Part 2: City Connects on Public School Insights

As a follow up to his recent interview with City Connects’ Executive Director Mary Walsh and Director of Practice Pat DiNatale, Claus von Zastrow of the Learning First Alliance spoke to two people experiencing City Connects in Boston’s schools: Traci Walker Griffith, principal of the Eliot K-8 School, and Kathleen Carlisle, site coordinator at the Mission Hill School. Read about how City Connects is implemented in schools and the impact it has on students and their families:

Helping the Whole Child: A View from Two Schools

City Connects was also recently featured on the Future of Teaching blog as an example of a positive shift that is catching on in the context of school reform.

City Connects Featured on Public School Insights

City Connects’ Mary Walsh, Executive Director, and Pat DiNatale, Director of Practice, were interviewed about the CCNX model of  student support over at the Public School Insights blog. The blog has a rich collection of what’s already working in public schools and aims to spark a national conversation about how to make it work for children in every school. It is a product of the Learning First Alliance, a partnership of 18 leading education associations with more than 10 million members dedicated to improving student learning in America’s public schools. Check out the interview and leave a comment!

When “City Connects” Helps the Whole Child,
Achievement Gaps Shrink

The figure in the interview is new work from the CCNX evaluation team. It shows that  students in City Connects schools outperform their Boston peers in middle school and achieve close to state proficiency levels in both English and math on Massachusetts statewide tests (MCAS). After they leave the CCNX program, significant long-term effects persist through middle school. This graph presents the percentage of students achieving in the Proficient or Advanced categories of MCAS mathematics for one cohort of students who started first grade in 2001.

Data Source: Massachusetts Dept. of Elementary & Secondary Education; Boston Public Schools MCAS data, 2009. CCNX sample sizes: Grade 4=374; grade 5=378; grade 6=338; grade 7=325; grade 8=276.

  • Learn more about City Connects data on our Results web page
  • Follow Claus von Zastrow, author of the Public School Insights blog and Executive Director of the Learning First Alliance, on Twitter

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