide the idea of “the achievement gap” refers to the academic learning of students and the overall performance of entire schools. A second achievement gap also merit attention: The gap between rich and poor students, one that indicates that, for too many young people in several parts of the world, the circumstances surrounding their births determine their life chances. Community schools, community learning centers, extended-service schools, and multi-service schools can be configured, implemented and improved in ways that address both gaps. Building on the compelling, evidence-based accounts provided by the leader-authors of the chapters comprising Part II, this chapter identifies important next phases in the development of this innovative school design. Examples of these next phases start with new language and frameworks for planning, specifying, and evaluating interdependent relationships among educators, community health and social service providers, parents and community leaders. Next phases also include needs to differentiate between partnerships among schools and other organizations and collaboration among people. Additionally, the examples extend to new ideas for how special subjects such as art, music, drama and physical education can be reconfigured to facilitate diverse students’ social inclusion and social integration. Perhaps above all, the priority for connecting community school components to classrooms is emphasized, improving teachers’ work and enriching students learning. This classroom-connected, teacher-supportive design is an advanced feature that moves these new schools toward innovative, integrated social pedagogy and away from a deficit-oriented, “fix, then teach” approach to services for vulnerable children and their families. Last, but not least, opportunities remain to expand this new school design to emphasize school-and-work and school-to-work initiatives, together with economic innovations such as time dollar programs and micro-lending schemes for small businesses. The reminder here is that services alone will not lift people out of poverty or provide pathways toward prosperity and social integration.

Although each of the innovative exemplars featured in the chapters constituting Part 2 has unique features, these special exemplars also can be appreciated together as a collective design experiment. In other words, each is like a piece for the same puzzle. Although this puzzle remains unfinished, it has immense potential for better policy and improved practice. To capitalize on this potential, it is timely to consider networked communities of practice, which enable collective knowledge generation, innovation exchanges, mutual assistance, and policy-related lesson drawing (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015).

All such collective puzzle solving is facilitated when leaders have the equivalent of a picture on the top of a puzzle box. Two such metaphorical pictures provide an appropriate way to launch this chapter because they provide opportunities to explore possible missing pieces in the puzzle.

One picture is framed by the persistent inability of schools serving significant numbers of vulnerable students to achieve desirable academic achievement outcomes at scale. We call this puzzle-solving picture “the old achievement gap” because it features students’ academic achievement.

The frame for this picture is narrow, and it often constrains new school designs such as the one featured in this book. It is founded on the conventional, inherited idea that schools solely are academic institutions concerned nearly exclusively with young people in their role as students. In this special framework, educators and schools are accountable for student academic achievement, while other helping professions (e.g., social work, nursing, public health) and their respective organizations are accountable for other child and family well-being indicators.

What we call the new achievement gap is founded on growing awareness of profound inequalities involving children’s well-being (Ben-Arieh, 2007). Child well-being is influenced by co-occurring and interlocking social and economic determinants, particularly ones nested in, and influenced by, family well-being and place-based vitality. So, for example, children’s academic achievement outcomes depend in part on improvements in family well-being outcomes (Briar-Lawson, Lawson, & Hennon with Jones, 2001), and family system outcomes are influenced by housing, food security, and employment opportunities.

Additionally, child and family outcomes and school outcomes often depend on improvements in the particular places where they reside (Taylor, McGlynn, & Luter, 2013). The new social geography of education and schooling showcases the importance of urban neighborhoods, inner ring suburbs, rural communities, and entire regions (Dyson & Kerr, 2015; Kerr, Dyson, & Raffo, 2014; Sampson, 2012; Tate, 2012).

This child well-being gap extends to a priority for reducing inequality—and without a predetermined political solution. Although inequality has been a constant in many nations, and human diversity alone gives rise to unavoidable distinctions and predictable social stratifications, it has become increasingly apparent that problematic equality is rising in some nations (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009); and also that it is durable (Piketty, 2014; Tilly, 1999). Emmengegger, Hȁusermann, Palier, & Seeleib-Kaiser (2012) characterize this new gap as “the age of dualization.” Brady’s (2009) simple translation is perhaps more appealing: “Rich democracies, poor people.” Either way, the future of democratic societies hinges in part progress toward addressing this new achievement gap.

New school designs such as the one featured in this book provide an “inside-out strategy” for improving selected child well-being, family support, and community development outcomes. Meanwhile, “outside-in strategies” progressively optimize conditions for school success as leaders strive to achieve important community economic and social development outcomes for housing, food security, employment, transportation, and neighborhood safety and security.

The next phase in the international research and development agenda entails joining these inside-out and outside-in strategies in order to simultaneously address both the old achievement gap and the new one. One of the main policy assumptions also is a practice guide. As progress is made on closing this new achievement gap, the old one also will be closed; and vice versa (e.g., Basch, 2010; Ben-Arieh, 2007). In other words, over time and with the right conditions, academic learning and achievement will improve for vulnerable students in challenging schools and, as they do, more young people will have access to, and take advantage of, opportunity pathways to employment, well-being, and active democratic citizenship.

In this chapter, we focus primarily on the inside-out strategy. We identify and describe promising innovations for community schools, community learning centers, extended-services schools, and multi-services schools. As our chapter title announces, we offer these innovations as nominees, not as mandates. Consistent with the rationale provided in all the previous chapters, each innovation must be adapted so that it is fit for purpose, in special contexts and at particular times.

Although we stop short of claiming that these nominees are requirements, we nevertheless hold the view that these innovations are like missing pieces on the top of the puzzle solving box. As leaders progressively design and implement them and figure out how each piece fits with the others and enhances the whole, they will advance community school-related designs and make measurable progress toward closing both the new and the old achievement gaps.

Developing Connections to Classrooms to Enrich the Instructional Core

Academic learning and achievement are no less important because they are just one important component in child well-being. In other words, improvements in children’s academic learning and academic achievement must remain a policy aim and practice goal. A substantial body of research helps to direct efforts directed at closing the old achievement gap (Hattie & Anderman, 2013).

Starting with the Research on School Reform

Research on the history of school reform in diverse nations oftentimes yields the same two findings. First, the reform problem tends to be narrowly framed to increase student academic achievement, and the solution set typically is restricted to three improvement priorities. They are new curricula, preferred instructional strategies, and, to insure the faithful implementation of new curricula and pedagogies, professional development supports for teachers and school leaders.

The second finding documents disappointment. Unfortunately, myriad reform initiatives fail to penetrate classrooms at scale, and so they do not result in improvements in what and how teachers teach and what and how students learn. Expressed in formal terms, the core technology of conventional schools—also known as the instructional core (Elmore, 2004)—does not improve at scale. In the same vein, key programmatic and behavioral regularities, which are defining features of a school’s culture, often prove to be intractable (Sarason, 1996).

The entrenched institution of schooling thus triumphs over all manner of reforms. This unsettling conclusion is a stimulus for timely innovations in community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-service schools. By design, they have the have to potential to yield outcomes that conventional reform models and strategies cannot.

Missing Priorities in Conventional Reforms: Timely Opportunities for Innovation

The dominant approach to conventional school reform typically omits four priorities, and this oversight helps to explain its disappointing results. These priorities are: (1) Students’ barriers to healthy development, learning and overall success in school, many of which are rooted in external causes; (2) Needs and opportunities to gain influence and some measure of control over students’ out-of-school time; (3) Educators’ overall lack of awareness about what works pedagogically with vulnerable, culturally- and ethnically-diverse students; and, (4) The adverse effects of these three priorities on teachers’ commitments, expectations for themselves as well as their students, job satisfaction, individual and collective efficacy, and retention. All are especially relevant to individual schools, networks of schools, and school districts which serve significant numbers of vulnerable students.

