The Promise of Promise Neighborhoods: Beyond Good Intentions — Secretary Arne Duncan’s Remarks at the Harlem Children’s Zone Fall Conference.

“Let me cite one final example of a national program that works, which I came to know well in Chicago. Communities in Schools, known as CIS, runs the nation’s largest dropout prevention program, each year providing about two million students an array of integrated support services. In Chicago, CIS provides services to 64,000 students at 152 public schools, and it tripled in size in Chicago over the last decade. A third of the students in Chicago, 22,000 in all, went through conflict management, anger management, gang prevention, and bullying prevention programs last year.

 

Like East Lake and HCZ, CIS has sponsored rigorous, independent evaluations of its program. As a result, CIS can now show that it boosts math achievement, reduces dropout rates, and is one of the only dropout-prevention programs in the country that increases the proportion of students who graduate from high school with a regular diploma. CIS also discovered that school sites which fully implement the CIS service model have a bigger impact on student learning and graduation rates than schools that only partially implement the model.

 

It is programs like CIS, East Lake, and the Harlem Children’s Zone that are showing us the promise of Promise Neighborhoods. A relentless focus on improving outcomes, on regional scalability, and sustainability are the core elements for a successful assault on poverty and educational inequality. And the spoke of the wheel that makes that conveyor belt of seamless services turn is a great school. To succeed, place-based programs can no longer treat good schools as optional, or secondary to efforts to build high-quality preschool and after-school programs. Communities will take different approaches to achieving these goals, but the principles will be the same.”

To read Secretary Duncan’s full speech please click here.