How Do Promise Neighborhoods’ Strategies Align With Research Evidence on Poverty and Education?

Abstract

Promise Neighborhoods attempt to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone’s “cradle to college pipeline” model of coordinated and continuous child and family services for a single neighborhood. We analyze the 46 planning and 18 implementation grants to determine which factors these neighborhoods plan to address and compare these efforts with research on poverty and academic performance. We conclude that Promise Neighborhoods more frequently focus on in-school factors and often fail to address many factors supported by prior research. We discuss the degree to which these neighborhoods are actually serving as all-encompassing cradle to college pipelines versus continuing current in-school efforts.

Keywords

educational policy educational reform social justice urban education

With the Black–White achievement gap plateauing and the gap between classes growing, many now argue that addressing poverty directly may help students more than continuing to tinker with schools. Promise Neighborhoods were conceived to link and coordinate social services with local schools and reform communities and education together. In this article, we undertake the first effort to assess the plans of all 64 winning grants and compare these plans to current research on poverty, social policy, and the achievement gap. We conclude that the grant-funded neighborhoods plans (a) focus disproportionately on school changes rather than addressing poverty-related issues in neighborhoods, and (b) neglect to address many factors most strongly supported by research.

The Achievement Gap

The test score gap between students from high- and low-income families has grown substantially during the past 30 years and is now approximately twice as large as the Black–White achievement gap (Reardon, 2011). Meanwhile, researchers are increasingly focusing on the gaps in opportunities that explain these gaps in outcomes (Carter & Welner, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Milner, 2013).

Over the past-half century, starting with the “Coleman Report” (Coleman et al., 1966), researchers have consistently found that nonschool factors are stronger predictors of the achievement of a given student than in-school factors (see, for example, Alexander, Riordan, Fennessey, & Pallas, 1982; Hauser, 1972; Sirin, 2005). Roughly half of this gap in achievement already exists when students enter school (Lee & Burkam, 2002) and another quarter forms during summer breaks (Benson & Borman, 2010; Downey, von Hippel, & Broh, 2004; Entwisle & Alexander, 1992; Heyns, 1978), making our best estimate that about three-quarters of the gap forms outside of school time (Murphy, 2009). In other words, the gaps in opportunities outside of school are larger than the gaps in opportunities inside of schools. In this context, the large influence of nonschool factors makes sense when we consider that kids spend only about 14% to 15% of their waking hours in schools from birth through high school.¹

Recent research indicates that school factors may predict a larger share of outcomes other than achievement test scores (e.g., college attendance) but may also reduce racial inequality while exacerbating inequality between classes (Jennings, Deming, Jencks, Lopuch, & Schueler, 2015). Schools certainly can dramatically impact students, but we know that experiences outside of school (e.g., neighborhoods, health, and family) influence students outcomes more, on average. Promise Neighborhoods exist to address both at once through comprehensive, place-based strategies.

Previous Policies

While we know that psychosocial conditions experienced by students affect their outcomes, we know less about whether changing these conditions can subsequently change those outcomes. Few studies have examined the effects of a policy change (or experiment designed to simulate a policy change) on subsequent academic performance. We found only seven such studies, which we discuss below.

The first article to do so examined the Illinois Supreme Court’s 1976 Gautreaux decision allowing public housing residents in Chicago to reside in the suburbs as well. Kaufman and Rosenbaum (1992) found that students who moved to suburban areas were 4 times less likely to drop out twice as likely to enroll in college and 7 times as likely to enroll in a 4-year college 7 years later.

Largely in reaction to these findings, the federal government ran the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment in five American cities from 1994 to 1997. MTO randomly assigned families to receive vouchers to move to housing in a lower-poverty census tract. Few academic gains were observed in the immediate aftermath (Sanbonmatsu, Kling, Duncan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2006), but a recent follow-up finds that effects appear a decade later (Chetty, Hendren, & Katz, 2016), with students who moved prior to age 13 years attending college more frequently and earning higher incomes as adults.

Subsequent studies of families who moved from Chicago housing projects (Jacob, 2004) and who used housing vouchers Chicago (Jacob, Kapustin, & Ludwig, 2015) found no statistically significant effects on academic achievement, but an analysis of semirandom housing placement in Denver found significant effects (Galster, Santiago, Stack, & Cutsinger, 2016).

The New Hope Project, conducted in Milwaukee beginning in 1994, was a more comprehensive experiment. Low-income residents in the treatment group received job placement assistance, and those who worked 30 hr per week were given an earnings supplement that pushed them above the poverty line and offered both subsidized health insurance and child care. Standardized test scores remained higher 2 years after the program, but gains faded 3 years later. Even 5 years after the program, however, treatment group parents reported higher levels of school engagement and school expectations and were more optimistic about the future (Huston, Walker, Dowsett, Imes, & Ware, 2008).