Community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-services schools offer viable solutions to all four priorities-as-opportunities. For example, collaboration with community health and social services professionals, in tandem with collaboration with the school’s student support professionals, provides a tested strategy for addressing external barriers to attendance, on-time arrival, healthy development, learning, and overall success in school. In the same vein, collaboration with out-of-school time (OST) providers and positive youth development specialists enables all educators and especially teachers to gain beneficial influence over how young people spend their time. Moreover, both kinds of collaboration (i.e., with community service providers and OST providers) provide insights and practical strategies that teachers can use to connect with diverse students, resulting in differentiated, culturally-competent instruction that improves academic learning (Gay, 2010).

Most of all, as progress is made on these three priorities, beneficial effects for teachers also are evident. For example, teachers who are provided with these supports and resources become more resilient, have higher expectations for themselves and their students, and enjoy comparatively higher levels of job satisfaction (e.g., Day & Gu, 2014).

When these beneficial outcomes are in evidence, two critically important outcomes may be expected to follow. First: Teacher attendance improves (Mendez et al., Chap. 10). Ultimately, teacher retention improves, enhancing schools’ innovation readiness and capacity (Weiner, 2009). These twin workforce outcomes increase the probability that vulnerable students will enjoy the opportunity to develop a sense of attachment to a caring adult who works daily with them in classrooms.

Building Systems: Commonalties in a New Classroom-Connected Design

The achievement of these several, essential outcomes hinges on a formal system for connecting teachers’ classroom work with the efforts of both OST providers and community health and social service providers. A formal system entails developing tried and tested mechanisms for facilitating mutually beneficial interactions among teachers, student support professionals, community health and social service professionals, OST providers, and increasingly, parents/caregivers.

Developing this system is akin to building and paving a two-way street. One direction is outside-in. It connects community helping professionals and OST providers to teachers and their classrooms. The other is from teachers and their classrooms to OST providers and community professionals.

Eight key components in this two-way street system make it work. The first is shared data systems and cross-boundary record-keeping (McLaughlin & London, 2013). The second is linkage protocols with provisions for accurate and useful data and continuous reporting on intervention development and success (Anderson-Butcher, Iachini, & Wade-Mdivanian, 2007). The third is formal communications systems, including computer-assisted mechanisms and structured opportunities for face-to-face information-sharing and joint problem-solving.

The fourth component is cross-boundary coordination. In North America, two kinds of specialists are charged with this function: A health and social services coordinator (typically a social worker) and an OST coordinator (typically a teacher with solid connections and credibility with classroom teachers). In Europe cross-sector, interprofessional teams (education, health and human services) oftentimes are coordinated by educators/pedagogical staff members from schools or a network of schools, and the OST coordinator can also be a staff member working for local authorities and networks of schools (e.g., the chapters from Belgium and the Netherlands).

In both Europe and North America, cross-boundary coordination extends beyond direct practice to policy and resource coordination. Advanced exemplars have a team or council structured consisting of top level leaders from schools, community agencies, and local governments. Some exemplars also have an operational team charged with assessments and other diagnostics as well as planning for prevention and intervention for schools (Edwards & Downes, 2013; Van Veen, 2006, 2012). In nations with specialized schools for special needs students, professionals of special schools are part of these cross-sector, interprofessional teams, connecting mainstream/regular and special schools and contributing to broad agendas for social inclusion of all young people (Van Veen).

The fifth component is a revised system of roles, responsibilities, and working relationships. As with coordinators and the function of coordination, expanded roles, responsibilities and working relationships entail important cross-boundary planning, which starts with the school and extends to community agencies and neighborhood organizations.

The sixth component is a resource development and allocation plan that is tailor-made for this new system. This new system includes dedicated time blocks for this all-important collaboration between teachers and other program and service providers.

The last two components often are missing from technical systems. One is a clear, coherent, aligned, and feasible plan for teacher-supportive, classroom-connected interprofessional collaboration (Lawson, 2003, 2004). Such a plan provides shared understanding among all of the involved adults—OST providers, community professionals, student support professionals, teachers, and parents—that they depend on each other. Genuine interprofessional collaboration is not possible without these shared perceptions of interdependent relationships (Lawson, 2003, 2004).

Finally, all of the collaborating professionals, but especially classroom teachers, need to have shared mental maps, i.e., visual pictures that demonstrate the differences between the new system and the old, “non-system.” Only when everyone perceives the benefits will they exercise joint ownership over the new design, endorse the common purposes it offers, and join forces to develop, institutionalize and sustain the system. Figures 13.1 and 13.2 provide two such systems design pictures (Lawson & Briar-Lawson, 1997).

Fig. 13.1

Self-fulfilling prophecies and vicious cycles

Fig. 13.2

Self-fulfilling prophecies and virtuous cycles

Stopping Vicious Cycles and Starting Virtuous Ones

Figure 13.1 indicates that, absent the new system, classroom teachers and students with unmet needs typically become enmeshed in unproductive and relationship-damaging interactions. A vicious cycle is in evidence when every problematic teacher-student interaction builds on the former ones and leads to others that become increasingly intense and complicated. These vicious cycles inevitably produce undesirable, preventable outcomes. One is reduced academically engaged learning time for all students in the class. Furthermore, these vicious cycles are associated with suspensions, expulsions, preventable student and teacher absenteeism, and early school leaving or “dropping out” (Freeman & Simonsen, 2015). In brief, a classroom-connected system that prevents these undesirable problems serves students and teachers alike, perhaps providing an important strategy for closing the old achievement gap.

In contrast to familiar vicious cycles that frequently develop when teachers work alone and also when improvement strategies do not penetrate to classrooms, the new system provides assistance, social supports, and resources to teachers, students, parents, service providers, and cross-boundary coordinators. As Fig. 13.2 indicates, virtuous cycles prevent vicious ones, and mutual benefits follow. Teachers benefit as students barriers to engagement, learning and achievement are addressed by service providers. Reciprocally, community service providers serving the same students benefit because young people’s sub-optimal classroom experiences and problematic relationships with teachers no longer produce excessive stress, social-emotional problems, and anti-social behavior.

Enriching and Enhancing the Instructional Core

Meanwhile, the benefits to teachers extend to new resources and supports for differentiated instruction (Aronson & Laughter, 2015; Gay, 2010), especially ones facilitated by collaboration with other professionals who also work with the same children. Teachers’ collaboration with OST providers, for example, offers much-needed opportunities to increase students’ academically-engaged learning time, starting with homework clubs but including bountiful opportunities for multiple teaching and learning strategies that are difficult to mount and sustain in classrooms. Reciprocally, OST providers often discover students’ special interests and pedagogical needs, offering teachers solid information about how best to reach particular students and providing important information regarding how best to differentiate instructional and learning strategies for particular students.

Where teachers’ relationships with health and social service providers are concerned, these new collaborations have the potential to yield integrated teaching-learning and social/health services strategies (Mooney, Kline, & Davoren, 1999; Van Veen, 2012). These integrated strategies bridge the divides between a social service or a health intervention and a classroom-based instructional strategy. These special collaborations between teachers and service providers also offer opportunities to expand the idea of a professional learning community (presently teachers only) to classroom-based, interprofessional learning communities.

