Neighborhood schools provide a layer of social fabric that brings a community together and encourages social connection – something we need now more than ever before! How does the neighborhood, in turn, impact its schools?
For example, research on schools serving communities living in poverty show that they have lower attendance rates and higher drop-out rates. But as any sociologist will tell you, these things don't happen in isolation. We live in neighborhoods that are made up of many different parts. Ask a realtor and they’ll tell you the impact school performance has on housing prices. To support the long-term success of our schools and improve student attendance and achievement levels, we must engage more than parents and educators – we must build communities that understand the value of the schools in their neighborhood.
Schools across the country provide a gathering place to host local events, from election day to summer camp. We use school buildings to provide emergency shelter operations, host community meetings, and come together to celebrate holidays and support nonprofit activities. On their playgrounds and sporting fields, kids and their parents meet their neighbors, sometimes for the first time. Inside our schools, teachers and principals get to know generations of students and their families.
In addition, school performance impacts housing demand and prices, according to a 2019 report from the National Association of Realtors® Research Group. It states that 53% of home buyers with children under the age of 18 reported that the quality of local school districts was an important factor in the purchase decision. A 2022 Brookings report on the relationship between schools and communities links strong school performance to higher home values and greater demand. These homebuyers seem to understand the importance of living in a community that values its schools.
Research shows that neighborhoods and communities matter to the success of schools and students. In addition, schools play an important role in connecting local businesses, organizations and individuals. By engaging a diverse group of partners and volunteers to support our schools, we can build strong communities that are invested in their success.
With this in mind, we must engage our entire community, not just educators and parents. That means welcoming the wider community to meet our teachers, support our students, and follow our long-term success through ongoing updates and engagement. Hosting events and activities that bring community members into our schools for the first time are great ways to start. When an entire community comes together to support the success of its local schools, we can make an impact on the lives of our students, our families and our neighbors.
In 2015, a group of people from a neighborhood in south Chicago launched a hunger strike to protest the closing of a local high school. Their community had no open enrollment high schools left, something they felt was unfair and unsustainable for their community and for their kids. The community laid out a very specific vision for what kind of high school they wanted, and the kinds of careers they hoped it would train and equip local kids for.
That Chicago community did not win their fight, and the discussion around what kind of schools we need, what kind of relationship they should have with their neighbors and who gets to make those decisions remains important today.
One lesson that we can take from this example, is that our policymakers must consider our schools, our educators and our students as key audiences that are affected by their decisions now and in the long-term. As we build strong and engaged communities that are actively working to support the success of our schools, we must include policymakers as well. When they make decisions about our schools – whether it's building a new one or closing/renovating an existing one – those decisions have wide reaching impacts on the entire community for years to come.
Schools serving communities with concentrated poverty levels are impacted directly by a lack of resources and opportunities for their students. According to a 2017 study by The Commonwealth Institute, these schools often employ teachers with less experience and pay them less. They offer less advanced placement courses for students and spend less on instructional materials for teachers. Lower attendance rates and graduation rates were also measured in these schools.
I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans, because that city is held up as an example of what urban school districts of the future are going to look like. In this city, a group of people set out to solve the problem of poor quality schools and concentrated poverty. As a result, New Orleans families can pick their school from all over the city. In theory this sounds great, but in a city with this much poverty, many families don’t have their own transportation. . This means that kids are spending hours on school buses crisscrossing the city, making their school days really long. You can find kids in New Orleans who leave the house at 6 am or earlier and don’t get back home until after dark because of their long commute.
The city’s response to overcoming the educational barriers of concentrated poverty was to open school enrollment up to kids across the city, to close underperforming schools and to open new high performing schools. One of the tradeoffs, however, has been the quality-of-life issue of long commute times for students.
This is a cautionary tale about how policies can cause impacts we didn’t imagine, just like ripples in a pond. Unintended consequences like these can go so far beyond what the architects of these policies set out to do.