Urban Colleges Move Into K-12 Schools to Help Kids and Themselves

New schools aim to improve neighborhoods near campus, boost student pipeline.

Colleges have long encouraged students to tutor area children and funneled aspiring teachers into nearby classrooms for training. Some operate pricey private “lab” schools to test new pedagogy like play-based learning or bilingual instruction, or to attract faculty with families.

Now they are taking over entire public schools.

The University of California, Los Angeles, Johns Hopkins University and others are lending their names to new charters or partnering with districts to overhaul troubled institutions, often investing millions or tens of millions of dollars in cash or faculty time.

They say the K-12 work is about testing education theories, such as the value of socioeconomically diverse classrooms, and being good neighbors, but acknowledge the engagement is far from altruistic. It is also about improving blighted blocks that abut their campuses and strengthening the pipeline of students who could eventually enroll at their institutions.

The strategy has risks and sometimes doesn’t pan out, as shown by a University of Southern California experiment that was called off in 2012 after five years and stumbles at a Baltimore school in which Johns Hopkins has invested millions of dollars.

Aiming to avoid the potential headaches of working within the confines of a school district, Purdue University invested $1.1 million for startup costs at the Purdue Polytechnic High School, a science, technology, engineering and math focused Indianapolis charter school opening this fall. It has also pledged $1.7 million over the next five years to cover faculty advising on the hands-on curriculum and an emergency backstop if enrollments don’t pick up quickly.

The school, about 70 miles away from Purdue’s main campus and in Indiana’s largest city, was created in part “to increase significantly the unacceptably low number of Indianapolis Public School students who are qualified to succeed at Purdue,” said university President Mitch Daniels.

The City University of New York had a similar goal when it began setting up early college high schools, which allow students to earn two years of college credit before graduating, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. It started with two schools, in 2003. There are now 17.

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