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Early Ed Watch has been keeping an eye on the Promise Neighborhoods Program, and will continue to report on how the program takes shape. The Promise Neighborhoods idea draws on many concepts from the Harlem Children’s Zone, a network of schools and social services within a 100-block section of Harlem that President Obama has cited as a strategy to help lift kids out of distressed communities and break the cycle of urban poverty in America.

 

This year’s federal budget allocates $10 million for the Promise Neighborhoods Program that the department will distribute as 20 planning grants of up to $500,000 each. If Congress approves more funding in future years, communities will be able to compete for larger, five-year implementation grants to help build a “cradle-to-college and career” continuum of education and social services.

 

The one-year planning grants are available to two different types of organizations: nonprofits (this can include faith-based nonprofit organizations) and institutions of higher education. In order to be eligible, the entity must be designed to help a designated, distressed community; it must either operate or partner with a school or schools in this designated “neighborhood” and coordinate with the school’s local education agency; and it must currently provide at least one part of the proposed continuum of services that will eventually constitute the Promise Neighborhood area.

 

The application package provides detail on the criteria that must be met. “Need” and “significance” will both play small roles in selection, while quality measures—such as the applicant’s capacity to organize and create a Promise Neighborhood and the design of the network —will be more heavily weighted during the selection process. Additionally, rural and tribal communities will be given some level of priority— a somewhat surprising twist, given that the Harlem Children’s Zone seems poised to become an archetype for urban solutions to poverty.

 

At Early Ed Watch, we’ve expressed our curiosity about how strongly the early years will play into this “cradle-to-career” approach. The application has an early signal: applicants must collect data to use as indicators for their proposed planning and programs, including some measure of whether “children enter kindergarten ready to learn.” Data must show how many children have access to non-emergency healthcare and early learning settings, as well as how many 3-year-olds and kindergartners are making progress across multiple domains of early learning.

 

For those interested in planning grants, the Department is hosting a series of the course of the next 10 days. “” and “Frequently Asked Questions” sheets are also available online, including information on what outcomes, data collection, and reporting the Department of Education expects from the one-year grants.