The Essential Supports

What are the Five Essential Supports?

School leadership: This support refers to whether principals are strategic, focused
on instruction, and inclusive of others in their leadership work. Elementary schools
with strong school leadership were seven times more likely to improve in math and
nearly four times more likely to improve in reading than schools weak on this
measure.

Parent-community ties: This support refers to whether schools are a welcoming
place for parents and whether there are strong connections between the school and
local institutions. Elementary schools with strong parental involvement were ten times
more likely to improve in math and four times more likely to improve in reading than
schools weak on this measure.

Professional capacity: This support refers to the quality of the faculty and staff
recruited to the school, their base beliefs and values about change, the quality of
ongoing professional development, and the capacity of staff to work together.
Elementary schools where teachers were highly committed to the school and inclined
to embrace innovation were five times more likely to improve in reading and four
times more likely to improve in math than schools weak on this measure.

Student-centered learning climate: This support refers to whether schools have a
safe, welcoming, stimulating and nurturing environment focused on learning for all
students. Elementary schools with strong safety and order were two times more likely
to improve in reading than schools weak on this measure.

Instructional guidance: This support refers to the organization of the curriculum,
the nature of the academic demand or challenges it poses, and the tools teachers have
to advance learning (such as instructional materials). Elementary schools with strong
curriculum alignment were four times more likely to improve in math and reading
than schools weak on this measure.

To summarize, school organization drives improvement, and individual initiatives are
unlikely to work in isolation. This has strong implications for states and districts
focused on any number of reforms that have gained increasing political currency—for
example, improving teacher quality, turning around low performing schools, or
mandating a single curriculum.

Truly Disadvantaged Schools

Clearly, the social context of schools matters. Indeed, the authors found that
community factors accounted for most of the difference in stagnation rates among
schools. For instance, schools in communities with weak religious participation were
twice as likely to stagnate as schools in communities with strong religious
participation. Schools in communities where people did not believe they had the
ability to make a positive change were twice as likely to stagnate as schools in
communities where people believed they could. This pattern held true for social
indicator after social indicator.

Still, despite tremendous obstacles, a handful of “truly disadvantaged” schools did
improve. Over the seven-year period, 15 percent of “truly disadvantaged schools”
showed significant academic improvement. While low, these improvement rates didn’t
differ significantly from those of schools in predominantly minority communities,
which had much lower rates of crime and child abuse and higher median family
incomes.

The small group of truly disadvantaged schools that “beat the odds” and improved
suggests that community context matters, but only so far as it affects the likelihood of
developing certain organizational structures that the authors found were vital for
improvement. Whether in advantaged or disadvantaged communities, very well
organized schools improved and very poorly organized schools stagnated, the authors
found.

In short, in communities where there are few viable institutions, where crime, drug
abuse and gang activity are prevalent, and where palpable human needs walk through
the school doors virtually every day, robust efforts are necessary to ensure schools are
organized for improvement. The hopeful news is that even truly disadvantaged
schools can be organized for improvement.

The Interrupters

Watch The Interrupters (Graphic Language) on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

"Violence is learned behavior." Cure Violence revolutionizes the perception and reduction of violence by promoting a public health and science-based perspective. Not unlike AIDS or tuberculosis, violence is a disease. If such a contagious epidemic is ignored, it is not cured, but rather, it spreads. Cure Violence understands that violence persists despite external punishment or moral judgment. In order to effectively combat peaking societal violence, social norms must be targeted from the source.

The people are not to be blamed for this epidemic, but are instead our number one resource in countering the problem. Cure Violence connects with trusted community members committed to both transforming the direction of their lives as well as to cleansing the violence from their hometowns. These individuals have experienced and participated in the violence first hand. They make it possible to anticipate where violence will occur and to intervene before violence has a chance to erupt. These individuals further act as mentors for high-risk individuals, illustrating a path out of violence and an opportunity for a more nourishing life.

Entire communities are enabled to voice a powerful message with the help of Cure Violence. At the site of shootings or common violent attacks, communities gather to protest and insist that violence is devastating, destroying both sides of the conflict, and simply not the answer.

The Cure Violence Model is a public health approach to violence prevention that understands violence as a learned behavior that can be prevented using disease control methods. The model prevents violence through a three-prong approach:

1) Interrupt transmission

2) Identify and change the thinking of highest potential transmitters

3) Change group norms

Interrupt transmission

The Cure Violence model deploys violence interrupters who use a specific method to locate potentially lethal, ongoing conflicts and respond with a variety of conflict mediation techniques both to prevent imminent violence and to change the norms around the need to use violence. Cure Violence hires culturally appropriate workers who live in the community, are known to high-risk people, and have possibly even been gang members or spent time in prison, but have made a change in their lives and turned away from crime. Interrupters receive specific training on a method for detecting potential shooting events, mediating conflicts, and keeping safe in these dangerous situations.

Identify and change the thinking of highest potential transmitters

Cure Violence employs a strong outreach component to change the norms and behavior of high-risk clients. Outreach workers act as mentors to a caseload of participants, seeing each client multiple times per week, conveying a message of rejecting the use of violence, and assisting them to obtain needed services such as job training and drug abuse counseling. Outreach workers are also available to their clients during critical moments – when a client needs someone to help him avoid a relapse into criminal and violent behavior. The participants of the program are of highest risk for being a victim or perpetrator of a shooting in the near future, as determined by a list of risk factors specific to the community. In order to have access and credibility among this population, Cure Violence employs culturally appropriate workers, similar to the indigenous workers used in other public health models.