Studies of these seven initiatives offer mixed evidence on the ability of changes in nonschool social policy to affect change in academic performance (DeLuca & Dayton, 2009; Johnson, 2012). Gautreaux offered evidence that rather small changes in policy could dramatically change lives, but the initial results of MTO dampened much of that enthusiasm. Two things about the collective evidence are worth noting. First, later assessments almost always found more positive results than earlier ones—indicating that it may take a long time to realize the full effects of nonschool social policy. Second, the scope of social issues impacted by these policies—particularly each one individually, but even when examined collectively—is somewhat small. A myriad of social factors are associated with academic performance, but these policies and experiments touch on only a few. Promise Neighborhoods were conceived to address a far wider range of issues.

Promise Neighborhoods

Promise Neighborhoods seek to replicate (and, ultimately, improve on) the model of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) in New York City (NYC). HCZ started when Geoffrey Canada, a local karate instructor, grew frustrated when children regressed once they left his program. He eventually formed a network of programs that became a “cradle to college pipeline” now serving more than 10,000 children in an area covering over 100 blocks with services ranging from parenting classes to exercise programs to charter schools (Tough, 2008). Replicating the HCZ became a focus of President Obama’s first campaign, where he promised “When I’m President, the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in twenty cities across the country” (Obama, 2007). While Promise Neighborhoods place education at the center of their mission (U.S. Department of Education, 2010c), potential applicants were instructed that their end goal should also be that “distressed communities are transformed” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b, p. 7) by integrating initiatives aimed at health, housing, family engagement, and others.

When applications were reviewed, though, scoring focused heavily on the capacity of the Neighborhood to manage complex operations. Point allocation differed slightly by year, but all years assigned about three-quarters of available points to measures of capacity, leaving far fewer points for the types of school or community initiatives included (U.S. Department of Education, 2010a, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b).

Even in neighborhoods with capacity, we still might not see the change we desire. In a case study of one southern Promise Neighborhood, the lack of trust between families and schools, police, government agencies, and other residents and arguably limits “the potential for true comprehensive community change” (Geller, Doykos, Craven, Bess, & Nation, 2014, p. 23).

It remains far too early to assess Promise Neighborhoods’ impact on students’ college and career success, but two analyses of educational outcomes have been released. The first found that differences in test scores stemmed from enrollment in the neighborhood charter school rather than residence inside the zone itself (Curto, Fryer, & Howard, 2011; Dobbie & Fryer, 2011). The study, however, compared students living in the zone but not attending the charter school with those living outside the zone not attending the charter school, which may not tell the whole story. It remains unclear whether students living in the neighborhood but not enrolled in the charter schools actually engaged in more or fewer HCZ programs than those living outside the area but attending the charter schools. Additional research needs to explore the degree to which each group of students were actually receiving the services of HCZ (many services are rendered at the school level so students from outside the zone may end up receiving more services if they attend the local charter schools than neighborhood kids do if they attend other schools).

The second critically examined the results and found no differences in test score gains between two charter schools inside the HCZ and other NYC charter schools (Whitehurst & Croft, 2010) and roundly criticized advocates of community reform.

There is no evidence that the HCZ influences student achievement through neighborhood investments. There is considerable evidence that schools can have dramatic effects on the academic skills of disadvantaged children without their providing broader social services. Improving neighborhoods and communities is a desirable goal in its own right, but let’s not confuse it with education reform. (p. 9)

Both studies measure only short-term gains in achievement scores. While a gain likely indicates something positive, it may or may not precipitate more important outcomes later (e.g., college attendance, employment, etc.). Indeed, a number of programs have seen test-score effects “fade out” within a few years and then more important effects emerge a decade or more later (see, for example, Deming, 2009; Dynarski, Hyman, & Schanzenbach, 2013). Given the goals of Promise Neighborhoods, research on previous social policy interventions, and the reemergence of effects after test score differences fade out, research examining long-term measures of academic performance including high school graduation and college enrollment will be far more compelling.

The federal program has now handed out 46 planning grants of up to US$500,000 and 18 multimillion dollar implementation grants over four rounds of funding starting in September 2010 (U.S. Department of Education, 2013). The programs vary widely in size, scope, location, urbanicity, and management structure, offering opportunities for practitioners to try different things and for researchers to compare a wide array of strategies.

While some studies have examined the efforts of selected neighborhoods or selected types of interventions, researchers have yet to comprehensively examine which strategies Promise Neighborhoods around the country are using or planning on using, to what extent they address in-school or out-of-school issues, or to what extent they are addressing similar issues across neighborhoods.

Flynn (2014) analyzed the contents of the 21 planning grant winners from 2010 and five winners of implementation grants in 2011 and found that many proposals infrequently mentioned nutrition, exercise, food, weight, and accessibility (a list of 14 keywords were included a median of 11 times total in planning grants). In a case study of the Heyward Promise Neighborhood, she argues that this lack of attention in writing continued to a lack of attention in practice as well.