The expansive framework for vibrant, equitable “learning ecosystems” provided by Prince, Saveri, & Swanson, (2015) offers additional opportunities for innovation. This framework emphasizes equitable opportunities for learning, not just classroom-based instruction provided by teachers. Granting this framework’s merits, at the present time all such OST learning opportunities will fall short of their immense potential if they are not connected to schools’ instructional core.

In all of the above-identified ways, community schools and their counterparts offer critically important opportunities to develop a formal system that connects classroom teachers with OST providers and their programs as well as health and social service providers and their services. This formal system is explicitly designed to enrich and improve the instructional core, increase the quality and quantity of academically-engaged learning time, and address two kinds of barriers to academic learning and achievement: (1) Students’ barriers and (2) Teacher-related barriers, including their retention. Developing this system with evaluation-driven, continuous improvement methods is a solid strategy for closing the old achievement gap.

However, a fully-developed system requires trail-blazing work on two companion innovations: (1) Specification of interdependent working relationships among specialized professionals (e.g., teachers, mental health professionals such as psychologists and social workers, nurses); and (2) Formal, observable, and testable frameworks for orchestrating and coordinating multiple inventions implemented in schools, community agencies, homes, and other places.

Beyond the Collaboration Buzzword: Specifying Interdependent Working Relationships

The second innovation is in many ways inseparable from the first, and it also provides a strategy for closing the academic achievement gap. The main idea is that collaboration among teachers, student support professionals, OST providers, and community health and social services professionals is a specialized intervention (Claiborne & Lawson, 2005). Like all manner of interventions, these professionals’ collaboration efforts need to be specified.

Who needs to collaborate and toward what ends? What exactly does this collaboration entail and require? How does it influence the classroom-connected system described above? How does it influence the formation and operation of school-based and school-linked, interprofessional teams?

Unfortunately, collaboration has become yet another buzzword, one applied loosely and even carelessly to describe needs and opportunities for people to work and learn together. In many parts of the world, collaboration’s meanings, requirements, and desired outcomes also are clouded by its conflation with “partnership.” So-called “interagency collaboration” is another example of this conflation (Iachini et al. 2015). This popular conflation adds to the difficulties and creates its own set of challenges because a partnership also is a specialized intervention.

Intervention specification starts with a strategy for ending and preventing this conflation. Collaboration means interdependent relationships among people, while partnership refers to new relationships among organizations—schools, community health and social services agencies, youth development and youth care organizations, and local businesses. Two units of analysis are implicated here: Relationships among people (collaboration) and relationships among organizations (partnership). Where community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended services schools are concerned, both are needed. Especially when they are aligned and synchronized, collaboration and partnerships are twin interventions, and they are indicators of advanced or mature exemplars.

An old saying applies to the next set of challenges with collaboration. “The devil’s in the details.” In short, it is one thing to proclaim interdependent working relationships among teachers and educators, student support professionals, OST providers, and community health and social services professionals. It is quite another to specify how these relationships play out in everyday practice; and also to craft policy that provides incentives and rewards for optimal arrangements. The effectiveness of new practice protocols and all manner of collaborative working arrangements (e.g., teachers’ professional learning communities, interprofessional student services teams, interprofessional family support teams) depends on such specifications.

The theory of action for community schools, community learning centers, extended-service schools and multi-service schools also depends on such specifications. Recall the main assumptions for this theory of action (theory of change)—as initially presented in Chap. 3. (1) Children’s schooling-related needs, problems, and aspirations influence and are influenced by their counterparts in other realms of their lives. (2) Improvements in children’s school engagement, academic learning and overall school performance will transfer to improvements in other aspects of their lives (e.g., improved mental health). (3) Reciprocally, improvements in, for example, a child’s mental health via mental health interventions will transfer to schools, ultimately resulting in improved attendance, on-time arrival, engagement, academic learning, and overall school performance; (4) In addition to the transferability of outcomes from a single intervention (e.g., mental health) to these school-related outcomes, multiple interventions can and must be implemented simultaneously, harmoniously and synergistically when children’s needs and problems co-occur and nest in each other such that addressing one entails addressing one or more of the others—and indicating that the professionals who address them depend on each other.

Thompson’s (2003) path-breaking conceptualization of three kinds of interdependent relationships provides guidance for the difficult work that lies ahead. He offers important choices for designers of various collaboration configurations, starting with the classroom-connected system described above. Together these three conceptualizations open evaluation pathways toward important questions regarding the value-added effects of the kinds of teams, communities of practice, and networks, which are centerpieces in community school-related designs (Wenger, Trayner, & de Laat, 2011).

These three conceptualizations of interdependent relationships are not mutually exclusive, i.e., a particular community school can have systems for all three. What matters is that the targeted relationships among people and their practice strategies are specified. With such specification, professionals know their respective roles and responsibilities in relationship to others. Only then can they be evaluated and improved systematically, enhancing the probability that children families are served, and maximizing the efficient use of precious resources.

Sequential Interdependence

Sequential interdependence is exemplified by an industrial organization’s product assembly line. In community school-like designs, sequential interdependence is founded on turn-taking by two or more individuals or teams. Typically individuals and teams are expected to proceed in a predetermined order. In some cases, program and service scripts or protocols are developed that designated roles, responsibilities and relationships and specify the required sequence.

The pattern here is a familiar one. As each individual or team takes its turn with a student, a sub-population of students, or a family system and implements one or more specialized interventions, an essential, short-term objective, also called a proximal outcome, is achieved. Over time and with the best sequencing, the achievement of each short-term objective progressively contributes to the achievement of a major goal. In Weick’s (1984) terms: Each small win ultimately adds up to huge gains.

A community learning center example illustrates sequential interdependence. Students with mental health needs such as depression and suicidal ideation cannot be expected to learn optimally and succeed in school until such time as these two needs are addressed. Optimal practice models recommend therapeutic services provided by a specially prepared mental health professional, oftentimes one employed by a community-based mental health agency.

In this sequential relationship, the student initially is referred to the agency. The mental health professional starts by providing services, i.e., s/he implements and monitors evidence-based mental health interventions. The main assumption is that the teacher cannot succeed and progress with the child until such time as the mental health need is addressed effectively. In other words, the teacher depends fundamentally on the mental health professional. S/he cannot achieve academic learning and classroom and school outcomes until such time as the mental health need is addressed. Honig, Kahne, and McLaughlin (2001) characterize this relationship pejoratively as “fix, then teach.” Setting aside the pejorative connotations, this collaborative relationship is an example of sequential interdependence.

All such sequential interdependence involves careful, orchestrated task coordination, whether within a team, inside an organization, or at the connected boundaries of schools and social/health service organizations. It can be viewed as a collective function or activity, one that is scripted and even regimented; and with shared responsibility and accountability among the several professionals.

Reciprocal Interdependence

Reciprocal interdependence is a special kind of collaboration, and it responds to three important needs. One is how long it takes to provide assistance, social supports, services, and resources to a student, a student sub-population, or a family system. The second need is cost: The longer it takes to meet data-identified needs and the more professionals it requires, the greater the expenditures. The third need is the paramount priority—what it takes to achieve desired outcomes and avoid bad ones.

