Jamie Gracie

When Resources Meet Relationships: The Returns to Personalized Supports for Low-Income Students

Abstract:  Children from low-income families face persistent educational and economic disadvantages. This paper studies Communities In Schools (CIS), a program that places coordinators in high-poverty schools to connect struggling students with personalized support. CIS is the largest program of its kind in the US, reaching 2 million students each year—nearly three times the size of Head Start—and, unlike most programs of this scale, is funded largely by private philanthropy and local governments. Using the staggered rollout of CIS, we find that the program boosts test scores for struggling students, and that these improvements persist, ultimately increasing high-school completion and adult earnings. These long-run effects can be closely forecast from changes in short-run outcomes, with non-cognitive measures playing a central role. CIS emphasizes personalization as a core feature of its model, and our results are consistent with this claim: coordinators tailor services to distinct student needs, yet students with different needs still see similarly large long-run gains. CIS delivers returns that compare favorably to other major education interventions, such as class-size reductions.