Chicago Public Schools Community Schools Initiative

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and their community partners have used community schooling as a strategy to support students, their families, and the broader school community, creating the Community Schools Initiative (CSI) in 2002. A key component of the initiative is identifying the needs of the school community and providing high-quality programming and services to address the academic, social, emotional, and other needs of students enrolled in initiative schools.

The initial CSI cohort consisted of 20 CPS schools, which were partnered with arts, youth development, and social service organizations. To date, more than 200 schools and almost 50 organizations have participated in the initiative.
 

AIR's Work with the CPS Community Schools Initiative

AIR began working with CPS on the initiative starting in 2003, providing training and technical assistance on the design and delivery of high-quality out-of-school time programming. In 2011, CPS contracted with AIR and its partner, the Diehl Consulting Group, to conduct a comprehensive, mixed-methods evaluation of the initiative. AIR’s evaluation relied on the CSI Implementation Framework and had three primary purposes:

• Support learning about what constitutes effective implementation of the community school strategy and understand how well schools are meeting goals related to improving implementation efforts;
• Monitor implementation and outcomes to determine whether schools and participating youth are progressing as expected and to identify promising practices in adopting the community school strategy; and
• Assess impact on youth outcomes using rigorous quasi-experimental designs.

To help schools gauge their progress in implementing the community school strategy and identify areas for improvement, the evaluation team developed a Continuous Quality Improvement Process (CQIP) and an aligned set of self-assessment rubrics. Schools have identified the following benefits associated with completing this process:

• Positive changes to programming, such as taking steps to incorporate greater stakeholder voice into program design and delivery;
• Increased family and community engagement; and
• Increased youth engagement in programming.
   

Key Findings

Through our work with Chicago Public Schools, we have identified key drivers that contribute to community school implementation success. Lessons learned are summarized in the following field-building briefs:

• Identifying Key Drivers of Effective Community Schools: Lessons Learned From the Evaluation of the Chicago Community Schools Initiative (PDF) outlines a series of key processes that we found were important to supporting implementation of the community school model.
• Community Schools and the Science of Learning and Development: What We Are Learning From the Chicago Public Schools Community Schools Initiative (PDF) describes the pillars of community schools and how they align with the science of learning and development and shares what we are learning from our work with community schools in Chicago in terms of this connection.

Implementation of the community school strategy at a given school ideally will support the achievement of a wide variety of possible positive outcomes for participating youth, including the development of social and emotional skills and competencies, improvements in academic achievement, the development of behaviors important to school success, and better health and well-being among enrolled youth.

We have also assessed how well Community Schools Initiative schools support these types of school-related outcomes through a series of periodic effectiveness analyses. AIR has found that ongoing and sustained participation in community school programming across multiple school years was associated with:

• Higher levels of academic achievement in reading and mathematics;
• Improvement in school-day attendance and reductions in disciplinary incidents; and
• Improvement on a series of school climate scales associated with the 5Essentials survey.