THE PROPOSED ACTION PLAN

During “A Leadership Conversation,” The New York City Leadership Center (NYCLC) briefly introduced 20/20 Vision for Schools (20/20) as a vehicle for education reform that NYCLC has embraced as its first citywide service initiative. Investing in future-oriented, emerging leaders insures leadership for generations to come. Transformational leadership requires engaging critical social issues with meaningful solutions.

Put simply, 20/20’s mission is to transform public education within a single generation of students. More specifically, 20/20 will mobilize grassroots faith-based, business, and community institutions to come along side public schools for meaningful advocacy and service.

Our vision is for first graders of September 2008 – who are the graduating high school class of 2020 – to reverse decades of chronic under-performance and graduate in record numbers, equitably across demographics and neighborhoods, with the skills and character necessary to achieve in life.

NYCLC & 20/20 VISION FOR SCHOOLS ACTION ITEMS

Building on the Findings and Recommendations of the Forum Participants, the NYCLC 20/20 staff commit to implement the following action items:

1.  Mail this Summary Report to the 120 Forum Participants for review, comment and commitment. The Summary Report also will be placed online for access by interested stakeholders.

2.  Request from each Forum Participant, and any additional potential stakeholders, commitments regarding their involvement in the ongoing reform conversation, unique adoption opportunities, and any collaborative strategies that may ensue.

3.  Identify existing education reform groups and NYC Department of Education officials with whom to nurture collaborative, trusting relationships and ongoing partnership.

4.  Develop an Advisory Committee for 20/20 Vision for Schools from among the Forum Participants and qualified nominees. The Advisory Committee shall consist of between twelve and twenty civic, education, business, clergy, community, and student leaders who will speak into the further development and expansion of 20/20. Each Advisory Committee Member shall agree to the terms as listed here below:

A. Work with NYCLC and 20/20 staff to further refine 20/20′s mission, values, vision, and strategy, and establish a comprehensive reform agenda that reflects the Findings and Recommendations of the Leadership Conversation in a process to be determined by the Advisory Committee;

B. Establish rigorous evaluation criteria, impact metrics, and transparency safeguards to insure accountability.

C. Thereafter, meet collectively at least once a year by telephone conference or at a location determined by NYCLC, and shall provide non-binding guidance except as otherwise agreed;

D. Be available for individual or group consultations that may be periodically scheduled throughout the year;

E. Contribute annual financial gifts and in-kind contributions, and actively fundraise on behalf of the NYCLC and 20/20, at levels to be determined by the Advisory Committee; and

F. Serve renewable two-year terms.

5. Develop funding streams to build the administrative and programmatic infrastructure for 20/20.

6. Recruit, register, and train grassroots partners to begin adopting schools through 20/20. Develop a coherent and decentralized recruitment and training schedule for 2009 that provides reliable onramps for individuals and institutions alike to plug into the movement.

7. Leverage internet technology and media relationships to foster awareness of the issue, collaboration, fund development and social networking amongst stakeholders.

A. Develop an interactive website to facilitate ongoing communication amongst stakeholders.

B. Engage media partners and nurture additional media relationships to tell the stories (both the urgent appeal and successes) of education reform as implemented according to the Actionable Plan.

C. Produce promotional materials for communications purposes, as needed.

FORUM PARTICIPANTS’ ACTION ITEMS

In order for NYCLC and 20/20 to complete the above action items, we request all Forum Participants to consider which of the following Action Items you can help implement:

1. Identify and enlist education reform groups and NYC Department of Education officials with whom to nurture collaborative, trusting relationships and ongoing partnership.

2. Create a master plan for scalable engagement and measurable results, based upon the findings and recommendations of the Leadership Conversation.

3. Develop funding streams to build the administrative and programmatic infrastructure for 20/20.

4. Develop an interactive website to facilitate ongoing communication amongst stakeholders.

5. Build media relationships to tell the stories (both the urgent appeal and successes) of education reform as we implement the actionable plan.