Miller, Wills, and Scanlan (2013) analyzed 41 planning grant applications, comparing the 21 funded applications to the 20 from tribal areas, and found that virtually all applicants planned to address academic achievement, other school outcomes, and early childhood education, but fewer than half laid out plans to address economic development, job training, or housing. The authors nonetheless conclude that Promise Neighborhoods, unlike traditional educational initiatives, use “more holistic, ecological perspectives” that address students’ “broader life contexts” (p. 568).

Horsford and Sampson (2014) report on a proposed Promise Neighborhood in Las Vegas that did not receive funding. They note two major changes reviewers tell them to make: clarifying the theory of change and the theory of action, which the group decides to address by “attend(ing) more specifically to educational improvement” (p. 985).

These three studies offer evidence that Promise Neighborhoods may be focusing more on school reform than social reform. Indeed, Dyson (2014) acknowledges that Promise Neighborhoods were created because “struggling schools, high unemployment, substandard housing, persistent crime, and other challenges . . . behoove an integrated approach” (p. 711), but concludes that we should focus “more on eradicating counterproductive school policies and practices that create a harmful school-wide culture and climate” (p. 735). We examine the extent to which Promise Neighborhoods around the country have made this same decision.

Poverty and Academic Performance

A number of authors have examined the links between poverty and academic performance (see, for example, Anyon, 2005; Berliner, 2013; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Rothstein, 2004). We start with a list of 18 factors/conditions research has pointed to as important drivers of the achievement gap enumerated in earlier research (Bower, 2013). Below, we briefly describe these 18 factors/conditions and the evidence linking them with academic performance. We divide these into housing and neighborhoods, health and health care, and family and home.

Housing and Neighborhoods

Disorder

A large-scale study in Canada (Kohen, Brooks-Gunn, Leventhal, & Hertzman, 2002) found a negative relationship between disorder (interviewer ratings of fronts of buildings) and verbal ability of young children. Racial and economic context were stronger predictors of perceived disorder than objective observations by external evaluators in a study in Chicago (Sampson & Raudenbush, 2004), but poverty was a stronger predictor in a study in Baltimore (Franzini, Caughy, Nettles, & O’Campo, 2008).

Violence and crime

Research has linked neighborhood crime and violence with higher anxiety, lower grades, and more school absences (Hurt, Malmud, Brodsky, & Giannetta, 2001); lower scores on state tests (Milam, Furr-Holden, & Leaf, 2010; Sharkey, 2010); and reduced feelings of safety, perceived parental support, and school involvement, leading to reduced self-esteem, hours spent studying, and grades (Patton, Woolley, & Hong, 2012).

Social organization of neighborhoods

A seminal study concluded that students in Catholic high schools had tighter bonds with their peers and the community—more “social capital”—and were less likely to drop out as a result (Coleman, 1988). More recently, researchers have found that neighborhood-level social capital was positively associated with school-level achievement (Woolley et al., 2008) and that neighborhood-level “social control of children” reduced adolescent delinquency in Chicago (Sampson, 1997).

Physical conditions

Studies have found that parental perceptions of neighborhood distress (e.g., abandoned/run-down buildings, crime, and violence) predicted school problems of their adolescent children (Meyers & Miller, 2004); living in neighborhoods with fewer abandoned/run-down buildings, lower crime and violence, and higher reported concern for the neighborhood predicted reading achievement, but not math achievement, of Latino students (Eamon, 2005); and poor physical conditions reduced achievement progressively more as students moved from first to eighth grade (Woolley et al., 2008).

Crowding

Low-income families are many times more likely to live in crowded homes (more than one person per room) and have less space available to use both adjacent to their homes and in nearby parks (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002). A reanalysis of the Kansas Language Acquisition data found that parents in more crowded homes were less verbally responsive to their children and that children’s vocabularies grew more slowly as a result (Evans, Maxwell, & Hart, 1999).

Noise

Lower-income children are more likely to live in noisier environments than their better-off peers (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002), which research has long found increases stress (Glass & Singer, 1972). Noise also likely impairs language acquisition (Evans & Maxwell, 1997) and reading ability (Maxwell & Evans, 2000). One study used apartment buildings next to highway buildings to study the effect of household noise on children’s verbal abilities (Cohen, Glass, & Singer, 1973); higher floors were less noisy and, net of other background factors, children who lived there scored higher on assessments of both auditory perception and verbal achievement.

Homeownership

Green and White (1997) first found that children of homeowners stayed in school longer. Aaronson (2000) expressed skepticism that these were not family effects, but still found that the increased residential stability from homeownership explained higher achievement. Follow-up research found that children of homeowners experienced better home environments and exhibited fewer child behavior problems and higher cognitive achievement (Haurin, Parcel, & Haurin, 2002). Some recent studies, however, find no statistically significant impact of homeownership on achievement when using quasi-experimental research designs (see, for example, Barker & Miller, 2009; Holupka & Newman, 2012; Mohanty & Raut, 2009).