Change group norms

In order to have lasting change, the norms in the community, which accept and encourage violence, must change. At the heart of Cure Violence’s effort at community norm change is the idea that the norms can be changed if multiple messengers of the same new norms are consistently and abundantly heard. Cure Violence uses a public education campaign, community events, community responses to every shooting, and community mobilization to change group and community norms related to the use of firearms.

Three additional elements are essential for proper implementation. First, with all of these components, data and monitoring are used to measure and provide constant feedback to the system. Second, extensive training of workers is necessary to ensure that they can properly carry out their duties. This includes an initial training before they are sent out on the streets, follow up trainings every few months, and regular meetings in which techniques for effective work are reviewed. Third, the program implements a partnership with local hospitals so that workers are notified immediately of gunshot wound victims admitted to emergency rooms. These notifications enable workers to respond quickly, often at the hospital, to prevent retaliations.

Chicago neighborhoods

Chicago gang violence shows no signs of stopping

Where the Poorest Americans Live

Many metropolitan areas never recovered from the decade’s first downturn, in 2000. Midwestern and Northeastern Rust Belt metro areas, and several in the South, experienced the steepest increases in concentrated poverty as they shed manufacturing jobs and income throughout the decade. Chicago and Detroit chalked up among the largest declines in the 1990s but yielded back much of that progress in the 2000s.





This research merely confirms what we've suspected for some time: extremely poor neighborhoods and their residents are last to benefit from growth when times are good, and first to feel it when tough times arrive. Progress against concentrated poverty is possible when growth is strong and sustained, and buttressed by housing, education and transportation policies that guard against segregating poor families. With projections of high unemployment for years to come, the outlook for this indicator is grim.

But that's no excuse to throw up our hands in the fight against concentrated poverty. If anything, we need to redouble our efforts at growing not just any old jobs, but better-paying jobs, and jobs that are accessible to workers living in these disadvantaged communities. Now that we’re finally paying attention to rising inequality in America, it's a good time to focus on helping the places that bear the most severe burdens of an increasingly unequal society.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/11/where-the-poorest-americans-live/419/

The End of the Neighborhood School

Kids being uprooted from neighborhood schools are often the ones that can least handle the sudden change. "A lot of the children who are affected by this trend are already at risk because of poverty, drug abuse, violence, family upheaval, lack of healthcare," says Julianne Robertson King, a mother of four who lives in D.C.'s Ward 5, which is set to see four schools close this year. "These are people who have not been able to capitalize on the promise of America. When you remove one thing that they can count on... ."

According to researchers from the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, if these students are sent to a similarly under-performing school, test scores will remain low. Moreover, students are more likely to jump around between schools after their first school is shuttered, and may stop attending school altogether.

Five large school districts saw charter school enrollment increases averaging 17 percent over the 2011-12 school year: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

According to a report commissioned last year by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, despite geographic disparities, two-thirds of all students attend schools within or adjacent to their neighborhood cluster. (For traditional public schools, 74 percent of students stayed within their neighborhood cluster; in charter schools, it was 57 percent.)

"One of the biggest things is the community aspect of it," explains Garrison PTA President Ann McLeod. "You really meet more of your neighbors that way. It helps you enjoy your neighborhood more, you are more rooted in your neighborhood, you've got resources for your kids to have more friends who live around them."

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/02/end-neighborhood-school/4687/

Mapping Urban Agriculture From the Sky

These types of backyard growers seldom figure into public discussion and policy debates about urban agriculture. We more often focus on community gardens. But these images suggest we might think instead about urban agriculture, food deserts and neighborhood sustainability with an eye toward a network of smaller growers rather than a few epicenters.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/01/mapping-urban-agriculture-sky/4346/

Living in Some Parts of Chicago Can Take More Than a Decade Off Your Life!!!!!

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/08/living-some-parts-chicago-can-take-more-decade-your-life/2781/

Researchers with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, in conjunction with the Center on Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University, have found that people living in Chicago neighborhoods with a median income higher than $53,000 a year have a life expectancy almost 14 years longer than Chicagoans who live in communities with a median income below $25,000.

This research reinforces an idea we’ve written about previously: that where you live may be the most important determinant of your health.


"Place really is the fundamental [issue]," says Brian Smedley, director of the Health Policy Institute at the Center for Political and Economic Studies. "Residential segregation is really the fundamental driver of many of the health inequalities that we see."

"It is unacceptable in the world's wealthiest society that a person's life can be cut short by more than a decade simply because of where one lives and factors over which he or she has no control."


The researchers also frame this problem in another way: Chicagoans with the worst access to chain supermarkets and large independent grocery stores (in the bottom quintile) have an average life expectancy that's 11 years shorter than Chicagoans with the best access to food (in the top quintile).

This doesn’t mean that when grocery stores disappear, people die prematurely. Rather, the patterns on these maps reveal that numerous forces are all intersecting in the same parts of the city: Neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty are also the neighborhoods with the lowest educational attainment and the least access to pharmacies and food, and they’re also the neighborhoods where the city’s minorities tend to be segregated, and where the health outcomes tend to be the worst. The correlations are just too strong to ignore. As the report warns: "These place-based patterns are neither arbitrary nor benign."

These communities, Smedley says, have experienced long-running patterns of disinvestment (by grocery chains, by employers, by banks, by cities), and health inequalities appear to be one result of it.

-The Atlantic Cities