6. Produce promotional materials for communications purposes, as needed.

7. Nominate themself to join the Advisory Committee for 20/20 Vision for Schools.

8. Provide names of candidates to serve as potential Advisory Committee members.

9. Indicate any additional ways they are willing to contribute to the development and expansion of 20/20.

To indicate your willingness to help implement any of the above Action Items, please complete the Commitment Form online here.

CONCLUSION

New York City Education Chancellor Joel Klein says public schools are broken in America because somewhere education became less about children and more about adults. We have exchanged the selflessness of investing in students for the students’ sake alone for turf wars and power plays, partisanship and self-interest.

At the Forum, Principal Edward Tom of Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics offered an impassioned plea to once again “put children first” in the struggle to overcome entrenched educational injustices.

To that end, the NYCLC and 20/20 urge multi-sector leaders to open sourceIbid. a collaborative effort to transform education in America. If education is first and foremost about children, education reform should not be a proprietary pursuit. Since the problems are too vast for one person, interest group, or community to overcome on its own, open sourcing ideas, best practices, funding solutions, evaluation methodologies, and reform strategies represents the best way to engage the best minds in transforming public education in this country. If it’s “about the kids,” we need to model how to share.

What’s incredible to me about this plan is that it’s based on “Open Source” theory and practice. Open source theory says basically that the best ideas often lay outside of your organizational boundaries. It calls for a radical kind of outsourcing that fuels creative energies by inviting a broad palette of collaborators to paint their own colors into a project. Take WordPress (WP) as an example-the content management system under-girding this website. WP is a classic open-source phenomenon. What WP has done is make their code fully accessible…to anyone. That means ingenious contributions are welcome from 15 year-olds or 55 year-olds who can design plug-ins that work effectively. Similarly, here’s what the New York team has proposed about developing strategies to overhaul public education:

Since the problems are too vast for one person, interest group, or community to overcome on its own, open sourcing ideas, best practices, funding solutions, evaluation methodologies, and reform strategies represents the best way to engage the best minds in transforming public education in this country. If it’s “about the kids,” we need to model how to share.

Brilliant. Rather than posturing for position in the political games that often drive education reform (or fail to drive it, as the case may be), this movement seeks to open source their process and radically model sharing to kids by sharing with one another. They, in turn, hope to be a model the whole country can follow.

There’s more than a little we can learn from this in youth ministry. After all, it’s a group of urban youth workers who got together and started this movement in New York City. What about your town? What about my neighborhood? How can we partner to advocate for the issues most pressing for kids around us? And what can we do to model open-sourcing in our ministries, sharing ideas and strategies with other youth workers who are not our competitors, but our partners in Kingdom work? If the best ideas really could be “out there”, why do we so stubbornly continually look “in here” for the answers-whatever the most pressing questions may be in our context?

I don’t have this figured out, but I’m inspired by what our friend in New York is doing. And I’m stirred to get better at what I continually ask my own young children to do: share.

TABLE FINDINGS & RECOMMENDATIONS

The heart of the Forum consisted of thirteen table discussions designed to surface collaborative strategies for education transformation. Facilitated by Frances Hesselbein, Chairman and Founding President of the Leader-to-Leader Institute (formerly the Peter Drucker Foundation), the discussions focused on four key issues: collaboration, transcendent strategies, leadership and synergies. Table Moderators helped each group arrive at three findings and three recommendations for each topic.

The New York City Leadership Center has sifted through the written notes of all thirteen Tables, with the similar goal of synthesizing common themes into findings and recommendations. The consensus that emerged is reported in this section, and provides the basis for the next section’s proposed actionable plan. A complete transcription of the notes obtained from each of the 13 tables can be found in Appendix 7.

Issue I: Collaboration

Is collaboration across sectors (business, education, non-profit, government, religious, students, and families) for comprehensive education reform even possible? If so, how so? What challenges inhibit collaboration and how can they be overcome?