Mobility and homelessness

Mobility may explain why homelessness impacts achievement (Buckner, Bassuk, & Weinreb, 2001), but both homelessness (Masten et al., 2012) and mobility (Ziol-Guest & McKenna, 2014) appear to affect school readiness by affecting behavior and Executive Functioning. One recent study of homeless and highly mobile students found that about half seemed quite resilient and performed no differently than their peers, but that overall math and reading achievement were lower (Cutuli et al., 2013). A review of six neighborhood factors found that residential mobility was most strongly related to academic performance (Leventhal & Newman, 2010).

Health and Health Care

Nutrition

Studies have found that inner-city students who consume fast food at least 4 times per week score a full half standard deviation lower in both math and reading than those who eat fast food 0 to 3 times per week (Tobin, 2013) and that nutritional quality of children’s breakfast predicts reading and math scores independent of socioeconomic status (SES; O’Dea & Mugridge, 2012). Reviews of the literature have found strong evidence of a link between breakfast and academic achievement for low-income children (Basch, 2010) and plentiful evidence that “diet can influence the development and functioning of the brain” (Benton, 2008, p. 25).

Physical fitness

Many small-scale studies have found evidence that increased activity improves academics, studying, for example, aerobic fitness of third and fifth graders in Illinois (Castelli, Hillman, Buck, & Erwin, 2007), physical fitness tests of fourth, sixth, and eighth graders in Massachusetts (Chomitz et al., 2009), and aerobic capacity of fifth graders in West Virginia (Wittberg, Northrup, & Cottrel, 2009). A review of 125 of these studies found that the majority find positive effects of physical activity on factors related to academic achievement (Howie & Pate, 2012).

Mental health

Living in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates may lead to less social support and less effective coping strategy usage among mothers (Klebanov, Brooks-Gunn, & Duncan, 1994). Studies have found that adolescent depression increased the risk of underachievement (Ferguson & Woodward, 2002), that mental health significantly predicted GPA trajectories from first to 12th grades (Gutman, Sameroff, & Cole, 2003), and that college freshmen with better social support and coping strategies had significantly higher college GPA and retention (DeBerard, Spielmans, & Julka, 2004).

Prenatal care

A growing evidence base supports the theory that the effects of prenatal care on health and development extend to educational outcomes. This includes evidence that low birth weight was associated with lower math and reading scores at age 5 years (Goosby & Cheadle, 2009) and predicted slower cognitive development into adolescence and lower graduation rates (Cheadle & Goosby, 2010), and that twins’ cognitive development was affected more by neonatal health than school quality (Figlio, Guryan, Karbownik, & Roth, 2014).

Vision

In an experiment in Baltimore (Harris, 2002), students with vision problems scored significantly higher on math and reading achievement after a year of vision therapy. Half of inner-city students in Boston (Orfield, Basa, & Yun, 2001) failed vision tests and scored significantly lower on standardized tests but made faster progress after receiving vision therapy or glasses. And Ohio kindergartners (Streff, Poynter, Jinks, & Wolff, 1990) who were offered eyeglasses and vision therapy scored similarly on math and IQ tests in September but statistically significantly higher by April.

Teen pregnancy

Becoming pregnant as a teenager may decrease the odds of graduation because it prevents people from reenrolling rather than because it causes people to drop out (Upchurch & McCarthy, 1990), but a more recent study finds that decreasing dropout rates and keeping students in school longer actually reduces teen pregnancy (Marcotte, 2013). One review argues that public sentiment toward teenage childbearing is far stronger than the evidence of its ill effects (Furstenberg, 2003), but a more recent review argues that “the association between nonmarital teen births and educational attainment is well documented” (Basch, 2010, p. 29).

Environmental toxins and pollution

Students exposed to lead in North Carolina (Miranda, Kim, Reiter, Overstreet Galeano, & Maxson, 2009) and Massachusetts (Reyes, 2015) had lower achievement years later. Urban air pollution also increases asthma rates, causes neurological deficits and neurobehavioral changes, increases hospital admissions, and decreases cognitive function and IQ (Schwela, 2000). Asthma increases school absenteeism both in the HCZ (where 30% of children were asthmatic; Nicholas et al., 2005) and across the country in a review of 66 studies (Taras & Potts-Datema, 2005).

Family and Home

Home environment

A study of the Black–White achievement gap found that controlling for home environment explained about half of the gaps that remained after controlling for SES and other demographic variables (Brooks-Gunn, Klebanov, Smith, Duncan, & Lee, 2003). Decades of research have correlated family and home environment with intelligence (see, for example, Nisbet, 1961; Sameroff, Seifer, Barocas, Zax, & Greenspan, 1987). Twin studies have found that family environment predicts children’s reading ability (Petrill, Deater-Deckard, Schatschneider, & Davis, 2005) and household chaos predicts cognitive ability net of genetic and SES influences (S. A. Hart, Petrill, Deater-Deckard, & Thompson, 2007).

Parenting style

Studies of parenting styles have found that less authoritarian or permissive parenting styles (which were used more frequently by low-income parents) were negatively associated with grades (Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987), that parental warmth predicts higher achievement net of a bevy of other factors (Yeung & Conley, 2008), and that parental psychological support at age 6 years strongly predicted achievement and, subsequently, outcomes at age 22 years (Entwisle, Alexander, & Olson, 2005).

