Center for American Progress Report

The Center for American Progress has analyzed President Obama’s education budget for 2011 in great detail. The center’s analysts had this to say about the budget’s community initiatives:

The president also proposes to support community schools under a reformed CCLC program. The Center for American Progress discussed the benefits of school-based services offered by community schools in a recent report. In addition, the proposed $210 million in funding for Promise Neighborhoods will allow for the replication of the highly successful Harlem’s Children’s Zone in communities across the country. The president is right to prioritize funding for school-level reforms that facilitate access to important social and health services for students and families.

Child Trends report

From Prevention Action, a British online news publication on children’s health and development, reflections on a recent report from Child Trends on the prospects for Promise Neighborhoods and, specifically, the difficulty of finding the right data to use as benchmarks for success:

Child Trends acknowledges Harlem’s achievement. … The question is whether a neighborhood in Detroit, Denver or Chicago will ever be able to compare its progress to Harlem’s using similar criteria, and whether the experience of all four can be meaningfully combined – or contrasted with the experience of non-Promise neighborhoods who may or not be running initiatives of their own.

Promise Neighborhood Resources

As the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports, the Bridgespan Group, a consulting firm that works with non-profits, has just released a report on how communities might best approach Promise Neighborhoods. They’ve also set up a website as a public resource for interested communities.