A. Findings

1. Collaboration is possible if cross-sector stakeholders commit to intentional communication, trust building, resource sharing, and coordination of efforts, facilitated by catalytic and creative leaders who have mutually agreed and are empowered by the stakeholders to shepherd the process on their collective behalf.
2. Challenges include: defining the issues or mission too narrowly; using exclusive language that fractures communities; either-or engagement paradigms that perpetuate mistrust; and traditional “every organization and agenda for itself” approaches.
3. Collaboration begins as each stakeholder raises awareness of the crisis within their respective spheres of influence and urges win-win approaches where each sector, and stakeholder, invests from its strengths to aid the others’ weaknesses.

B. Recommendations

1. Craft a common communications platform that nurtures trust among stakeholders, dispels suspicions, and open sources* education reform by: sharing ideas and access to resources and relationships; identifying and innovating best practices; decentralizing program controls to grassroots partners; and coordinating efforts around a shared mission and common objectives.

   * [Footnote] The technological concept of “open sourcing” innovation is illustrative as we tackle uniquely 21st century challenges to educating our children.

   In the early 1990s, upstart computer programmers discovered that the best way to solve common problems with the then-emerging Internet technology was to collaborate with others who shared an interest, but lacked the necessary time and resources to solve the problems on their own. “Open source” refers to their practice of allowing anyone, including potential competitors, to view and even improve upon source code – the underlying instructions that make computer software work – by making the code publicly available online, and permitting potential users to download the software for free. This radical departure from business-as-usual fueled the development of the World Wide Web, and its innovations empowered the information age in which we now live.

   On the Internet platform it helped create, open source methodology has evolved beyond just programming practices to social networking, content creation, media production, political campaigning, publishing, and even commerce. Why not education as well?

2. Identify grassroots community institutions and influencers such as faith congregations, businesses, and non-profits to educate, equip and mobilize individuals to act both personally and collectively for education reform; empower their success by supplying research, best practices, training, and scalable initiatives that can be decentralized, owned and implemented at the local level.
3. Inject accountability into reform by emphasizing shared ownership, including responsibility for the problems and opportunities to innovate solutions; protect accountability by rejecting old-style blame shifting and focusing instead on rigorous standards, feedback, and evaluation.

Issue 2: Transcendent Strategies

Do any specific educational issues transcend regional, demographic, and religious differences around which we can mobilize? Which one(s)? How should we mobilize, and to what end(s)?

A. Findings

1. Chronic underperformance metrics nationwide (such as literacy, drop-out rates, college admission and retention, and job readiness), especially in urban and rural communities, suggest widespread institutional and individual failures.
2. Inequitable distribution and management of resources – financial, personnel, and otherwise – have contributed to de facto educational apartheid, where the place of one’s home often dictates – unjustly – the quality of education one will receive.
3. A strategy that integrates the need for systemic reform with the need for character education that empowers personal responsibility (of students, teachers, parents, administrators, etc), and supportive services that compensate for gaps in family and social assistance, must be pursued in a complementary way.

B. Recommendations

1. Appoint a delegation of stakeholders who would craft a comprehensive mission, vision, values, and agenda for an education reform movement that responds to educational injustices and collaborative opportunities for meaningful change.
2. Overcome resource constraints by developing a web of partner supports that identifies existing (and nurtures new) womb through college interventions and services both regionally and at the grassroots level.
3. Build infrastructure for ongoing networking and coordination of efforts, resources, and communication that leverages technology for exponential reach.

Issue 3: Leadership

What is the role of leadership in addressing the educational crisis? What kind of leadership is required (top-down, bottom-up, indigenous, expert, both/and, other)? How do we discover, develop, and deploy students themselves to provide meaningful leadership in both conceiving and implementing solutions to entrenched problems?

A. Findings

1. Leadership is the linchpin for comprehensive education reform and requires a compelling vision of the future; the courage to pioneer new approaches to both collaboration and education; the determination not to settle for anything short of long-term transformation; the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances; and a willingness to be accountable for results.
2. Collaborative leadership must be ethnically, economically, gender, and sector diverse, and reflect all of the above leadership styles, without the arrogance that suggests one style, demographic, or sector is inherently more important or valuable than the others in the process.
3. Empowering effective student leadership requires changing our paradigm of students from customer (adults do “for” them by teaching, parenting, etc.) to owner (investing in their own lives, communities, and futures by cultivating their own education); and releasing real authority to students – along with corresponding mentorship and supervision – both to make decisions for themselves and their schools and to deal with the consequences thereof, whether good, bad, or messy.