Whereas sequential interdependence proceeds over a considerable period of time via individual and team turn-taking, reciprocal interdependence is predicated on strong, structured interactions in the here-and-now. The main idea is that no professional can proceed efficiently, effectively, and appropriately without the immediate, timely contributions of other professionals. Above all, the student, student group, or family system cannot make progress unless individual professionals and teams interact and jointly provide services in the here-and-now, synchronizing their respective efforts in the here-and-now and aiming to create a mutually-beneficial synergy.

The above example of the collaboration between the teacher and mental health service provider provides a case in point. The community-based mental health professional quickly finds out that she cannot make progress with the treatment plan until such time as the child’s trajectory in the classroom and the school overall improve. In other words, this mental health professional discovers that a separate, categorical mental health intervention fails to address some of the root causes of the child’s depression and suicidal ideation because it turns out that they are caused in part by the child’s perceptions, experiences, interactions, and behavior in the classroom, perhaps in relation to a particular teacher. Oftentimes, these several needs are associated with vicious cycles that develop between classroom teachers and children with mental health needs (Fig. 13.1).

In brief, neither the mental health professional nor the teacher can make demonstrable progress with the child when their respective interventions are crafted and implemented sequentially. Here, “fix, then teach” logic (sequential interdependence) turns out to be part of the problem. The way ahead necessitates interventions that connect and integrate mental health services and classroom pedagogy in real time, also requiring interdependent relationships between the community mental health professional and the teacher. Their individual and collective social experimentation, directed toward shared outcomes, involves back-and-forth interactions, interchanges, and in-flight adjustments in real time. No one succeeds, i.e., desired outcomes are not achieved, without mutually-beneficial interactions and behavior involving the mental health professional, the teacher, and, of course, the child.

In comparison to sequential interdependence, reciprocal interdependence is more difficult to structure, manage, and facilitate. Where schools and community agencies are concerned, it requires special connective-communicative mechanisms and linkage protocols—as described previously. Significantly, reciprocal interdependence is both a reason and a motive for forming interprofessional, school-linked teams that enable face-to-face intervention planning, progressive monitoring, and fortified, shared perceptions of interdependent relationships. Collaboration’s pattern of reciprocal interdependence is facilitated when special structures such as formal teams are developed; when teams are facilitated and led by specially-prepared leaders and coordinators; and when the social settings for teams are conducive to the institutionalization and sustainability of genuine team collaboration (Edwards, Lunt, & Stamou, 2010; Lawson, 2014; Mellin, Anderson-Butcher, & Bronstein, 2011; Van Veen, 2008).

Pooled Interdependence

Pooled interdependence operates in a laissez faire environment. Here, individuals and teams contribute to each other’s success, but there is no formal plan or system, and no direct leadership and infrastructure, to institutionalize and sustain it. In fact, it may be the case that diverse professionals and educators are unaware of what others do and have done, even though their own efficiency, effectiveness and overall success would not be possible without the contributions-as-achievements of other individuals, teams, and organizations.

The mental health treatment and school success example provides a case in point. Both the mental health professional (and her agency) and the teacher (and his school) may owe their respective achievements to the un-orchestrated and informal contributions of the other(s). In short, in too many schools, interprofessional, collaborative working relationships between teachers, community service professionals, and OST providers are unplanned. Lacking a formal system and a supportive cross-boundary infrastructure, mutually beneficial assistance, social supports, and resources are more like random occurrences.

These features and others make pooled interdependence fragile, and that’s just the beginning of its manifest limitations. Staying with the same example, when the mental health needs of students are no longer met, and academic and classroom challenges and problems develop suddenly and systematically, teachers, student support professionals, and school leaders remain in the dark as to what happened and why. This also means that they are left to their own devices about what to do differently and better. The challenges mount when a teacher leaves for another job, or the mental health professional takes maternity leave. Absent a formal system of arrangements, these workforce changes derail plans to coordinate classroom and school interventions with ones mounted in community agencies, homes, and neighborhood organizations. This problem is especially apparent when multiple interventions must be implemented simultaneously to address co-occurring and interlocking needs. Unfortunately, this problem often results in parents/caregivers who are uninformed, uninvolved, or caught between conflicting schedules and service delivery protocols. This is not a recipe for success.

Developing Formal, Coherent, and Feasible Plans for Coordinating Multiple Interventions

All of the professionals responsible and accountable for the success of community schools community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-service schools depend on each other, and so they must collaborate because many of the children and families they serve have multiple, co-occurring and interlocking needs. Addressing and striving to prevent one need oftentimes entails strategies for addressing and preventing one or more of the others. Examples are plentiful, and they are well-known to every experienced practitioner.

For example, mental health problems such as depression often co-occur with other problems such as substance abuse, lack of student engagement, and unhealthy out-of-school time choices and behavior. Another example: Children in foster care (“looked after children”) frequently have adverse childhood experiences that produce trauma-related symptomology, and many needs for special education services in tandem with mental health counselling. Yet another example: Children with parents with substance abuse problems have their own needs, and these needs often cannot be met without companion interventions for parents and the entire family system (e.g., Iachini et al., 2015). One more: Early school leaving or dropping out of school is caused by and associated with many factors, necessitating multiple interventions (Freeman & Simonsen, 2015).

What strategies can community school leaders select, implement and strive to improve in order to orchestrate the progressive implementation and synchronization of multiple interventions? Mindful that there are no easy or firm answers to this important practice and policy question, Weiner, Lewis, Clauser, and Stitzenberg (2012)’s inventory of five strategies provides structural and operational guidance. Although they are identified and described separately next, they are not mutually exclusive. They may be packaged together in various combinations. These important opportunities for more detailed designs may give rise to several important innovations.

The Accumulation Strategy

In the accumulation strategy, interventions implemented by various people in schools, community agencies, and neighborhood organizations produce a cumulative effect that yields desired outcomes. Significantly, the effect of any one intervention does not depend on one or more others. In other words, each intervention is independent even though each ultimately contributes to the achievement of interdependent student, family and school outcomes.

This accumulation strategy is associated with the above-described idea of pooled interdependence. These two ideas belong together because their joint effects are implicit, perhaps even coincidental. Arguably, in many fledgling community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-services schools, this combination of pooled interdependence and the accumulation strategy reflects the current status. It provides a baseline for new designs.

In other words, planning for multiple intervention coordination, alignment, and synchronization begins with recognition that no such framework has been developed and also that improved outcomes depend on specifications of how multiple interventions will be coordinated across the boundaries. The following strategies provide important alternatives, and as they are implemented, progress in achieving outcomes will follow.

The Amplification Strategy

With this second strategy for orchestrating multiple interventions, whether in schools, community agencies, and homes, the effect of one or more interventions is conditional on the effect(s) of one or more others. This strategy is especially salient when co-occurring and interlocking needs must be addressed. Just as each need is nested in one or more others, interventions specially designed for one need also depends on the successful implementation or one or more others.

So, for example, OST interventions to improve a student’s homework completion and enhance her engagement may need an “intervention booster.” Career counseling and life course developmental planning interventions that connect academic learning with “possible selves” and adult lifestyles are one such booster (Oyersman, Johnson, & James, 2011).

The Facilitation Strategy

This third strategy for coordinating and orchestrating multiple interventions represents an advanced developmental stage of the amplification strategy. The main difference is noteworthy. In contrast to the informal system and implicit intervention relationships that characterize the amplification strategy, the facilitation strategy is founded on a formal system for orchestrating and coordinating multiple interventions.

