Comprehensive Services For Children In Poverty: What We Know And What We Need To Learn
To help schools and families prepare future generations Americans to compete in a rapidly changing economy and participate in 21st century civic and community life, strategies are needed to address the out-of-school factors that can interfere with learning.
Integrated Student Support -- a school-based approach to promoting achievement by coordinating community and school-based supports and services to target both academic and non-academic barriers to learning -- has demonstrated promising evidence of effectiveness in promoting students' academic achievement and life chances. But building on the evidence base is critically important to influence policy and empower our schools, assert researchers in a conference report issued in mid-April by Boston College's Center for Optimized Student Support (COSS).
Entitled "Comprehensive Services for Children in Poverty; Setting the Research Agenda for Integrated Student Support,", the 22-page report synthesizes the findings from an October 2017 convening of 29 leaders in the fields of developmental sciences, economics, educational research methodology and law, hosted by BC's Lynch School of Education. The leading scholars gathered at Boston College to better understand the current state of research on integrated student support and to begin developing research questions to move this nascent field forward.
“We were so pleased to draw upon the expertise of scholars across the fields to understand what is known about integrating comprehensive supports for children in poverty, and what we still need to learn. This is a pivotal opportunity to focus the nation on a shared, productive research agenda with relevance,” said Mary Walsh, Executive Director of the Boston College Lynch School of Education’s Center for Optimized Student Support and Kearns Professor in the Department of Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.
The report outlines a research agenda to advance our understanding of integrated support, and ultimately inform policy and practice.
“As researchers, we are invested in integrated student support because of the evidence suggesting that it can make a huge impact for children living in poverty, said Erin Sibley, PHD, a Research Fellow at the Center and lead author of the report. “By growing the research base, we think we have a greater chance of impacting policy changes that will support these types of interventions.”
The report comes at a critical point. The challenges facing America’s schools are urgent. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 52 percent of students nationwide are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a measure of poverty. Our nation is seeing a proliferation of attempts to meet the complex needs of children in schools. And these community-involved efforts are increasingly supported by state and federal investments, and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 includes language recognizing the importance of integrated student support to improve student outcomes.
“Our nation must find effective, cost-efficient, scalable ways to educate children living in poverty and other challenging circumstances to be ready to participate in 21st century civic and community life and the workforce,” explained Joan Wasser Gish, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Center. “Our shared future depends on helping all children achieve academically and thrive.”
Participants identified critical next steps. These include improving our understanding of the most important elements of integrated student support so that it can be more easily scaled and made available to all students across the country in an efficient and sustainable manner, and of the ways components of integrated student support work to impact student outcomes.
“We felt that this was a very important event for the field, because we know from our own work at the Center that integrated student support makes a difference, added Sibley. “Coming together with a group of researchers with diverse expertise was important to figure out what steps we needed to take next to move the research in this field forward.”
About the Center For Optimized Student Support (Boston College)
The Center for Optimized Student Support, hosted by the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, studies and shares the most effective ways to address the out-of-school factors impacting student learning and thriving in schools, and to support practitioners in implementing evidence-driven integration of school and community resources. It houses the innovative City Connects intervention, a research-practice partnership implementing integrated student support in 100 schools nationwide. The Center uses research in developmental sciences, knowledge emerging from City Connects, and discoveries from around the country to make more effective and efficient use of school and community resources possible.