2017 Series • No. 17–1
Current Policy Perspectives
Community Education Circles in the Lawrence Public Schools: Evaluation Design and Baseline Survey 
The Boston Fed launched its Working Cities Challenge as an effort to promote economic growth and development in the region's smaller "Gateway Cities," midsized urban centers that historically were strong industrial hubs, but that today face many economic and social challenges. The inaugural 2013 Challenge focused on smaller Massachusetts cities; Lawrence, one of the cities that received a multiyear grant, has suffered from prolonged economic stagnation since the 1950s. The city's median household income is well below the national median and (as of 2014) 26 percent of its families were living in poverty, more than double the national poverty rate of 11 percent. Besides these economic challenges, Lawrence has had a chronically underperforming public school system, though in 2011 a turnaround plan began to address this problem.
The city's winning proposal, the "Lawrence Working Families Initiative," seeks to improve the employment opportunities and overall economic outcomes for low-income families, and coordinates outreach efforts with a number of different organizations, including the Lawrence Public Schools. The program known as Community Education Circles (CECs) aims to improve educational outcomes for students, to give their parents—many of whom are immigrants--a greater sense of belonging and engagement with their children's school, and to enhance the cultural competency of teachers dealing with students and parents from diverse backgrounds. While there is anecdotal evidence that the CECs are fostering better family-school engagement, this paper describes the Boston Fed's research strategy for evaluating the success of the CECs (the results of which will be discussed in a forthcoming paper), involving an intent-to-treat approach that compares the outcomes for those invited to participate in the CECs with members of a demographically similar control group who were not invited to participate in the program. This preliminary paper provides extensive information, garnered by baseline survey data supplied by the families and data provided by the Lawrence public school system, on the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the families in our study—including control group families as well as treatment group families, and identifies relationships among these characteristics that may pose barriers to achieving the goals of the CECs.
Key Findings
- The parents in the CEC sample (including both the treatment and control groups) are almost three times more likely not to have completed high school and three times less likely to have a four-year college degree or higher when compared to the adult population in Massachusetts. Over 75 percent of adults in the sample primarily speak a language other than English at home (Spanish tends to be the other main language), and 46 percent of parents indicate that they lack fluency in English. The percentage of the sample parents who are in the labor force is greater than the labor force participation rate for all residents in Lawrence or Massachusetts, but the unemployment rate for the research sample is also higher than the rate for all Lawrence residents and is much higher compared to the overall Massachusetts unemployment rate. In terms of family structure, 46 percent of the sample consists of a one-parent household, and 54 percent consists of a two-parent household.
- Almost two-thirds of the single parents in the sample are employed. Among two-parent households over 80 percent have at least one employed adult, and in 55 percent both parents are employed. In the sample, almost 80 percent of the households headed by a single working parent are classified as economically disadvantaged, while almost 60 percent of the families headed by two employed parents are categorized as economically disadvantaged. Parents who are recent immigrants are more likely to have jobs, whether they are the single head of household or part of a two-parent household. Spanish-speaking parents are more likely to be employed than are English-speaking parents.
- Contrary to expectations, there is no distinct pattern relating parental educational attainment and a household's financial stress. English-speaking parents report having somewhat greater difficulty paying bills than do Spanish speakers, which suggests that Spanish speakers are able to overcome potential impediments to employment and earnings based on a lack of English language skills.
- Across all families in the sample, 25 percent report having a low level of involvement with their children's learning, 40 percent a middle level, and 35 percent a high level. A comparison of involvement levels based on parents' primary language suggests that English-speaking parents may find it easier to be involved with their children's learning.
Implications
Follow-up surveys of the study population are currently being conducted and will be compared with these baseline statistics to determine, over a multiyear period, whether the CECs had any measurable effects on the outcomes of interest, such as children's school performance, parental involvement in their children's education, and parental satisfaction with their children's school. Follow-up data may also be useful in understanding the degree to which changes in a family's economic circumstances affect how it engages with its children's learning and whether participation in the CECs helps mitigate any impact that economic stress has on children's educational outcomes.
Abstract
This paper describes a plan for evaluating the Community Education Circles (CECs) program that is being implemented in the Lawrence Public Schools as part of an effort to enhance family-school engagement and improve outcomes for both students and parents. The CECs program supports the larger Lawrence Working Families Initiative, which in 2013 was awarded a multiyear grant through the Boston Fed's Working Cities Challenge. This paper accomplishes several objectives: (1) describe the goals and methods of the CECs program as well as the larger goals of the Lawrence Working Families Initiative; (2) describe the methods that will be used to evaluate the success of the CECs program; (3) describe important features of the survey data and the school administrative data that have been collected so far for the families that are participating in our study. Concerning the last objective, we describe aspects of family structure and employment situation, primary language, demographic information and immigrant status, measures of the family's financial situation and financial stress, and measures of parents' satisfaction with the schools and of their involvement in their child's learning. We also identify relationships between such characteristics that may present barriers to the achievement of the goals of the CECs program across a diverse set of families.