Language exposure

An oft-cited study (B. Hart & Risley, 1995) found that young children from upper-class homes heard millions of words more than their lower-class peers and subsequently developed much larger vocabularies. Other studies have found that child-directed speech (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991) and subsequent vocabulary growth differed weeks (Hoff, 2003) and years (Rowe, 2008) later between working-class and middle-class families. And a meta-analysis of the effects of parent-preschooler reading found that frequency of book reading explained about 8% of the variance in language growth, emergent literacy, and reading achievement (Bus, van IJzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995).

Summary

These 18 factors affect a wide array of students’ experiences outside of school and, as a result, likely affect their outcomes inside school as well. Research more strongly supports some than others, but they offer a good starting point for examining the actions of Promise Neighborhoods because successfully addressing many of these factors seems likely to lead to better student outcomes in the long run.

Data

We use the grant applications of the 18 neighborhoods that were awarded multimillion dollar implementation grants and the 46 neighborhoods that were awarded planning grants of up to US$500,000. Many of these applications are hundreds of pages long and explain in detail the programs each neighborhood will implement, the data they will collect, and what they aim to accomplish. Promise Neighborhood applicants were required to identify a need for the project, outline the project’s design, develop a management plan, and describe the services that would be provided to neighborhood residents, as part of a “continuum of solutions” that addresses issues in their neighborhood. We focus our analysis on the services described in this section.

Method

We began with a provisional list of these 18 factors and coded the grant proposals for each neighborhood, looking at where each initiative fit and adding new categories as necessary. These new categories emerged over multiple readings (Creswell, 2012) and we constantly revised the list as we progressed (Saldaña, 2012). We separately read through the entirety of each grant and assigned codes wherever an intervention was introduced. Two readers then reconciled codes at multiple points to ensure alignment.

Reconciled codes were then sorted and tallied. The final codes included 71 different factors, categorized into eight categories: Neighborhoods/Housing, Health/Health Care Family/Home, Economic, School, Other Educational, Personal Efficacy, Technology, and a group of uncategorized codes. We present the list below grouped by topic (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2013) and illustrated with example interventions in the appendix.

By comparing the frequencies of the presence of different strategies across Promise Neighborhood grants, we gain insight into what these neighborhoods are more or less likely to do and on which areas they are placing more or less focus. While cannot yet determine exactly which of these initiatives were implemented and which were not, detailed plans to implement an initiative (or a lack of any mention) indicate the neighborhood’s commitment to specific issues.

Results

After coding the 18 implementation and 46 planning grant applications, we tallied counts of how many Promise Neighborhoods plan to address each factor. Overwhelmingly, the applications spell out more initiatives addressing in-school factors than strategies addressing factors related to Neighborhood/Housing, Family/Home, or Health/Health Care

Of the original 18 factors (Table 1), many applications include plans to target nutrition, language exposure, mental health, physical fitness, obesity, and violence/crime. Few Promise Neighborhoods plan to address homeownership, crowding, environmental toxins/pollution, or vision and none plan to address noise.

Table 1.

Percent and Counts of Promise Neighborhoods Addressing Original 18 Factors.

	Total (n = 64)		Implementation grants (n = 18)		Planning grants (n = 46)
Nutrition	61	95.3%	18	100.0%	43	93.5%
Physical fitness	60	93.8%	17	94.4%	43	93.5%
Language exposure	53	82.8%	18	100.0%	35	76.1%
Violence/crime	49	76.6%	14	77.8%	35	76.1%
Parenting	49	76.6%	13	72.2%	36	78.3%
Mobility/homelessness	47	73.4%	15	83.3%	32	69.6%
Mental health	43	67.2%	17	94.4%	26	56.5%
Obesity	30	46.9%	11	61.1%	20	43.5%
Home environment	29	45.3%	9	50.0%	20	43.5%
Prenatal health	27	42.2%	11	61.1%	18	39.1%
Teen pregnancy	23	35.9%	9	50.0%	17	37.0%
Homeownership	17	26.6%	5	27.8%	14	30.4%
Community organization	17	26.6%	12	66.7%	11	23.9%
Disorder	16	25.0%	8	44.4%	9	19.6%
Vision	7	10.9%	2	11.1%	5	10.9%
Environmental toxins	6	9.4%	3	16.7%	4	8.7%
Crowdedness	3	4.7%	1	5.6%	3	6.5%
Noise	0	0.0%	0	0.0%	0	0.0%

While analyzing each Promise Neighborhood’s Continuum of Solutions, new codes emerged. We chart other nonschool factors in Table 2. Many Promise Neighborhoods seek to improve the overall wellness of their community’s residents and proposed programs targeting additional health and health care factors beyond those included in our original list. All Neighborhoods seek to establish a “medical home” for the community’s residents, meaning residents are not relying on emergency rooms for routine medical attention and instead have a family physician, or similar person, whom they can see for nonlife threatening concerns. Despite findings that nutrition and fitness mediate the relationship between obesity and academic outcomes (Baxter, Guinn, Tebbs, & Royer, 2013; Cottrell, Northrup, & Wittberg, 2007), many Neighborhoods plan to address obesity. Far fewer plan to address birth weight, despite more research supporting prenatal care.

