Evaluating the Next Generation Community Schools Pilot in New York City

RAND Corporation published an implementation study on September 13 examining how the New York City Office of Community Schools rolled out its Next Generation Community Schools pilot. The 20-school initiative adds academic components to a model historically centered on nonacademic student supports. For NYC's nonprofit service providers, the report quantifies the operating conditions of the country's largest citywide community schools system.

Pilot Design and Scale

The Next Generation Community Schools pilot launched in 2022 under the NYC Office of Community Schools, an entity within NYC Public Schools. Implementation ran across two academic years — 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 — in 20 schools. The pilot layered three academic enhancements onto the existing community schools framework:

• Collaborative leadership development
• Instructional leadership development for school leaders
• A cocurricular enhancement for kindergarten math

These enhancements sit atop NYC's Community Schools Initiative (NYC-CSI), which serves almost 200,000 students per year in more than 400 schools. NYC-CSI remains the largest citywide system of community schools in the United States. The pilot does not replace the existing model; it tests whether structured academic additions can be embedded into a service-delivery architecture already built around nonprofit and community-based partners.

Implications for School–Nonprofit Partnerships

The community schools model operates on shared leadership between schools and community-based organizations. Service providers deliver a substantial portion of the nonacademic programming that defines the strategy. RAND's study draws on original surveys and interviews with OCS staff, school district leaders, school leaders, and service providers — making it one of the few recent datasets capturing nonprofit-side implementation conditions within NYCPS contracts.

The research was sponsored by NYC's Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity, in partnership with NYCPS, the Fund for NYCPS, and Robin Hood. Conducted under RAND's Education, Employment, and Infrastructure Program, the report carries peer-reviewed methodology standards. For sector organizations currently contracting with NYC community schools, the dataset offers a baseline measurement of how pilot-stage academic enhancements interact with existing service delivery obligations.

Sector Signals Worth Tracking

Several concurrent data points frame the pilot's operating environment:

• Service demand pressure. A joint Imagine Canada sector update found that over 70 percent of surveyed charitable organizations reported service demand exceeding current operational capacity, with rising service queues and acute workforce shortages in community care roles.
• Donor priorities. A Lombard Odier multi-region report, "The Next [Gen] Chapter of Philanthropy," documented that emerging donors prioritize measurable impact, innovative funding vehicles, and transparency in charitable giving.
• Compensation constraints. A Newsweek opinion piece raised concerns about nonprofit salary structures limiting the sector's capacity to address inequity.

For NYC-based nonprofits operating inside the community schools system, three practical checks emerge from the RAND findings:

• Map your contract footprint against the 20 pilot schools to determine whether your organization sits inside or adjacent to the enhancement rollout.
• Identify which of the three academic enhancements — leadership development, instructional leadership, or kindergarten math — intersects with your current service line.
• Monitor the Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity and Fund for NYCPS for subsequent implementation phases or expansion decisions, as the pilot's evaluation will determine whether NYC-CSI scales the academic layer beyond the initial 20 schools.

The report's findings on enabling and hindering factors will define whether future NYCPS community schools budgets allocate toward academic enhancement infrastructure or maintain the existing nonacademic focus.