Expanding school-community partnerships
Across the country, states and communities are mobilizing to focus attention on young children and families, and many benefits could be increased by integrating school and community efforts with early childhood initiatives. Extensive research evidence supports such integration. Recent studies demonstrate the importance of early cognitive stimulation and early emotional development, development promoted by a reciprocal and enriching relationship with a primary caregiver and reinforced by others. But for many babies and young children, this relationship is off to a bad start, with parents who, due to their own circumstances, put their children in danger. To address this need for better early childhood programs, this document explores ways to promote the expansion of school-community partnerships (S-CP) in early childhood learning by maximizing federal policy and use of other new strategies.
Research and high-quality, comprehensive early childhood programs suggest that intervening early to strengthen parent-child development and relationships results in long-term positive impacts on children, including academic achievement, cognitive skills, and significantly higher language skills and fewer behavioral problems than those evidenced by the children. in control groups. However, for children in family child care or in-center care, poor quality is the norm, and the worst documented care for infants and toddlers. As more welfare-working parents accept low-wage jobs, more young children spend more time in child care and early learning settings; Currently, about half of young children are in informal and unregulated daycare. Poor quality child care is a corollary of poverty, and for about half of those living in extreme poverty, the implications are ominous and pressing. Research has long documented the powerful relationships between poverty and poor academic performance and other risk factors, but primarily in older children. There is now evidence that poverty is even more harmful to young children, and the more extreme the poverty, the more harmful. Clearly, waiting until these children get to school is waiting too long to develop an integrated community response with a set of results that reflects cooperative ventures of educators, human services personnel, and other community groups and family members.
The goals of school readiness include (a) providing universal access to quality preschool programs that prepare children for school; (b) allow parents to act as a child’s first teacher, with access to training and support; (c) provide nutrition, exercise, and medical care to ensure that the child is optimally prepared to learn; and d) reducing the number of low-birth-weight babies through better prenatal care. The focus on “school readiness” has directed attention to the development of conceptual frameworks that can capture the complexity that the term denotes, from the child’s factors that reflect social, emotional, cognitive and physical readiness, to family factors. and school factors. Although many people advocate for a narrow child focus or even a child-specific focus, there are also strong voices advocating for community indicators that can be used to drive strategic thinking and collaboration.
For all these reasons, S-CPs must include care for young children that goes beyond having a starter program in place, or even a family resource center. Current programs across the country indicate a solid foundation on which to build. These programs are sometimes home-based and sometimes include parenting education, family support, and family literacy initiatives; sometimes they funded communities or schools to design their own mix of supports for families with young children. In addition, half of the states reported that they fund family support and parental education strategies for children from birth to age 5. These programs establish a clear framework for joining the early childhood agenda with early learning goals and S-CPs.
Currently, only a few states have made young children a high political priority and have mounted multiple strategies to promote their well-being. Most efforts focus on family support or early learning, but, with the exception of some family literacy and home visiting programs, most programs do not attempt to integrate a variety of services. This lack of comprehensive services and family support, exactly those supports that complement a community learning approach, the school’s vision, is the reason why S-CPs could be such a powerful asset to the first community. childhood. While youth development is now part of the vision for community schools, child and family development should be as well.
The quest for sustainable reform has now shifted its focus from “process is everything” to “results are everything.” This mindset places little importance on what can achieve those results and does not provide partners with the opportunity to build a shared vision or think systematically about the links between goals, strategies, and results. Due to this results-oriented approach, funds are rarely made available to develop the kind of working relationship between partners that would sustain partnerships over time. Furthermore, political and educational rhetoric, and sometimes legislative reality, creates new pressures to downplay many paths to real educational reform and to focus exclusively on achieving simple goals. Concerns about teaching for the test or narrow visions of school readiness (for example, knowing 10 letters of the alphabet) are real. The challenge for S-CPs is to use the results to broaden the vision of how to get to real learning, real family support, and real community collaboration to change the “learning lives” of students. Building and sustaining a meaningful interagency collaboration with a vision that includes strong family involvement, linking formal and informal supports, and improving educational outcomes are not easy tasks. The following dictations seem critical to developing and maintaining S-CPs:
– Strong and sustained leadership is key.
– Building a shared vision for change is painstaking and requires a combination of clear vision, achievable goals, and opportunistic risk-taking.
– Integrating the voices of family, students, and teachers is challenging and essential.
– Getting broad community support and participation, including business support, can make a difference in political and fiscal sustainability.
– The PC-S must assume the characteristics of the local culture; they are unique companies.
Federal assistance can help overcome challenges in three key areas: integrating early learning more deeply into the S-CP movement, expanding S-CP leadership and vision to more communities, and evaluating outcomes so schools and communities are accountable for students’ results and also provides information on maintaining and deepening partnerships. School-wide programs and other federal actions have promoted greater flexibility than previously allowed in the use of federal funds and in the consolidation of resources. However, this flexibility is not yet widely used to promote PC-S specifically or education reform in general. Furthermore, taking advantage of this flexibility, especially in all programs, remains enormously complex. Another emerging and not yet fully developed feature of recent federal legislation is the use of incentives and performance bonuses to reward states that exceed federally framed targets. These changing perspectives on federal policymaking offer new possibilities for how the community schools movement could advance federal policies that can advance this complex and crucial agenda. In the hope of stimulating discussion, here are some principles for federal legislation, along with some specific recommendations, particularly related to the challenge of early learning:
– Federal legislation could create incentives to promote development at the level of systems that include S-CP. Incentives can help existing and new programs direct their attention to include community-based initiatives for young children and families, and encourage integration with any ongoing school and community efforts. Incentives can consist of implementation and bonus funds for initiatives that show evidence of system changes and better community indicators and educational outcomes.
– Legislation should continue to promote flexibility in existing federal educational programs and greater consistency in the ways in which flexibility is defined between programs.
– Federal agencies can promote easier resource sharing, better strategic planning, and new initiatives with each other.
– The federal government, both through legislation and agency initiatives, must promote a strong research and development agenda to facilitate more effective learning.
Federal policy alone is not enough to change education in America to meet the vision and goals set by the S-CPs. But it has clearly played a key role in helping to develop the P-PCs of the 21st century, and it can, and must, continue to play an important role in shaping and implementing the vision of P-PCs for the future.
