Equity and opportunity have always been a key focus of City Connects. And over the years, we’ve learned more about how to increase equity and opportunity and how policymakers can promote these resources in their school districts, ensuring that all students have the resources they need to succeed.
“Our goal at the outset of City Connects was to address the inequities that we saw in schools,” Mary Walsh says, recalling the educational environment in the 1990s. Walsh is the founder and executive director of City Connects.
“It wasn’t intentional inequity,” Walsh adds, “but in some schools, student support staff spent 90 percent of their time working with students who had the most noticeable, most serious difficulties. At best that meant helping 10 to 15 percent of kids.”
We’ve seen how important opportunities are for students in City Connects schools. Our coordinators refer students to summer camps or music lessons or even summer school, and those students grow academically and personally.
There’s also evolving evidence that opportunities can lead to equity. In a cohort study that has followed children for 26 years, Boston College’s Professor Eric Dearing, found that increasing students’ opportunities closed achievement gaps, which helps create more equity. Dearing is a professor of Applied Developmental Psychology in Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development as well as the Executive Director of the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, home to City Connects.
“The number of opportunities children have almost entirely explains why those born into low income families graduate at lower rates and have lower levels of income in their mid 20s,” Dearing notes. “In fact, the number of opportunities is a stronger predictor of college graduation and high school graduation than poverty is,” Dearing explained last year.
“The strongest predictor of educational attainment that we have in our models is opportunities. It’s not how much money your parents have. It’s not how highly educated your parents are,” Dearing adds.
“Even more eye-opening is that each opportunity mattered more for the poorest kids. So going from six to seven opportunities for a high income child does not matter nearly as much as going from one to two opportunities for a low income child.”
City Connects’ model of providing integrated student support weaves this kind of equity into the fabric of schools by having Coordinators conduct whole class reviews, meeting with teachers every fall to explore the needs and strengths of every student. This means every student is seen. And every student is connected to a rich set of services and opportunities.
The role of opportunity is also highlighted in the National Guidelines for Integrated Student Support, which were co-created by a national working group of experts who drew on best practices.
As the National Guidelines explain, integrated student support programs “weave relationships and resources into a network of support and opportunity around each student.”
The importance of equity and opportunity are also prominently featured in the Integrated Student Support State Policy Toolkit, a guide for policymakers who want to create or expand integrated student support programs. The toolkit was published by the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children, City Connects, and Communities in Schools.
Among its recommendations, the Toolkit says that state policymakers should direct state education agencies “to provide guidance and support for the implementation of integrated student support that is consistent with the best practices” of the National Guidelines for Integrated Student Support.
In Massachusetts, for example, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education “is providing a school and district learning network named the Systemic Student Support (S3) Academy,” where participating educators build on their existing student support programs to create holistic, culturally aware reviews of students that “place equity at the center of student support practices.” This is a systematic way for educators to think about strengthening the opportunities that their schools offer students.
Joan Wasser Gish, the Director of Systemic Impact at the Center for Thriving Children, sums up this commitment explaining that City Connects and other evidence-based, integrated student support programs are “one way of putting equity of opportunity in action.”
“We can transform the resources and assets in schools and in communities into a powerful engine of opportunity to lift students over known barriers to learning, over broken systems that have held back talent and potential for generations, and we can provide meaningful opportunity to our next generation.”
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