For example, a community mental health professional’s cognitive-behavioral therapy for a student’s depression and social and emotional behavioral problems can be facilitated when this professional dovetails her efforts with companion interventions mounted by educators. Two prime examples of these school-based, facilitative interventions are data-driven response-to-intervention protocols for addressing students’ academic and behavioral needs in school and a positive behavior intervention system, which provides generalizable norms, standards, and rules for behavioral conduct in schools, community agencies, and homes (Sailor, 2009).

Like the amplification strategy, with the facilitation strategy the effect of one or more interventions (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy) is conditional on one or other interventions (e.g., response-to-invention, positive behavior intervention systems). In contrast to the amplification strategy, in which intervention interactions may be fortuitous, in this facilitation strategy joint intervention causal relationships and combined effects are known and planned.

The Cascade Strategy

This strategy is built on patterns of sequential interdependence. Here, successive interventions are progressively implemented over time by individual professionals or teams, whether in schools, community agencies, homes, or some combination of these settings. The main idea is that the goodness of fit and power of the first intervention influences and perhaps determines the fit, power, and effectiveness of subsequent interventions. In effect, the first intervention’s outcomes (e.g., cognitive behavior therapy provided in a community mental health agency) become inputs or intervention baseline for one or more others (e.g., classroom-based interventions to improve the students’ cognitive, behavioral and affective engagement).

Ideally, these cascading effects are additive, integrative, and progressive. However, they also can be regressive and undesirable, especially when no organizing and unifying framework is present. The advantage of formal intervention frameworks is that they increase the probability that desired outcomes will occur, and they act as preventive mechanisms undesirable ones, including unintentional harm caused by professionals with good intentions (Allen-Scott, Hatfield, & McIntyre, 2014).

The Convergence Strategy

This strategy is built on patterns of reciprocal interdependence. Here, interventions implemented by multiple professionals, oftentimes doing their work in separate, but linked organizations, have an explicit, formal plan for their collaboration. They interact, reinforce, and strengthen each other in real time. In other words, they interact formally in the here-and-now, and they make reciprocal interdependence an explicit aim. Oftentimes working in teams, but also working alone with strong communications systems and linkage protocols, they strive to development complementary, positive interactions among interventions.

Students and families benefit because potentially separate interventions are explicitly dovetailed with the aim of creating harmonious, synergistic relationships. These relationships have structural components that serve as system infrastructure, and they build strong collaborative cultures among specialized professionals employed by different organizations. In these several ways, this convergence strategy provides a timely innovation that promises to advance community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended services schools. For example, this strategy has enormous potential for improving student engagement, while preventing disengagement.

Focusing on Student Engagement, Disengagement, and Re-engagement

A slogan from the youth development field introduces this important student engagement priority and the innovations needed to address it. “Kids vote with their feet.” This slogan directs attention to the developmental pathways toward engagement.

Starting with Proximal Outcomes

Students’ attendance, on-time arrival, readiness to learn, and varying combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are important prerequisites and co-requisites for academic engagement, learning, and achievement. All can be viewed as proximal outcomes that community schools, community learning centers, extended-services schools, and multi-service schools can uniquely achieve systematically; and at scale. These schools’ partnership systems and people-related collaborations can be configured accordingly (Van Veen & Berdowski, 2000).

In fact, accountability-oriented evaluations can and should focus on them as early indicators of progress and effectiveness, as indicated in Chap. 3 (see also several chapters in Part II). When they are omitted, the risks increase of evaluation-driven “false negatives”—a tragic situation in which evaluators conclude that these new school designs have not made a positive difference, even though they have (Lawson, 1999). The main problem here is that evaluators have employed mismatched methods and have looked in the wrong places for progress toward desirable outcomes.

However, the roots of this problem run deeper. The root problem can be traced to the imprecision of community school-related designs. Too many designer-leaders have not developed formal logic models with synchronized intervention systems that are predicated on the important developmental progression identified above.

To reiterate: This complicated progression starts with regular attendance and on-time arrival; proceeds to learning readiness with varying combinations of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, which facilitates classroom (academic) engagement; and ultimately, when teachers do their jobs and students are engaged, academic learning and achievement improve. Absent such a strategic focus on these engagement-related priorities, and without sufficient specification regarding how multiple interventions are connected and what kinds of interdependent relationships will be prioritized, community schools, community learning centers, extended-services schools, and multi-service schools end up as “hollow shell” partnership configurations. Mirroring the limitations of conventional school reform strategies, hollow shell partnerships and loosely-configured, people-related collaborations are insufficiently specified, and they are not riveted on the daily student priorities that matter most. Engagement is one such priority.

Mapping and Addressing Four Kinds of Engagement

An international handbook devoted exclusively to student engagement provides a rich resource for engagement-focused maps and intervention strategies (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012). One of its main strengths also is a limitation. Its’ comprehensiveness, especially the variety of engagement conceptualizations and improvement strategies it presents, can be dizzying and paralyzing. Another limitation is an implicit model of the conventional school with egg crate classrooms in which teachers work alone.

Where community schools, community learning centers, multi-services schools, and extended services schools are concerned, a special conception of engagement provides important opportunities for partnership and collaboration innovations that improve results. It is called a social-ecological framework for engagement (Hancock & Zubrick, 2015; Lawson & Lawson, 2013; Wilcox, Lawson, & Angelis, 2015).

The framework is ecological because it is founded on the several settings that influence child well-being overall and their engagement in schools, community agencies, and other settings. Engagement is social because, in contrast to biology-related ecologies, it is not strictly determined. Instead, the engagement of individual students and groups of students is malleable. It is socially constructed and constituted by identifiable people (students, parents, educators, helping professionals) in particular social settings (schools, community agencies, neighborhood organizations, homes) and at particular times.

The same social-ecological conceptualization is germane to student disengagement, i.e., their gradual withdrawal from schools, youth development organizations, and other child and family-serving agencies (Lawson & Lawson, 2013). What’s more, this conceptualization applies to the work of re-engaging students (Hancock & Zubrick, 2015), especially those who have dropped out of school (e.g., Mills & McGregor, 2014).

Whether the focus is engagement, disengagement, or re-engagement, this new agenda involves four ecological settings and the engagement opportunities they offer. Figure 13.3 maps these engagement priorities, emphasizing that they are at least related and can be interdependent.

Fig. 13.3

Connecting four engagement priorities and improving them together

The conventional focus on academic or classroom engagement with its priorities for cognitive, affective, and behavioral indicators remains center-stage, and teachers bear considerable responsibility for it. However—and in contrast to conventional engagement models and walled-in school reform strategies—in this social-ecological conceptualization there are three other kinds of engagement—engagement in school activities, engagement in community organizations, and engagement with family systems in homes. Each of these other three kinds influences, and is influenced by, academic or classroom engagement.

Significantly, this comprehensive, social ecological framework provides additional resources, assistance and supports to teachers and students alike. Simply stated, people other than classroom teachers share responsibility and accountability for academic engagement. Such a comprehensive strategy thus is a preventive mechanism for a current problem that is evident world-wide. This strategy is a potential remedy for unwarranted and excessive blame placed on teachers for students’ lack of classroom engagement, learning, and improved achievement. With a social-ecological framework for engagement, responsibilities and accountabilities for engagement are shared.

