School district wide retention and improvement initiatives: Kalamazoo Promise

I have written about how in the 1980s, Hennepin County, Minnesota realized that population shrinkage in Minneapolis was costing it significant property tax revenue, and the reductions would put the county's finances at risk.

What they did is look at the places in Minneapolis that weren't losing population and they realized they were rich in natural amenities--parks, lakes, rivers--and they figured out that if they aimed to reproduce those conditions in more places in the city, they could add population instead of lose it.

They created the Hennepin Works initiative as an infrastructure investment program to do just that ("A County and Its Cities: the Impact of Hennepin Community Works," Journal of Urban Affairs, 2008).  

Later they added light rail transit to the program.  And later and separately, Minneapolis created its own neighborhood investment program called the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, which invested in schools, parks, and other neighborhood-based infrastructure.

Central city school districts have similar issues.  First, as the nature of households change there are fewer children anyway.  Second, but as options for schooling grow--private, parochial, charter--school districts are capturing a smaller percentage of the student population in their cities, especially higher income families.

Charter schools.  Some cities, like Milwaukee and Washington, DC, created a parallel system of charter schools to provide a greater array of choices to parents, keeping the families in the city, but at the cost of planned decline of the traditional school system, which lost enrollment and funds, as well as social and community capital as families shifted to charter schools.

Maps4Kids, Oklahoma City.  Oklahoma City is very large, almost 600 square miles, with urban and suburban sections, with more than 20 school districts serving parts of the city.  The urban section is served primarily by the Oklahoma City School District, and the facilities had languished, especially by comparison to the suburban areas.

The city's Metropolitan Area Projects (MAP) program invests in infrastructure as amenities projects.  The second phase invested in school buildings, focused mostly on the urban section of the city, but with monies also going to the suburban school districts.

While the facilities improved significantly and this helped to improve neighborhoods, attract new residents and students along the lines discussed in "The bilingual Key Elementary School in Arlington County as another example of the "upsidedownness" of community planning," MAPS4Kids didn't invest simultaneously in programs, curriculum improvements, etc., so the benefits were muted.

Special/magnet schools.  Other cities kept the focus on the traditional system, but added a handful of magnet or special schools and programs, as a way to attract or retain families with choices.  Philadelphia, in association with the University of Pennsylvania, created special schools in the vicinity of the university.

These efforts can be criticized as inequitable because they aren't focused on improving the entire system, but only schools likely to be attended by high income students.

The Transformation Program in Dallas counteracts this by focusing on larger geographies with a deliberate process for enrolling low income children, and seems to be doing quite well ("Dallas parents flocking to schools that pull students from both rich and poor parts of town: School districts see success with ‘Transformation Schools’ that offer a socioeconomically mixed student body," Hechinger Report).

Kalamazoo Promise.  Kalamazoo is a second tier Michigan city.  Home to Western Michigan University and private colleges, it had been the headquarters city of Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, and the firm contributed significantly to the city's success.  Also, less successful, it is the site of the first Downtown pedestrian mall in the US.

The school district had been shrinking in enrollment for more than a decade, and in 2006 they introduced a new program, free college tuition for graduates.  In the 17 years since, student enrollment has stabilized and increased, while in the other districts in Kalamazoo County, student enrollment has decreased uniformly.  The same is true compared to other Michigan second tier cities--Kalmazoo's school district grows in enrollment, while the others shrink.  

The school system captures 84% of potential enrollment.  And is racially diverse.

-- "Biggest success of The Kalamazoo Promise? It’s a magnet," Kalamazoo Gazette
-- "17 years later, The Kalamazoo Promise has changed lives. But it hasn’t been a cure-all," KG

From the second article:

Starting with the KPS Class of 2006, The Promise has paid about $200 million in college tuition for more than 7,600 students. Not including the most recent round of college graduates, 2,954 Promise-eligible students have earned a higher-education degree or certification, including 2,350 with at least a bachelor’s degree, Promise data shows.

So it's not cheap.  But at $12 million per year, it's a relatively cheap stabilization measure.  On the other hand, some involved argue that improvements within the school system are elusive.  That doesn't surprise me as the MAPS4Kids program proved you need to have simultaneous investments in programs, curricula, etc.  From the article:

That said, Jorth and others agree that The Kalamazoo Promise is still a work in progress. There have been challenges along the way. The idea The Promise would transform Kalamazoo has proven illusive. “We’re better off as a community,” said Brad Hershbein, an Upjohn Institute senior economist and deputy director of research. “The district is better off. But there are still a lot of problems that remain. “It’s not a panacea. It hasn’t solved everything,” he said. “In fact, it hasn’t solved that much of anything.”

Conclusion: you have to go big.  I think the solution is to pair a complementary neighborhood and city revitalization program to the schools initiative.

For links to past writings a city-wide revitalization programs, see:

-- "Revisiting St. Louis revitalization planning in the face of population shrinkage" (2023)