Current Projects at a Glance

SUPPORTING YOUTH DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATIONAL SERVICES

We provide evaluation and related services to public schools and youth serving community service organizations.

YMCA of Greater New York

The YMCA is a leader in providing school-based after school programs that serve thousands of students in 138 schools and centers in all five boroughs.  Since 1997, we have provided the Y with a variety of program implementation and outcome evaluation projects.  As a learning organization, YMCA management has used our evaluation results to grow and improve youth development and academic assistance activities to achieve the organization’s longstanding commitment to “healthy spirit, mind, and body.” 

In a parallel project, we are taking advantage of the thousands of parent, staff, and principal surveys we have collected from YMCA after school sites over the years to develop a more robust, statistically validated set of data collection tools that will yield more reliable data and allow longitudinal, cross-site, and cross-program model comparisons.

MOUSE

Founded in 1997 by Silicon Alley techs and executives to help schools upgrade their technology infrastructure, MOUSE – originally Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools & Education – has become a major service-learning/technology education initiative.  The MOUSE Squads are teams of students who work with a faculty adviser to supply the highly valued help-desk services for the computers and other technology in their schools.  Founded in NYC, there are now are also MOUSE Squads in California, Connecticut, and Michigan.  We have recently completed the second year of an implementation and preliminary outcome evaluation examining MOUSE Squads in 49 New York City public schools.  We hope to continue working with MOUSE staff to standardize their data collection and program monitoring systems.  (Click here to read the MOUSE evaluation.)

YWCA of the City of New York

We are currently completing the first year evaluation of the YWCA Early Childhood Learning Centers providing pre-k and kindergarten education to approximately 250 low-income children in four centers in Hell’s Kitchen, Brownsville, Staten Island, and Coney Island. 

Peace Games

Boston-based Peace Games works on the assumption that non-violence and peace-making behaviors can be learned and cultivated.  Peace Games believes that growing peacemakers, “is best achieved by building the capacity of schools and community groups to implement holistic, peace and justice education programs.”  Using games, service learning projects, professional development for teachers, communication with parents, and volunteer opportunities of social justice oriented college students, Peace Games works with schools in metro Boston, Chicago, Fairbanks, Los Angeles, and New York.  We have an ongoing relationship with Peace Games and assist their New York staff with data collection and analysis for their annual implementation reviews. 

SUPPORTING EQUITABLE ACCESS TO HIGH QUALITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

NCSC provides policy analysis, research, and advocacy to support community led efforts to win public schools that work for all the children and youth they are supposed to serve.  

Project DATA

Documenting Achievement to Transform Accountability (Project Data) is a new project we are developing with the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families (CACF).  Project Data aims to debunk the ultimately harmful myth that Asian students are the “model minority” by documenting the distribution of students from a wide variety of Asian cultures and degree to which their academic and developmental needs are or are not served by the schools they attend.

School to Prison Mapping Action Project

The school to prison pipeline is a rhetorical image frequently used in debates about dropout, pushed out, and disconnected youth, particularly young men of color.  Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests the pipeline exists as an interlocking network of bureaucratic decision points and policies that ignore or even facilitate the “progress” of students toward involvement with the juvenile and criminal justice system.  NCSC is part of a working group of organizations focusing on education justice and civil liberties that has begun to analyze the connections among the public school system, social services, law enforcement, and court and incarceration system.  (See the Our Partners page.)

Technology of Mobilization

In 2005, nearly 1,500 students walked out of DeWitt Clinton High School and marched through the streets to the Bronx office of the NYC Department of Education (DOE) to protest metal detectors and other grievances.  Students used Sconex, a social-networking site, and cell phone texting to mobilize and coordinate the action.  NCSC is working with Sistas and Brothas United (SBU), a youth-led community organization affiliated with Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, to explore the ways in which youth do and might use technology to organize around issues they define.  NCSC and SBU members designed a survey, which SBU members then circulated to students from ten schools.  Based on the survey, SBU members are now testing various tech-based strategies to turn out attendance for events and actions they organize.  (Click here to read the project report.)

Human Rights in Schools and Sunset of Mayoral Control

NSCS contributes to several strands of policy advocacy triggered by the looming 2009 sunset of legislative authorization of mayoral control of the New York City public schools.  We are participating in the growing public debate around what, if anything, should replace mayoral control.  We continue our long-standing collaboration with the Independent Commission on Public Education (iCOPE), which works to educate the public on the value of a human rights framework for defining both the content and structure of a more humane and holistic public education system.  More recently, we have agreed to participate in the steering committee of the Mayoral Control Coalition-In-Formation, a coalition of grassroots and advocacy organizations that focuses on the governance issues embodied in replacing or reforming mayoral control.  (See expanded discussion)

SERVING AS ONE OF FORDHAM’S BRIDGES TO THE COMMUNITY

Our midtown Manhattan location, excellent subway connections, and extensive network of school reform and education justice organziations combine to provide us with frequent opportunities to assist programs and events and strengthen the University's relationship with the communities that make up New York.  We also like to think that such collaborations might raise Fordham's profile with youth (and their parents) beginning to think about college.

KidsCreative

The National Center for Schools and Communities participates in the advisory board for KidCreative, an after-school and summer day camp program in which children develop and stage their own plays and musical numbers.  This summer (2008) marks the third year in which we are co-sponsoring KidsCreative summer camp.  Sixty children, many of them from New York Housing Authority apartments on Amsterdam Avenue, are going to college this summer using the classroom and auditorium of the Lowenstein Graduate Center of the Lincoln Center campus.

Youth study and research education policy

In spring of 2007, NCSC arranged for classroom space and technology for a participatory action research (PAR) project of the Youth Researchers for a New Education System (YRNES) and provided technical assistance and an on-line platform for their student survey.  (Click here for their report)  Last summer, we co-sponsored a community service-credit course on the history of school reform for high school students led by a CUNY professor. 

Grassroots school reform groups

We have co-sponsored citywide events organized by iCOPE around the Undoing Racism Workshop, the history of decentralization of the public schools, and human rights in public education.  We have provided space and equipment for other groups such as Teachers Unite and the Progressive Education Network for New York (PENNY).