School Engagement

School engagement is manifested in students’ involvement in school-sponsored co-curricular and extra-curricular programs and services, which are centerpieces in community school-related designs. Examples include student clubs, sports, drama, the arts, newspapers and yearbooks, and honorary societies. The main ideas-as-potential benefits derive from the positive youth development research. When the right conditions are in place and interventions work as planned, students involved in these activities develop a sense of connection to school, a sense of attachment to the caring adults who supervise these programs, and membership in a prosocial peer group. All are facilitators for attendance, on-time arrival, learning readiness and behavioral controls, and student motivation.

What’s more, when these co-requisites are harnessed effectively, students’ classroom (academic) engagement improves, setting the stage for companion improvements in academic learning and achievement. Reciprocally, academic engagement facilitates school engagement. In this social-ecological framework, these two kinds of engagement are mutually reinforcing (Lawson & Lawson, 2013).

Another important opportunity for innovation has not been described sufficiently, and it is a timely, strategy way to improve efforts directed toward the social integration of diverse students, particular those with special needs who are at risk of peer-related social exclusion. The school subject matter areas that risk being viewed as “expensive frills”—with some targeted for reduced time and resources and perhaps elimination—provide important bridges between academic (classroom engagement) and school engagement, especially so in community school-related designs. Examples of these school subjects include art, music, drama, and physical education. In addition to their subject-specific contributions to children’s engagement, education and overall well-being, they offer two other timely, important opportunities to address three manifest needs.

The first is founded on the fast-growing priority for twenty-first century skills and especially the priority for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM disciplines. These twin priorities are evident in nearly every nation as part of schools’ contributions to economic development. A recent noteworthy development expands this rather narrow approach to STEM and economic development. The arts are added—and with a special priority for how the various arts disciplines are needed for the creativity component and team-based problem-solving prioritized in nearly every definition of twenty-first century skills. A new acronym has developed to describe this important expansion of STEM. STEAM is the new one, with the A standing for the arts and providing multiple opportunities to link classroom engagement school engagement and community youth engagement.

The second opportunity concerns the connection between these special school subjects (e.g., physical education and music), their companion extra-curricular activities (e.g., interscholastic sports, school choirs and orchestras), and the important needs for the social integration of culturally and ethnically diverse students. A strong, convincing line of research conducted under the title of “intergroup contact theory” provides structural and operational guidance regarding how these school subjects and extra-curricular activities can be oriented toward social integration alongside school and classroom engagement (e.g., Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011).

The main idea is that school subjects such as physical education and art provide opportunities for diverse groups to enjoy face-to-face contact with each other. This interpersonal contact sets the stage for them to learn about undesirable stereotypes based on race, ethnicity and special physical and developmental needs, paving the way for the elimination of harmful prejudices.

In a nutshell, what makes these school subjects different (and risks the label “frills”) actually provides ideal settings for social inclusion and cultural integration outcomes. These activity-based subjects provide ideal settings for diverse students to develop new friendships—if they are explicitly designed and conducted to achieve this important social integration outcome.

Risking over-simplification, a research-supported script drives teaching, learning, and participation designs. The four components are: (1) Learning about the outgroup(s); (2) Repeated interventions for attitudinal and behavioral changes in relation to one or more outgroups; (3) Generating affective ties among individuals and groups; and (4) Helping individuals and like groups reappraise their initial, prejudicial views and stereotypes, expanding their horizons and preparing them to other students and adults do the same.

These four components can serve as drivers for curricular designs and instructional strategies for physical education, art, drama, music and other subjects, especially designs and strategies that bridge the “regular school day” and “out of school time.” The intervention power of this new bridging configuration increases when designs for community school organizational climates are configured to facilitate the social integration of diverse students, parents, and staff members. Figure 13.4, which is informed by Stanton-Salazaar’s (2001) research, provides examples of formal, explicit norms for positive school climates.

Fig. 13.4

Community school climate features that improve social integration

Engagement in Communities

Youth engagement in community agencies and neighborhood organizations is the third kind. As with school engagement, community school-related designs offer a special opportunity because community partnerships are defining features. The main idea is that positive youth development and beneficial out-of-school time programs facilitate both school engagement and classroom engagement—and vice versa.

Here too, intervention logic and careful orchestration of multiple interventions are like keys for opening these doors of opportunity. Community professionals, leaders of neighborhood organizations, and school leaders (particularly community school coordinators) need to capitalize on the opportunities to develop formal plans and service protocols that effectively connect youth engagement in communities, school engagement, and classroom engagement. To reiterate: Reaping the benefits from this kind of engagement depends in part on figuring out what kind(s) of interdependent relationship(s) needs to be developed (e.g., reciprocal, sequential) and how multiple interventions mounted in schools, community agencies and neighborhood organizations will be orchestrated.

Engagement in Homes

The fourth social-ecological setting is the home, and engagement-related planning and intervention development focus on parents/caregivers and entire family systems. Facilitating the engagement and re-engagement of children and youth, while preventing their increasing disengagement, is a powerful way to recruit, engage, and sustain the participation and joint leadership of parents/caregivers. Here, there is a direct connection to the parent and family interventions presented in Chap. 4—namely, parent involvement, collective parent engagement, and family support.

A unique feature of community school-related designs also provides opportunities for interventions in the home and directed toward parents and the family system. These new designs feature programs and services for parents and entire family systems, typically offered during times when “regular school” is not in session. Two-generation strategies are predicated on the idea that one of the best ways to engage and support a child is by simultaneously engaging and supporting the parent/caregiver and the entire family system (e.g., Ascend at the Aspen Institute, 2012). So, for example, adult career and technical education programs offered at the school serve parents and, at the same time, enlist parents’ support in engaging their children. In the same vein, two-generation strategies show considerable promise in helping new immigrant parents/caregivers and their children learn a nation’s dominant language (Ross, 2015).

As with the other forms of engagement, interdependent relationships are mainstays in formal intervention planning, The three other kinds of engagement (classroom, school, community) influence what happens in homes; and reciprocally, what parents/caregivers and entire family systems prioritize and do in the name of engagement influences young people’s engagement in community agencies and neighborhood organizations, school programs and activities, and classrooms.

An Explicit Plan Driven by Data

Although the relationships among these four kinds of engagement are complicated, the fact is that they already are operative, albeit implicitly and behind the scenes. The partnership systems and the various collaboration arrangements made possible by community school-related designs enable educators, parents, neighborhood organization leaders, and community agency professionals to craft collaboratively explicit, testable engagement strategies that target all four kinds of engagement and unite them in a clear, coherent, aligned, and useful framework. As this work advances, significant progress will be made in addressing the old achievement gap, while providing opportunities to intervene early and prevent tragic school dropouts.

Comprehensive, integrated school-community data systems are essential co-requisites and facilitators for this all-important engagement work (McLaughlin & London, 2013). For example, these data systems enable statistical analyses that yield identifiable groups (sub-populations) of like students with identical and similar engagement-related needs and assets (Lawson & Masyn, 2014). Interprofessional collaboration arrangements can be structured accordingly—for example, educators and community professionals are able to develop an engagement-related system of roles, responsibilities, and relationships.

At the same time, cross-boundary, school-community engagement interventions are easier to develop, implement and evaluate, when sub-populations of students are the targets. Another advantage: In comparison to time-intensive and costly individual interventions, group-based interventions are more efficient and effective, and they often pave the way for youth leadership.

Beyond Professional Knows Best: Youth, Parent, and Community Member Leadership

As the number of community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended services schools grows, a major question looms. Whose schools are they?

