The Massachusetts School Centered Neighborhood Development Playbook

Neighborhood vitality and public school performance are closely linked, yet education improvement efforts are generally siloed from planning, housing, and community development.

Key Takeaways

  • Growing education reform movements and an influx of housing resources provide a window to embrace coordinated planning efforts at the neighborhood level
  • The funding of backbone organizations and the implementation of the Community School model are both effective ways to work across silos and create mixed-income neighborhoods and schools

Neighborhood vitality and public school performance are closely linked, yet education improvement efforts are generally siloed from planning, housing, and community development. This disconnect has contributed to increasingly high levels of racial and economic segregation in public schools, as prior MassINC Policy Center research documents. Drawing on models developed in other cities and states, this report outlines school-centered neighborhood development strategies and tactics that communities can deploy to build more mixed-income neighborhoods and schools.