Table 2.

Promise Neighborhoods Addressing Additional Nonschool Factors.

	Total (n = 64)		Implementation grants (n = 18)		Planning grants (n = 46)
Access to health care	61	95.3%	17	94.4%	44	95.7%
Access to computers/Internet	54	84.4%	15	83.3%	39	84.8%
Screening for developmental delays	51	79.7%	15	83.3%	36	78.3%
Child care	47	73.4%	17	94.4%	30	65.2%
Employment	39	60.9%	15	83.3%	29	63.0%
Dental	26	40.6%	6	33.3%	22	47.8%
Civic service	25	39.1%	10	55.6%	15	32.6%
Community resources	25	39.1%	16	88.9%	15	32.6%
Chemical use	25	39.1%	13	72.2%	18	39.1%
Child abuse	18	28.1%	9	50.0%	14	30.4%
Civic engagement	17	26.6%	13	72.2%	9	19.6%
Birth weight	16	25.0%	6	33.3%	12	26.1%
Asthma	13	20.3%	7	38.9%	8	17.4%
Parent–child communication	13	20.3%	9	50.0%	8	17.4%
Social capital	11	17.2%	12	66.7%	4	8.7%
Attachment	11	17.2%	9	50.0%	5	10.9%
Playgrounds	10	15.6%	6	33.3%	8	17.4%
HIV/risky behaviors	10	15.6%	9	50.0%	6	13.0%
Mortality	9	14.1%	5	27.8%	6	13.0%
Wealth	9	14.1%	5	27.8%	6	13.0%
Parent chemical dependency	8	12.5%	7	38.9%	5	10.9%
Assets	8	12.5%	7	38.9%	3	6.5%
Warmth	7	10.9%	4	22.2%	4	8.7%
Family size	6	9.4%	3	16.7%	5	10.9%
Income	6	9.4%	7	38.9%	2	4.3%
Utilities	5	7.8%	4	22.2%	4	8.7%
Single parenthood	5	7.8%	4	22.2%	2	4.3%
Admonishments/praise	3	4.7%	5	27.8%	1	2.2%

In terms of family interventions, most Promise Neighborhoods plan programs addressing child care and screening for developmental delays. We found that fewer than half of the Promise Neighborhoods target child abuse, single parenthood, warmth, or admonishment/praise heard at home, which are all backed by strong research evidence and major drivers of development.

Looking at economic programming, the majority of Promise Neighborhoods plan programming designed to improve residents’ employment status, but well under half plan to address income, assets, or wealth. Asset-building strategies included programming to help residents recover their credit or purchase a vehicle. Wealth-building strategies included programming to help residents open savings accounts or establish a financial plan for the future.

In terms of school programming (Table 3), all Promise Neighborhoods offer preschool options and the majority plan to address teacher quality, offer academic tutoring, improve attendance and parental involvement, and offer summer programs. Despite the apparent need for school improvement, however, few Promise Neighborhoods developed programs targeting advanced placement classes, establishing charter schools, or reducing teacher turnover.

Table 3.

Promise Neighborhoods Addressing Additional In-School Factors.

	Total (n = 64)		Implementation grants (n = 18)		Planning grants(n = 46)
Preschool	64	100.0%	18	100.0%	46	100.0%
Achievement	62	96.9%	17	94.4%	45	97.8%
Graduation rate	59	92.2%	15	83.3%	44	95.7%
College enrollment	59	92.2%	16	88.9%	43	93.5%
Parent involvement	58	90.6%	17	94.4%	41	89.1%
School safety	56	87.5%	15	83.3%	41	89.1%
Student mobility	54	84.4%	14	77.8%	40	87.0%
Attendance	53	82.8%	16	88.9%	37	80.4%
School climate	46	71.9%	17	94.4%	29	63.0%
Tutoring	46	71.9%	12	66.7%	35	76.1%
Teacher quality	40	62.5%	16	88.9%	30	65.2%
Summer programs	36	56.3%	16	88.9%	20	43.5%
Professional development	36	56.3%	7	38.9%	29	63.0%
College preparatory programs	35	54.7%	14	77.8%	27	58.7%
School-based health clinic	18	28.1%	4	22.2%	16	34.8%
Absenteeism	16	25.0%	12	66.7%	9	19.6%
Charter schools	12	18.8%	5	27.8%	9	19.6%
Teacher turnover	6	9.4%	5	27.8%	4	8.7%
AP classes	3	4.7%	5	27.8%	1	2.2%
Speech & language pathology	3	4.7%	5	27.8%	1	2.2%

When we tally interventions across categories (Table 4), we find that Promise Neighborhoods plan to implement far more in-school reforms than reforms in any other category. Overall, both planning and implementation grant winners included plans to address about twice as many in-school factors as health factors, despite health being a much broader issue. We did not tally the number of different programs under each category within each grant, but both reviewers informally reported reading far more about in-school plans and the reconciliation of codes largely involved the same code assigned to multiple in-school programs.

