HOW USDE's TWO-GENERATION PLACED-BASED OPPORTUNITY STRATEGIES SUPPORT NEIGHBORHOODS (1531 hits)
Our History
Place matters. Neighborhoods with concentrated poverty multiply the odds against children and limit their potential for a more promising future. Under the leadership of the Obama Administration, the federal government has focused on the significance of place: how a community supports the lives of the people who live there, how overlapping investments in a particular place can be coordinated and better aligned to increase impact, and how an understanding of community context improves the efficacy of service delivery.
Leveraging a successful track record of community organizing and working with local leaders to give high-need communities the resources to provide opportunities for all children, youth, and families, President Obama directed the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Office of Urban Affairs in 2010 to conduct a comprehensive review of federal programs affecting places, the first of its kind in 30 years.
Agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education (“ED”), under the leadership of Secretary Arne Duncan, were charged to orient programs and initiatives around a community-centric contexts. ED adopted a “place-based” approach in a few of its signature programs and initiatives, including its Promise Neighborhoods program. This approach recognizes that the federal government can better support strategies to achieve improved outcomes for students and families by taking into account where investments are made and how those investments interact with out-of-school conditions for learning.
Early lessons from Promise Neighborhoods and those of other Neighborhood Revitalization Initiatives like Choice Neighborhoods, Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation, and Community Health Centers gave birth to complementary place-based initiatives that focused on building capacity in neighborhoods and cities before seeding highly integrated initiatives and programs like Promise Zones, My Brother’s Keeper, and Performance Partnership Pilots. Throughout this evolution, ED has maintained the premise that schools should be central to place-based initiatives because the full community is needed to affect both in-school and out-of-school causes of low achievement.
In 2012, ED released “Impact in Place: A Progress Report on the Department of Education’s Place-Based Strategy” to report on these efforts. It speaks to ED’s early efforts to explicitly use “place” as a mechanism for combating the causes of low student achievement.
