Doubling Down

Depending on how one counts, over $120 billion of the $787 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—a.k.a. the “stimulus package”—is targeted at the nation’s preschools, schools and colleges—a staggering sum that will double the Department of Education’s budget and increase the federal government’s leverage in education. Much of the funding is earmarked for existing programs, including $17 billion for Pell Grants for college students, $11 billion to expand special education services, and $40 billion for teachers and professors facing layoffs. But there’s also a lot of spending that’s left to the discretion of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Here's one way to spend some of the cash: Build a new generation of full-service facilities for poor kids.

A host of studies makes clear that public schools are going to be a lot more successful with disadvantaged kids if they collaborate more closely with health clinics, parenting projects, and other community resources that counter the devastating consequences of poverty on student achievement. Secretary Duncan has an intuitive sense of this reality, having spent many hours growing up at his mother’s after-school tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago. “The more schools become community centers the better,” he told senators at his confirmation hearing. And on the campaign trail and since, President Obama has touted the logic of comprehensive strategies for urban students, frequently praising the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit supplying a range of services to 7,000 students in central Harlem.

So why not marry the stimulus goal of creating new construction jobs with a comprehensive approach to raising student achievement in impoverished neighborhoods by building facilities that combine schools with a range of youth and family services under a single roof? A great model is THEARC—The Town Hall Education, Arts & Recreation Campus—a $27-million, 110,000 square-foot facility that opened in Washington, DC’s, impoverished Anacostia district in 2005.

Funded with public and private monies and run by a non-profit organization, it supplies some of Washington’s neediest students and their families with immunizations, state-of-the-art dental and heath care, psychological services, legal aid, job training, music and fine arts instruction by the Levine School of Music and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Catholic middle school for girls, a full gymnasium run by the city’s Boys and Girls Clubs, and a 356-seat community theater that’s used for everything from graduations to fashion shows.

Why not build a network of these public-private ventures nationwide that includes traditional public schools and charter schools? It would help jump-start the economy and give inner-city kids the comprehensive help they need.