Table 4.

Total Number of Factors Addressed, by Category.

	Total	per Neighborhood	Implementation grants	per Neighborhood	Planning grants	per Neighborhood
School	823	12.86	265	14.72	591	12.85
Health/health care	417	6.52	151	8.39	292	6.35
Family/home	300	4.69	122	6.78	201	4.37
Neighborhoods/housing	242	3.78	116	6.44	159	3.46
Personal efficacy	95	1.48	39	2.17	68	1.48
Economic	62	0.97	34	1.89	40	0.87
Computers	54	0.84	15	0.83	39	0.85

Discussion

Promise Neighborhoods were conceived to address a wide range of issues facing those living in poverty that ultimately impact academic achievement and attainment. The intent to address out-of-school factors sets Promise Neighborhoods apart from previous federal efforts.

We find, however, that Promise Neighborhoods largely plan to address in-school issues. Grant applications mostly focus on in-school issues including preschool, teacher quality, tutoring, attendance, college enrollment, school safety, and school climate. This is broadly consistent with community schools, which a recent review (Heers, Van Klaveren, Groot, & Maassen van den Brink, 2016) describes as having three main goals: increasing academic achievement, decreasing dropout rate, and decreasing risky behavior.

Most grant winners, meanwhile, include few plans to address living conditions in neighborhoods, including pollution, noise, crowding, green space, or even fostering homeownership.

Finally, the nonschool factors that Promise Neighborhoods do plan to address are largely not those that previous reviews have found are best supported by research.

One explanation could be that Promise Neighborhoods focus more on continuing previous initiatives than on starting new ones. Miller et al. (2013) conclude that “most of the successful applicants framed [their proposals] as being consistent with their larger agendas and historically established track records of positively influencing their communities” (p. 565). Horsford and Sampson (2014) criticize the process, arguing that competitive grants reward the areas with most resources and that earning a Promise Neighborhood grant

might be an untenable promise for hundreds of communities without a sustained history of successful organizing or promise of future investment and resources . . . communities with the greatest need are far too often the least able to obtain federal support . . . thousands of high-need, low-capacity communities are left to fight poverty on their own, resulting in increased capacity to improve schools for some, and perhaps just another empty promise for others. (p. 987)

Indeed, one of the major criteria for selection is that neighborhoods “have the capacity to achieve results” (U.S. Department of Education, 2011c, p. 39590). If communities historically built capacity around serving schools and the communities with the highest capacity receive awards, Promise Neighborhoods might continue to focus on schools more than neighborhoods.

Other contributing factors might include the experience and beliefs of current leadership and the governance structure of the grant program itself. To what extent did leaders work in education versus on endeavors focused on neighborhoods, health, or family? To what extent do current leaders (and funders) believe schools created, and can solve, the problems they have identified in their neighborhoods? And if an agency other than the Department of Education managed the process, would they encourage Neighborhoods to focus more on other initiatives?

Whatever the cause, the lack of attention to nonschool factors—particularly those related to neighborhoods and housing, but also those related to home and family—combined with the tenuous alignment with prior research raises important questions regarding the potential efficacy of these Neighborhoods.

If Promise Neighborhoods simply offer more of the same of what we have been doing for the past 50 years, they will likely fail. If they address factors that are practically easy instead of those the literature identifies as most important, they will likely fail. If they simply repackage current ideas into new proposals, they will likely fail.

Promise Neighborhoods were designed to substantially differ from past and present interventions and to implement research-based interventions, but our findings indicate this may not happen. To what extent the actual implementation mirrors original plans remains unknown, but the original plans focus more on extending school reform efforts than on changing communities.

Conclusion

The past half-century has seen a growing consensus that nonschool factors drive achievement and attainment more than in-school factors and phenomenal growth in the rich–poor achievement gap while policy interventions have focused almost solely on schools. In response, Promise Neighborhoods were created to address a wide variety of nonschool factors and tie together schools and communities. We examine the extent to which these interventions align with research evidence on what drives achievement. We find 71 different factors Promise Neighborhoods seek to address to improve the lives, achievement, and attainment of the children within their boundaries. Most of these programs focus on in-school changes or factors supported by little evidence, raising the distinct possibility that key aspects of children’s lives will remain unchanged while we continue to focus on changing schools instead of society.

Footnotes

Appendix

Examples of Interventions in Each Category.

