January 6, 2009
Dear Faculty Friends and other Colleagues:
The National Center for Schools and Communities is going out of service. Thanks to the financial meltdown, we had two major projects cancelled by "partners" who depend heavily on corporate funding. We might have survived losing one of the projects; two left us with a hole in the budget that goes beyond temporary cash flow problems. We will finish a project we owe one of the abovementioned organizations and, absent a $200,000 deus ex machina, cease operations at the end of February. I will most likely go off the payroll in early February.
The center has served as one of Fordham’s bridges into the communities of New York City and, more broadly into urban centers across the United States. We have focused on issues of equity in public education and the provision of high quality, frequently school-based, child- and youth-development programming.
Established in 1992 and first led by Dr. Carolyn Denham, NCSC began with fostering the integration of education and social services at the school-site level by developing a national university network to promote inter- professional education and university-community partnerships to benefit low-income children and families. This network catalyzed and supported collaborative initiatives among 12 public schools and nine universities. These initiatives served over 1,500 low-income children annually and brought supportive social services into the schools to increase readiness to learn; to provide after-school cultural, recreational, and academic enrichment programs; and to strengthen the role of the local public school in the community it serves.
A national summit cosponsored by NCSC and Children’s Aid Society in 1997 gave birth to the Washington D.C. based Coalition of Community Schools. The Coalition is still active as a national network of youth development organizations, parent groups, educators, and social work professionals committed to making extended-service schools a universal feature of American school systems. The community schools concept we nurtured is now central to the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which, with annual appropriations in the billion dollar range, is the largest Federal budget stream for after school programs.
In 1998, under the leadership of our second executive director Sally Covington, NCSC reoriented its mission to emphasize support for educational equity and low-income parent and community participation in school and education reform. In 2001, I joined the NCSC staff as our third executive director to continue implementing that mission and sharpening our focus.
In the second half of our organizational life, we began to collect information and produce reports on the relationship of foundations to advocacy centers, early childhood programming, and community organizations. We began exploring the early stages of grassroots involvement with education justice issues. We provide data analysis and information tools that groups can use internally for leadership development and externally to position their issues in the media and in their dealings with decision makers and school administrators.
We began to develop data sets and other tools that have been used in cities across the United States by community groups who question the share of key teaching resources that goes to their children’s schools. In the past eight years, NCSC has worked with community groups in Albuquerque, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland (OR), Providence (RI), and St. Louis.
Parallel to our policy and advocacy work, we worked with major social service providers to provide implementation and outcome evaluations to help improve their programming for children and youth grades pre-K to 12. For the Bronx Educational Alliance, we conducted a multi-year evaluation of the country’s largest GEARUP program. This dropout prevention/college readiness experiment served 2,200 children of color from an original cohort of sixth graders from seven Bronx middle schools.
We conducted annual implementation reviews for the YMCA of Greater New York’s Virtual Y programming in serving 7,500 children in as many as 130 schools across the city. We provided first-ever independent evaluations for the YWCA’s four early childhood learning (pre-k) centers and MOUSE, which offers a service learning and technical education program in 50 NYC high and middle schools.
These and other projects have allowed us to structure real-life research experiences (and half-time jobs) for pre-doc students from our cosponsors, the Graduate Schools of Social Service (GSSS) and Education (GSE), as well as from Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Our work with Peace Games and the School to Prison Pipeline Project generated paid research internship opportunities for Fordham MSW candidates and graduate students from Baruch and Hunter. Moreover, we have provided second-year fieldwork placements for MSW candidates from the GSSS research concentration who frequently translated their experience working with our data into prize winning master’s theses. We have been the grateful employer of many undergraduate work-study students without whom many of our huge databases would never have been finished.
We have lent our sincere if sometimes Quixotic support for community-led efforts around issues such as the ill-conceived third and eighth grade retention policies, the racial skew of school discipline practice, the distribution of high quality instruction in middle schools, and language access for both NYC public school students and their parents.
Our collaborations have raised Fordham’s profile with an interesting array of well-regarded purveyors of policy analysis and advocacy such as the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown, the NYU Institute for Education and Social Policy, Bank Street College, the New York Immigration Coalition, Advocates for Children, the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, and the Independent Commission on Public Education.
Finally, the NCSC has habitually incorporated attention to race and equity into our analysis and articulation of research and evaluation results. Our early involvement in the now increasingly public discussion of the direction of school governance and accountability for the City’s public schools when the current authorization of mayoral control sunsets has convinced us of the usefulness of established human rights policy as a compelling normative and analytical frame for addressing the problems of urban public education in a holistic, humane way. We hope that our colleagues who are remaining here might continue to help Fordham support the connection between public schools and human rights.
Last but not least, we commend to your continued indulgence and assistance KidsCreative, which for the past three years has brought neighborhood kids from Amsterdam Houses into Lowenstein for a six-week summer theater camp – and bit of chalk art to dress up the sidewalks on the plaza.
So, all in all perhaps not a bad run. In closing (pun intended), we would like to thank our sponsors, the Graduate School of Social Service and the Graduate School of Education and, specifically, Dean Peter Vaughan and Dean James Hennessy for their ongoing support of the National Center for Schools and Communities and our work.
Thanks also to those of you who have lent concrete and moral support to and enthusiasm for our efforts over the years. Good luck to all.
John M. Beam
Executive Director
National Center for Schools and Communities
Fordham University
