CIS Featured in The Atlantic: The Program That's Turning Schools Around

This article was posted on January 28, 2026, in The Atlantic. 

On a chilly day before Christmas, Teresa Rivas helped a tween boy pick out a new winter coat. “Get the bigger one, the one with the waterproof layer, mijo,” she said, before helping him pull it onto his string-bean frame. Rivas provides guidance counseling at Owen Goodnight Middle School in San Marcos, Texas. She talks with students about their goals and helps if they’re struggling in class. She’s also a trained navigator placed there by a nonprofit called Communities in Schools.

The idea behind CIS and other “community school” programs is that students can’t succeed academically if they’re struggling at home. “Between kindergarten and 12th grade, kids spend only 20 percent of their time” in a classroom, Rob Watson, the executive director of the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me. If America wants kids to thrive, he said, it has to consider the 80 percent. Educators and school administrators in San Marcos, a low-income community south of Austin, agreed. “Tests and academics are very important,” Joe Mitchell, the principal of Goodnight Middle School, told me. “But they are secondary sometimes, given what these kids’ lives are like away from here.”

Along with mediating conflicts and doing test prep, Rivas helps kids’ families sign up for public benefits. She arranges for the nonprofit to cover rent payments. She sets up medical appointments, and keeps refrigerators and gas tanks full.

A new study demonstrates that such efforts have long-term effects. Benjamin Goldman, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell, and Jamie Gracie, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, evaluated data on more than 16 million Texas students over two decades, examining data from the Census Bureau and IRS, as well as state records on academic outcomes. They found that the introduction of CIS led to higher test scores, lower truancy rates, and fewer suspensions in Texas schools. The program bumped up high-school graduation rates by 5.2 percent and matriculation rates at two-year colleges by 9.1 percent. At age 27, students who had attended a CIS school earned $1,140 more a year than students who had not.

Read more on The Atlantic's website. 

Learn more about the breakthrough Harvard/Cornell research: When Resources Meet Relationships: The Returns to Personalized Supports for Low-Income Students