This overall question gives rise to others. What and whose interests do these schools serve? Who decides what they prioritize and do? Even with their data systems, do educators and other helping professionals always know all that is needed and how best to proceed? What, if anything, do educators and other professionals do to tap the expertise and preferences of students, parents, and active community members? How might professionals make the shift from “doing to” to “crafting with” students, parents, and community leaders?

Entire books are needed in response to these questions and others they implicate. We raise them because they represent the next phases in the design of community schools, community learning centers, extended-services schools, and multi-service schools and, once they are prioritized, timely innovations will follow. Many of the required conceptual frameworks and research-supported building blocks already are available.

A Shift from Direct to Indirect Practice with Children and Adults

Research on youth (student) leadership for school improvement continues to grow, and some of it includes descriptions and recommendations regarding how professionals’ roles, responsibilities and relationships change to facilitate this leadership (e.g., Mitra, 2007; Mitra, Lewis, & Sanders, 2013). Beyond the school, youth leadership for school-community partnerships also has been described and documented, including how this leadership has resulted in impressive innovations such as young people being elected to school boards and their leadership for the design of an alternative high school (Lawson, Claiborne, Hardiman, Austin, & Surko, 2007).

Research also indicates that youth leadership in particular depends on another important precondition. Supportive social settings are a practical necessity (Tseng & Seidman, 2007). Like the best organic gardens that provide optimal environments for growing healthy food, school, community, and home settings must be conducive to genuine youth leadership. Unfortunately, the hierarchical, control-oriented structures of many conventional schools make it difficult to develop supportive social settings for youth leadership. Viewed through this lens, community schools, community learning centers, extended-services schools, and multi-services schools offer distinctive advantages because of the alternatives structures, programs, and timetables they provide.

Four Pillars for Distributed and Collaborative Leadership

Four pillars support the conceptual foundation for this leadership, and all are equally important. Two dimensional, cross-boundary school and community leadership is the first one. Conventional ideas for distributed leadership—an intra-school phenomenon focused specifically on the instructional core (Spillane, 2013)—is paired with cross-boundary, collaborative leadership for various kinds of people-related collaborations and organizational partnerships (e.g., Green, 2015; Ishimaru, 2013). Together distributed and collaborative leadership are optimized when they are jointly focused on leadership for school and educational equity (Ishimaru & Galloway, 2014; Raffo, 2014). This unfinished agenda has import for schools, universities, and state/provincial education departments, and it extends to the much-needed resources, supports and preparation programs for school-family-community-university coordinators (e.g., Lawson, in press; Williams, 2012).

The second pillar is the idea of relational power (Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009), also known as relational agency (Edwards, 2009). Initially developed to refer to interprofessional relationships, the idea extends to professionals’ relationships with young people, parents, and community members. The main idea here is that, when professionals genuinely collaborate with each other and also with the students, parents and community members they serve, they generate this potent resource called relational power. This relational power includes resource-providing and –generating social capital relationships (Allan & Catts, 2012; Lawson, 2014). It stems in part from the more equitable power and authority relationships that professionals develop with persons known in other settings as students, clients, service users, consumers, patients and “laypersons.”

The third conceptual pillar is founded on twin ideas (Marks, 2012; Marks & Lawson, 2005). One is goal congruence. The main idea is that helpers and persons needing assistance craft shared goals. More than technical strategy, the development of shared goals involves a professional shift from “doing to people” to “working with them.” Put another way, motivation changes from top-down, compliance-oriented “have to motives” to young people’s self-initiated and –maintained “want to motives.” All in all, when helping professionals, students, parents, and other adults share the same goals, and they are jointly motivated to work toward achieving these goals, the better the likelihood that children, youth, and adults will be intrinsically motivated and will work semi-independently to achieve these shared goals.

Goal congruence paves the way to the second idea—co-production (Cahn, 2000). Here, students, parents, and community members are actively engaged in crafting and adhering to collaborative interventions that achieve shared goals. Responsibility and accountability shift accordingly. Students, parents, and community leaders accept shared responsibility and voluntary accountability for improved results when leadership for co-production has been developed.

The fourth conceptual pillar is leadership-as-meaningful employment. Here, jobs are developed for young people, parents, and community leaders; and with the assumption that services alone will not lift people out of poverty (Schorr, 1997). In addition to the customary paid employment opportunities are impressive innovations involving a non-monetary economy.

Time-dollar systems with school and community time banking institutions hold considerable promise because these systems pair employment development with purchasing power, social networking and community building (see Cahn, 2000; Cahn & Rowe, 1992; Marks, 2012). The primary assumption is that poverty-challenged people rarely will have enough money to purchase all of the goods and services they need. These needs will remain unaddressed until such time as an alternative arrangement is made to meet them. A local, non-monetary economy is one strategy for doing so.

The main ideas for the time dollar and time banking systems derive from this need-driven opportunity. (1) Redefine work to include the services everyday people provide to each other (e.g., cutting another person’s chair, walking another person’s dog, shopping for another person’s food, fixing another person’s broken window). (2) Recognize and reward the time it takes to provide this service—for example, each hour of service-as-work counts as two time-dollars; (3) Develop community-based, computer systems to record and monitor each person’s time dollar banking accounts; (4) Publicize the full range of time-dollar related services available for purchase in the community; (5) Develop social networking leaders and mechanisms to facilitate the “purchase” of goods and services using time dollars; and, (6) Consider the option of developing time banking systems and time dollar stores in community school-related designs so that students have access to goods (donated by community organizations) and learn how to develop savings accounts and manage “money.”

Innovations like these are powerful mechanisms for leadership development, the generation of relational power, and much needed assistance, social support provision, and resource exchanges in urban neighborhoods, inner ring suburbs and isolated rural communities challenged by concentrated disadvantage and co-occurring needs. They extend beyond social and health services to include all-important economic innovations. Two other innovations take community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-services schools in this same important direction toward economic resources and job-related opportunities.

Two Innovations that Expand School Designs to Prioritize Employment Readiness and Economic Development

These last two innovations can be summarized easily and succinctly because the stage has been set in the above discussion and also in previous chapters. Together they have import for future policy, practice and research involving area-based, clusters of community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-services schools.

Building Pathways to Postsecondary Education for Employment and Citizenship

The first entails the development of cradle-to-career education systems. Here, entire “organizational families” of community schools, community learning centers, extended-services schools and multi-service schools are joined with birth-to-age three programs, preschool programs, and postsecondary education institutions (e.g., Edmondson & Zimpher, 2014; Lawson, 2013; McGrath 2008; Tough, 2008).

Especially in de-industrializing democracies where postsecondary education is a practical necessity, these new systems are mechanisms for education’s contributions to economic and social development. More than this macro-level contribution, these systems with their educational opportunity pathways provide visible, tangible pathways out of poverty, helping to prevent perceived and actual social exclusion and social isolation. Developed explicitly in this way, these new educational systems designs facilitate student engagement, career-related identity development, persistence and resilience, and academic learning and achievement. In brief, they are powerful facilitators for addressing both the old and the new achievement gaps.

Expanding Designs for Employment and Economic Development

The second kind of innovation does not require students to have the kind of deferred gratification needed for a cradle-to-career system. It expands the design of community schools, community learning centers, extended services schools, and multi-services schools to encompass and prioritize two related economic development initiatives.

The first is the familiar and tested configuration for career development and job-related learning. School-and-work programs are paired with school-to-work initiatives. The former is a here-and-now configuration, and it extends to a variety of out-of-school time programs and services.