Violence/crime	Programming to discourage youth involvement with gang activity
Disorder	Repurposing vacant land, blighted structures, or brownfields; public art installation
Crowdedness	Home visits to assess crowding
Mobility/homelessness	Endeavors to develop affordable housing; programming to prevent families from relocating out of the neighborhood
Homeownership	Providing low-interest mortgages and home-buying classes
Utilities	Help preventing electric, water, and/or fuel service shut-offs
Civic service	Volunteering at community agencies (e.g., soup kitchens)
Civic engagement	Attending town hall meetings; voter registration/participation
Social capital	Creating working groups to address community concerns
Community	Community gardens, recreation spaces
Community organization	Coordination and cooperation among agencies to avoid the duplication or omission of needed services
Playgrounds	Development of community playgrounds and parks
Nutrition	Ensuring neighborhood residents eat 5 servings of fruits/vegetables
Birth weight	Classes that teach about healthy birth weight to expectant mothers
Asthma	Screening services for children at risk of developing asthma
Teen pregnancy	Teen pregnancy prevention through empowerment classes for young girls
Prenatal health	Expectant women have an OB/GYN physician; sonogram services
Access to health care	Ensuring that all neighborhood residents have a place to go other than the emergency room for medical attention
Vision	Mobile lab vision tests and optometry services for children
Mental health	Walk-in clinic for residents with mental illness
Chemical use	Programming to prevent drug and alcohol abuse
Environmental	Home environment tests for lead and/or mold
Physical fitness	Ensuring that all neighborhood residents participate in at least 60 min of moderate to vigorous physical activity every day
Obesity	Nutrition programs that target childhood obesity; exercise programs for children
Mortality	Access to appropriate health care to prevent against untimely deaths, especially infant deaths
Dental	Mobile dental vans; courses on proper dental hygiene; teeth cleanings
Admonishments/praise	Parenting programs that teach how to constructively correct children’s problem behaviors
Language exposure	Classes that teach how to talk to your child and the importance of reading to children
Family size	Family planning programs to prevent unwanted pregnancies
Single parenthood	Coping strategies and parenting classes for single parents
Home	Home visits conducted by promise neighborhood administrators
Parent chemical dependency	Drug/Alcohol rehabilitation services
Attachment	Parenting programs to teach how to bond with children
Parent–child communication	Instruction on how to effectively communicate with one’s child
Warmth	Courses on how to nurture and protect children; mothers’ circles
Child abuse	Screenings to ensure neighborhood children are not being abused
Child care	Access to safe, educational, affordable, and reliable child care
Parenting	Classes on how to be an effective and loving parent
Screening for developmental	Screenings to ensure children exhibit age-appropriate functioning
Income	Salary improvements; promotions
Wealth	Classes on how to make smart investments and build savings
Employment	Job readiness training; résumé writing; career exploration
Charter schools	Neighborhoods that established a charter school
Preschool	Center-based or formal home-based early learning centers
Tutoring	After-school academic enrichment classes
Summer programs	Recreational, academic, or college preparatory summer programming available to neighborhood residents
Teacher quality	Teachers are regularly assessed and evaluated; performance held to the highest standards
School-based health clinic	Clinic located on school grounds, offering access to health services
Achievement	Students’ performance on state math and literacy exams
Attendance	Students rarely miss school; 3rd-grade attendance rates
Parent involvement	Parents volunteer at their children’s schools; teachers conduct outreach programs to engage parents in their classrooms
Student mobility	Interventions to prevent students from changing schools repeatedly; assistance with finding affordable housing
Safety	Students feel safe at home/traveling to/from school; anti-bullying programs
Teacher turnover	Initiatives to retain quality teachers; professional development
AP classes	Advanced Placement classes are available to students
School climate	School environment is safe, productive, and learner-centered
Absenteeism	Interventions to prevent chronic absences from school
Graduation rate	Structured initiative to raise the graduation rate to 90%
College enrollment	Programming to encourage a college-going culture; assistance with application, financial aid, and registration forms
Professional development	Teachers and administrators receive ongoing trainings to improve their instructional performance
Ethnic identity	Programming designed to value one’s home culture; Native American language classes
Social skills	Self-confidence building; anger management; conflict resolution
Access to computers/Internet	Students and parents have access to 21st-century technology
College preparatory	Classes in study skills, time management, academic enrichment
HIV/risky	Courses in preventing STD’s; sexual health and education classes
Arts/performing	Theater outings; music education, public art installations
Speech/language pathology	Screenings for speech/language impediments or delays
Mentoring	Big Brother/Big Sister; Compeer; Internships
Youth	After school and/or summer work programs for teenagers

Note. OB/GYN = obstetrician/gynecologist; STD = sexually transmitted disease.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Bernadette Doykos for her incredibly helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors acknowledge receiving $2,000 from a Niagara University Research Support Grant in 2013-14.

ORCID iD

Corey Bunje Bower

Notes

Author Biographies

Corey Bunje Bower is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy at the University at Buffalo. His current research examines how urban poverty affects children and families and explores ways in which social and educational policies can mitigate these effects and narrow achievement gaps.

Rachael Rossi is a writing instructor at Niagara University and an Adult Literacy Teacher for Orleans/Niagara BOCES. Her research examines urban poverty and education, particularly the postsecondary outcomes of former high school dropouts.

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