B. Recommendations

1. Define stakeholder roles clearly (while preserving flexibility for adjusting as necessary), even as stakeholders empower a leadership team to coordinate this effort, and align their personal and institutional agendas with that team.
2. Co-create among the diverse groups of leaders by demonstrating a willingness to meet the “other” on their terms, in their space, according to their language and customs. Model student leadership development by retaining the attitude of an ever-learning servant leader.
3. Identify existing and potential student leaders, whether formally through student groups and achievement records, or informally through personal observation and peer or teacher recommendations; nurture student leadership development inside or outside schools through mentoring, leadership clubs, and formal training; and create platforms for them to be heard and to actually lead.

Issue 4: Synergies

What will you bring (individually and organizationally) to an ongoing engagement strategy? How can NYCLC help facilitate your continuing participation both locally and nationally? What other institutions and individuals need to be engaged in this dialogue?

A. Findings

1. The capacity exists for the 120 participating executives at the Forum to contribute significantly to education reform in New York City and beyond, both individually and on behalf of their organizations. Expanding the circle to include others not already at the table only enhances the capacity for systemic and lasting change.
2. Mobilizing existing networks and spheres of influence (employees, parishioners, friends, etc) requires commitments by each participant to educate themselves on the issues (using resources provided by NYCLC, partners, and other interested parties), pledge personal and/or institutional support, and champion the cause whenever and wherever possible.
3. The technological and media capacity exists to open sourceIbid. education reform so that every stakeholder can learn from the others’ successes and challenges; innovate and share solutions; and leverage scalable impacts as a result.

B. Recommendations

1. Process the data from the Forum thoroughly and timely; distribute it freely to as wide an audience as possible; and coordinate actionable next steps for existing and future participating stakeholders.
2. Identify from within the current participants names, contact information, and affiliations of others who need to engage the conversation; and create onramps for them to catch-up quickly and contribute meaningfully.
3. Invite specific contributions from participating and future stakeholders.

Here’s an excerpt:

If the moral test of a society is how it treats its children, America has failed the same test year after year after year for decades, specifically its failure to educate the urban poor despite promising equal access to quality education for all.

In his greetings to Forum participants, Newark Mayor Cory Booker described this shortcoming as, “the only poverty in this world that challenges us.” That poverty, he said, is “not material poverty, but a poverty of faith, a poverty of imagination, a poverty of love and compassion, a poverty of action.” …

In return for decades of unfulfilled promises, we have reaped generations of unfulfilled promise. Despite spending more money per capita for education than any other country in the industrialized world, the United States ranks eighteenth in the world in graduation rates, and first in incarceration. U.S. policymakers prepare for the worst by allocating prison construction budgets based on fourth grade reading scores.

When the average high school graduate from a low-income urban community reads at an eighth grade level; when fewer than 30% of urban high school students actually graduate in some American cities; when New York City, the nation’s model urban school district, graduated only 44% of eligible students on-time in 2008, the same year that it received the country’s highest prize for education reform; it feels a little too late to exclaim, “It’s time for change!”

… Together, they concluded that America’s crisis in schools is first and foremost a crisis in leadership. A systematic refusal to accept accountability for chronic underperformance has permitted decades of institutional failure, which has placed current and future generations at risk of social unrest and decay. Comprehensive reform requires multi-sector, collaborative strategies led by men and women willing to commit, as Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone says, “to fix this problem … to put politics aside and do what’s right for America’s children.”

… To that end, the NYCLC and 20/20 urge multi-sector leaders to open source a collaborative effort to transform education in America. If education is first and foremost about children, education reform should not be a proprietary pursuit. Since the problems are too vast for one person, interest group, or community to overcome on its own, open sourcing ideas, best practices, funding solutions, evaluation methodologies, and reform strategies represents the best way to engage the best minds in transforming public education in this country. If it’s “about the kids,” we need to model how to share.

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