The school-to-work initiative is a vertical configuration that spans grade levels and school levels. Both configurations involve a different set of partnerships—this time with employers, particularly businesses, corporations, and governments. All such job-related and economic development partnerships progressively expand the idea of a community school, community learning center, multi-services school, and extended-services school.

The second economic development priority is related to the time dollar and time-banking innovations described above. In addition to innovations in the non-monetary economy, these leaders for this new school design have the opportunity to develop partnerships with banks, credit agencies and governmental organizations that loan money to provide micro-credit and micro-loan strategies to entrepreneurial parents/caregivers and even young people who ready to launch their own small businesses (Briar-Lawson et al., 2001).

For example, student gardens are a common fixture in many American community schools. The food students grow is a potential commercial product, and an especially valuable one in challenging places with few grocery stores and shortages of healthy food. Micro-loans in support of small businesses that respond to the needs of places known as “food deserts” provides an important way to educate students, keep them engaged in school and with their eyes on the graduate prizes, and, at the same time, provide income at the same time they develop entrepreneurial skills and abilities. While conventional schools are able to mount the same innovative agenda, their stand-alone structure constrains and impedes these innovations.

Comparatively more readiness and capacity are evident in community schools, community learning centers, extended services schools, and multi-service schools because they already are configured to meet co-occurring needs and achieve interconnected outcomes. In fact, the logic model orginally presented as Fig. 3.1 can and should be expanded to include employment-related fixtures and economic development innovations.

Figure 13.5 has been designed accordingly. Framed by a Cradle-to-Career systems building agenda, and informed by the path-breaking work of others (Kerr et al., 2014, p. 160), it expands the services-oriented designs characteristic of the exemplars featured in this book. This figure indicates that designs for community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-services schools can be expanded strategically to include employment-related and economic development innovations.

Fig. 13.5

Expansive place-based community school development

This same figure diagram showcases several other important, innovative features, and many combine “inside-out” and “outside-in” improvement strategies. For example, data-driven assessments (left side of the figure) are more expansive, and they require new coordinative mechanisms overseen by newly-prepared and deployed cross-boundary leaders. Also in contrast to conventional schools, this new logic model emphasizes explicit goals for adults, entire families and communities.

Turning to outcomes at the right side of the Figure, family support is added to more conventional, school-based, short-term outcomes. The several parent and family innovations described in Chap. 4 provide strategies for achieving this outcome—an important one for community school-like designs and unique in relation to conventional schools.

The new intermediate outcomes start with improved academic outcomes—indicating a priority for closing the old achievement gap. However, two other, related intermediate outcomes are added to this conventional one. Both are achievable with community schools, community learning centers, extended-service schools, and multi-service schools.

Improvements in both child well-being and family well-being are essential, and their relationship is showcased in this Figure. Based on the compelling idea of two-generation helping, social support and resource strategies (Ascend at the Aspen Institute, 2012; Briar-Lawson et al., 2001; Ross, 2015), this dual outcome is a game-changer for all manner of schools, but especially the schools featured in this book. Developed as a way to make progress in closing the new achievement gap, it provides a very different answer to the questions posed early. Whose schools are they, and what purposes do they serve?

The intermediate outcome regarding staff retention and efficacy was introduced earlier in this chapter. The research-based reminder here is that schools serving the most vulnerable, diverse populations oftentimes are riddled by two kinds of undesirable turnover. Student turnover and staff turnover nest in each other, and one result is that student strangers interact with adult strangers and vice versa. This is not a formula for success.

The new systems prioritized in this chapter provide one way to improve staff quality, efficacy, and stability. Family support and resource interventions that target simultaneous improvements in child well-being and family well-being offer the companion opportunity to slow down student turnover because students change schools when their families move.

So the dual turnover challenge involving both the workforce and students is met by a theory of change that addresses them together. New school designs that serve the workforce and include interventions to strengthen and stabilize families increase the probability that strong, enduring relationships will develop between stable students, strong families and a stable, supported workforce. In contrast to schools needed to be turned around, ones in which strangers interact with strangers, this new framework helps to create the conditions conducive to success.

The long-term outcome of stronger, stable, and networked families follows from these intermediate outcomes. With families as the units for planning and analysis, the way is paved for place-based initiatives that manifest a special resource called neighborhood collective efficacy for children (Lawson, Alameda-Lawson, Lawson, Briar-Lawson, & Wilcox, 2014; Sampson, 2012; Tate, 2012).

Three main ideas are noteworthy, and all are signaled in Fig. 13.5. When place-based collective efficacy is high, parents and other adults jointly steward the learning, healthy development, and school success of the children who reside in their area. Their joint efforts reduce crime and delinquency, substance abuse, mental health needs, under-achievement, and school dropouts. Second, when the family-related social fabric of neighborhoods and communities is strong, diverse children and families are offered opportunities and mechanisms for social integration, particularly new immigrants.

Third, these place-based assets and outcomes are facilitators for children’s engagement in schools and in classrooms, setting the stage for academic learning and achievement and overall school success. In this complicated, but feasible framework, progress is made in closing the two achievement gaps, one involving schools and educational attainment overall and the other involving child well-being and extended to progress toward addressing problematic inequality.

In Conclusion: Inescapable Novelty, Complexity and Uncertainty

Like missing pieces for the same puzzle, the several innovations offered in this chapter are nominees for inclusion in the next set of design experiments in community schools, community learning centers, multi-services schools, and extended-services schools. Like all innovations, they necessitate additional policy incentives and rewards, net new resources, professional development for all manner of professionals (especially interprofessional education and training and cross-boundary leadership development), and both organizational and inter-organizational capacity-building, particularly with regard to cross-sector, integrated, and user-friendly data systems.

This work is not easy, and it is yet another iteration of a pioneering journey surrounded by novelty, complexity and uncertainty. On the other hand, the choice of “standing pat” and “resting on our current laurels” has adverse consequences. Foremost among these shortcomings is limited progress toward addressing the old achievement gap (academic learning outcomes) and the new achievement gap (child well-being as framed by persistent and growing societal inequality). Lives hang in the balance.

All of the innovations presented in this chapter have an especially important feature. All entail crossing well-established boundaries, including professional specializations, organizational jurisdictions, and policy sectors. A special kind of theory—boundary theory—offers special resources and insights for how best to proceed with this new, complex, and uncertain work (e.g., Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Halley, 1997). It is ripe with opportunities for individual, group, organizational, and policy learning, and designs for this learning need to be developed and implemented accordingly.

Finally, it bears repeating that leaders for this work are pioneers because their main charge is not merely to transport and implement someone else’s good idea. These pioneers must design innovations that are fit for purpose, in their specialized contexts, and at particular times.

As indicated in this book’s introduction, leaders are inventers for new professional, organizational, institutional, and policy designs. Mindful of the needs they must meet, the problems they must solve, and windows of opportunity open to them, they proceed with clear goals (intentionality) and with testable theories of action and logic models that specify causal relations. Knowing that today’s organizational and professional designs will not yield desired outcomes at scale, their pioneering design work also is based on contrasts between existing arrangements with sub-optimal outcomes and the innovations needed for better outcomes.

This essential design work is not limited to local exemplar development. It extends to efforts to scale-up, improvement, and sustain these initiatives, and it also necessitates coordinated changes in universities and governments. The last two chapters are structured to address these two sets of priorities—and with the assumption that they are related.