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| Photo: Mike Elliott |
Enterprise is working to bridge the gulf between community development and school reform. Enterprise understands that strategies to improve America’s low-income communities would be more successful if they were reinforced by simultaneous improvements in local schools.
There is an obvious and symbiotic link between the health of a neighborhood and the quality of its schools. Better schools attract families and boost property values; deteriorating schools lead to disinvestment and population loss. School-centered community revitalization strengthens neighborhoods and schools together.
Enterprise Community Partners has 10 years experience in Baltimore and Atlanta combining the large-scale physical redevelopment of a low-income neighborhood with meaningful improvements to the local school. Enterprise is not alone in doing this work. Across the country, for-profit developers and anchor institutions like universities are also seeing that both community development and school improvement are more successful if they are combined.
The approach that Enterprise is promoting combines best practices in community development (mixed income housing with a range of housing choices) with best practices in individual school improvement (new leadership for the school, research-based curriculum, early childhood education, teacher training, facilities improvements, and social service supports for families.) These joint efforts to improve schools and redevelop neighborhoods may become a powerful new paradigm for community development.
Together with Abt Associates, one of the nation’s premier research and consulting firms, Enterprise is documenting and disseminating the nation’s current efforts to combine school reform and community development. The exciting results of this project to date suggest reasons to be hopeful about the potential to improve urban schools. The school-centered community development paradigm does not depend on a particular school reform model. We found successful models for individual schools both inside and outside the traditional public school system. Our focus is on what a community developer or other outsider to the school system can do to bring about change in a particular place by working to improve a neighborhood school.
The first report in a series of three is below.
2007
by Jill Khadduri, Heather Schwartz, Jennifer Turnham of Abt Associates, Inc.
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This paper provides an introduction to school-centered community revitalization. Part 1 presents the case for integrating school improvement into community development, drawing on the academic research linking school and neighborhood quality as well as early results from school-centered community revitalization projects across the country. Part 2 presents the core components of school-centered community revitalization, including both school-based activities and neighborhood-based activities. The final part of the paper illustrates the diverse approaches currently being taken to improve schools and neighborhoods, drawing on the experiences of eight school-centered community revitalization initiatives in five cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia. |
2005
by Tony Proscio
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Schools, Community and Development, Erasing the Boundaries describes the remarkable results of efforts in four neighborhoods in three cities to connect community-based revitalization initiatives with school reform programs in the same neighborhoods. In some of the most challenged communities in Baltimore, St. Louis and Atlanta, low-income children, schools and neighborhoods are making real progress as a result of these coordinated approaches. |
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The Enterprise Education Initiative in Baltimore was launched to help provide better education to inner-city youth in the Sandtown-Winchester community. Research shows that when certain factors come together—dedicated teachers, parent involvement, high academic expectations—students perform better. This effort at public school reform is a key component of a larger Neighborhood Transformation Initiative and paid off in improved standardized test scores. This profile discusses the community need, program types, eligibility requirements and other key components of this program. |
2006
by Leslie Fenwick
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This monograph summarizes the work of the Mechanicsville Community Learning Collaborative (MCLC), a five-year school-anchored community development initiative based in Atlanta, Georgia. MCLC focused on systematically transforming the lives of children who attend Dunbar Elementary School. This pilot initiative employed a comprehensive community development strategy based on Dunbar being a point of leverage for community change in Mechanicsville and vice versa. This report explores the work that can be done, and the results that can be achieved, at the intersections of community building, school reform, and neighborhood revitalization. |
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Capital One has generously provided funding for this work. |
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