Community Schools Impact on Student Outcomes: Evidence From California

Community schools are an evidence-based strategy rooted in partnerships between schools and local agencies. They aim to strengthen learning conditions and support the well-being of students, families, and communities through four core pillars of integrated student supports, expanded learning opportunities, collaborative leadership, and family engagement. Since 2021, California has made an unprecedented $4.1 billion investment in the California Community Schools Partnership Program (CCSPP), establishing the nation’s largest state-level community schools initiative. California’s investment in community schools focuses on the state’s highest-need schools and far exceeds any prior funding on community schools in the United States. In comparison, the Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS) program, the primary federal initiative, allocated a total of $670 million over the past 17 years.

The state investment came at a critical time, as the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered California’s educational landscape, exacerbating long-standing challenges and creating new ones. Chronic absence rates surged to unprecedented levels; test score gaps widened; and student, staff, and educator mental health challenges intensified. These impacts were particularly severe in high-poverty schools and among historically marginalized student groups. Community schools offer a comprehensive approach to addressing these challenges by transforming how schools engage with students, families, and communities.

Community schools are more than just an approach to service delivery; they represent a fundamental shift from traditional factory model schooling toward a whole child, community-engaged approach. At their core, they are about good schools committed to investing in what matters to the community: rich learning opportunities for all students, strong teaching, meaningful family and community engagement and collaboration, a welcoming school climate, and necessary supports that address students’ barriers to learning. Where historical disinvestment has occurred, they seek to redress inequities, rebuild trust, and repair relationships between communities and their public schools.

The CCSPP implementation grants provide both detailed frameworks and structured support at the state and regional levels while allowing for local adaptation—a balance that is critical to the community schools approach. The program is designed to transform the relationship between the assets and needs of communities and the education of their children, rather than simply adding services to traditional school models. The substantial program provides a unique opportunity to assess the extent to which large-scale support for community school implementation can improve student outcomes and provide more equitable opportunities to all students.

This study assesses the extent to which the CCSPP grants effectively reached high-need schools and evaluates the impact of community school practices induced and supported by the CCSPP implementation grants on student outcomes, including attendance, suspensions, and academic achievement. The study compares changes in these outcomes over time between schools that received CCSPP grants (treatment group) and a matched group of similar schools that did not (control group). Employing a matched difference-in-differences technique, the analyses focus on the divergence in student outcomes between these groups after grant implementation.

This method leverages the fact that these school groups exhibited similar characteristics and trends in outcomes before the grants and would be expected to continue parallel paths without the CCSPP intervention. The primary analysis, using publicly available administrative data from the California Department of Education on all California schools from 2018–19 to 2023–24, specifically excludes schools with prior federal community school grant experience to isolate the effect of the California initiative on schools that were new to the community school approaches, though patterns in FSCS districts are explored. This report focuses on the 458 schools in the first cohort of implementation grantees, as they are the only schools with a full year of student outcome data. We plan to extend the study to incorporate longer post-treatment timelines and additional cohorts and as data become available for subsequent years.

Key Findings

Our analyses of student outcomes following the first full year of CCSPP implementation for the first cohort of grantees reveal consistent positive impacts across multiple domains:

• CCSPP implementation grants reached a diverse set of high-need schools across the state. The program successfully distributed resources across varied school levels, geographic regions, and settings with differing levels of prior exposure to community school approaches, ensuring broad representation in the initial implementation cohort. The average school served in the first cohort had roughly 90% of students who were from low-income households, English learners, and/or in foster care. These students are identified as part of the unduplicated pupil count (UPC), a measure used in California to capture a school’s concentration of historically underserved students.
   
• Community school approaches significantly reduced chronic absence in the first year of implementation. CCSPP schools demonstrated a meaningful reduction in chronic absence; this reduction was, on average, 30% greater than that experienced by similar matched comparison schools. Improvements in regular attendance were most pronounced in elementary schools, suggesting particularly strong early implementation of attendance-focused strategies at this level. Because of the scale of the grant program, the average reduction in chronic absence rates equates to more than 5,000 additional students attending school regularly in the first year.
   
• CCSPP community schools achieved a notable reduction in suspension rates. Implementation of community school approaches corresponded with a 15% reduction in average suspension rates. Reduced suspension rates were largest in secondary schools, where baseline suspension rates were higher and where restorative practices and improved school climate may have had the greatest impact on disciplinary outcomes.
   
• CCSPP community schools improved student test scores. Schools implementing community school approaches showed overall gains of 0.06 standard deviations in math compared to matched schools—roughly the equivalent of 43 additional days of learning. CCSPP community schools also showed larger-than-expected gains in English language arts (ELA) scores (0.05 standard deviations overall), equivalent to approximately 36 additional days of learning, though ELA effects were only statistically significant for some student subgroups. During this same time period, comparison schools showed declines in achievement in both subjects.
   
