An Economic Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of Providing Comprehensive Supports to Students in Elementary School
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An Economic Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of Providing Comprehensive Supports to Students in Elementary School A. Brooks Bowden 1
&
Robert Shand 2 & Henry M. Levin 3 & Atsuko Muroga 3 & Anyi Wang 4
# Society for Prevention Research 2020
Abstract There is growing evidence that out-of-school factors, such as physical and mental health, family support, and social and emotional development, significantly affect student learning (Berliner 2009). To address challenges related to poverty, schools are being charged with serving as a focal point in providing and coordinating support services for students and their families (Adelman and Taylor 2002; Dryfoos 2002). In many schools these support services are provided in fragmented ways that do not address the needs of all students or engage teachers in connecting these services to the academic mission of the school (Walsh and DePaul 2008). An emerging school-based model, broadly termed “comprehensive student support” (Walsh et al. 2016), is designed to overcome such fragmentation. In this paper, we build upon previous effectiveness work with an economic evaluation of a successful support model, City Connects. We find that the benefits of the program exceed the costs, indicating that the program is a sound investment and should be considered an option to address the needs of students and to prevent future crises from disrupting their learning. Keywords Economic evaluation . Induced costs . Benefit-cost analysis . Comprehensive student support . City connects . Community-based partnerships
Introduction Students come to school with a diverse range of strengths and needs that extend well beyond the traditional academic Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-020-01164-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * A. Brooks Bowden [email protected] Robert Shand [email protected] Henry M. Levin [email protected] Atsuko Muroga [email protected] Anyi Wang [email protected] 1
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
2
American University, Washington, DC, USA
3
Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
4
The Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
mission of formal schooling. There is growing evidence that out-of-school factors, such as physical and mental health, family support, and social and emotional development, significantly affect student learning (Berliner 2009). Challenges related to these factors include health issues (Basch 2011), trauma (Porche et al. 2011), hunger (Alaimo et al. 2001), and homelessness (Fantuzzo et al. 2012). Poverty also affects student learning through lack of access to resources (Dearing and Taylor 2007), higher levels of stress (Conger and Conger 2008), and unpredictable systems of support (Dearing 2008; Rothstein 2010). When schools focus primarily on achievement in literacy and mathematics and do not attend to these out-of-school influences that affect learning, their effectiveness is lim
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