• Gains were largest for historically underserved students. While students from all backgrounds benefited from the community school investments, there were larger-than-average effects for Black students, English learners, and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. The differential impacts for Black students translate to approximately 130 days of additional learning in math and 151 days in ELA, representing substantial acceleration in academic progress. Benefits for English learners equate to 58 and 72 days more of learning in math and ELA, respectively. For socioeconomically disadvantaged students, these impacts are roughly the equivalent of 58 additional days of learning in math and 43 days of learning in ELA. The larger effects observed among Black students and English learners suggest that the community schools approach may be particularly effective at addressing long-standing opportunity gaps and barriers to achievement that disproportionately affect these student populations. Black students in CCSPP community schools also experienced a reduction in chronic absence and suspensions at more than double the overall rates.
   
• CCSPP community schools’ test score improvements were most substantial in schools that made the greatest progress in reducing chronic absence. Each standard deviation improvement in CCSPP school attendance was associated with a near doubling of the main effect on achievement. The significant interaction between regular attendance gains among grantees in predicting increased learning suggests the interconnected nature of attendance and academic performance, reflecting the holistic impacts of community school engagement strategies.

Implications and Future Directions

The substantial reductions in chronic absence observed among CCSPP implementation grantees are both statistically significant and practically meaningful, aligning with prior community schools research. Similarly, the emerging findings on reduced suspensions and improved test scores mirror patterns seen in other community schools initiatives, where impacts often strengthen over time. Multiple research studies show larger impacts as culture shifts and partnerships and practices deepen; thus, we might reasonably expect additional positive impacts of the CCSPP grants to emerge over a longer implementation time frame as schools more fully integrate the community schools approach and the technical assistance they receive from regional and state support systems to scale and improve.

Our analyses reveal that the impacts of the CCSPP on both achievement and attendance were strongest at the elementary level and that achievement gains were strongest for the schools that had made the most progress in reducing chronic absence. Although high schools and middle schools made meaningful gains in reducing suspension rates, the inconsistent impacts on attendance and achievement at the secondary level suggest a need for targeted supports to enhance community school implementation in secondary settings. At the secondary school level, traditional departmentalized structures that reduce opportunities for close relationships between teachers, students, and families may often present barriers to core community school practices such as deep family engagement and building strong relationships between students and staff.

The strong association between achievement gains and reductions in chronic absence may have several plausible explanations. First, improved attendance directly increases instructional time, providing students with more opportunities to engage with academic content and receive teacher support. The compounding effects of consistent attendance may be particularly important in mathematics, where content tends to build sequentially and missed instruction can create significant learning gaps. Second, the specific integrated supports implemented through the community schools approach likely address underlying barriers that simultaneously affect both attendance and learning capacity. For example, improved access to health services may reduce illness-related absences while also enhancing students’ physical readiness to learn. Similarly, mental health supports may reduce stress-related chronic absence while improving cognitive functioning and focus during instructional time. Third, improved family engagement—a core pillar of the community schools approach—may simultaneously strengthen parents’ commitment to regular school attendance and their capacity to support learning at home. This dual impact could help explain why attendance improvements translate into achievement gains more in community schools. Finally, the cultural shift toward greater belonging and engagement fostered by the community schools approach may motivate students not only to attend school more regularly but also to participate more actively when present. This increased engagement may enhance the quality of students’ learning experiences, not just the quantity of instructional time received.

These findings highlight the importance of addressing chronic absence not merely as a compliance issue but as a fundamental educational equity strategy with direct implications for academic outcomes. They also suggest that the most successful community schools may be those that effectively integrate attendance interventions with broader strategies to enhance student engagement, well-being, and learning supports.

Further research is needed to more comprehensively understand the impacts of California’s historic investment in community schools. This includes examining a broader range of outcomes for Cohort 1 implementation grantees, such as school climate measures, teacher retention rates, student grade progression, and graduation rates, while also tracking these schools’ progress over additional implementation years. As cohorts 2–4 advance in their implementation journeys, incorporating their experiences and outcomes into the analyses will provide a more complete picture of the initiative’s effectiveness across diverse contexts.

One of the strong values of community schools is building a sense of responsive community, which is particularly important for families and children who have had negative experiences with public institutions. The initial positive findings presented here suggest a promising return on California’s historic investment in community schools, indicating that new resources and approaches are helping to get children back to school, lessening the need for exclusionary discipline, and increasing the rate of learning, especially among students who have been historically underserved.

Community Schools Impact on Student Outcomes: Evidence From California by Walker Swain, Melanie Leung-Gagné, Anna Maier, and Cassandra Rubinstein is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

This research was supported by the Stuart Foundation. Core operating support for LPI is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.

Cover photo by Allison Shelley for EDUimages.