Say Yes is a landmark collaboration that brings the Syracuse City School District, Syracuse University, Say Yes to Education, Inc., the Syracuse Teachers’ Association, the Syracuse Association of Administrators and Supervisors, the City of Syracuse, Onondaga County, the American Institutes for Research, and a diverse group of Syracuse area corporate, non-profit, and philanthropic organizations together to organize people, time, money and resources to support city students.

Syracuse is the first community in the United States committed to ensuring that all public school students can afford and succeed in college. Other cities have Say Yes chapters, including Philadelphia, Hartford, Conn., Cambridge, Mass. and New York City, but Syracuse is the first city to implement the Say Yes program district wide. Students who attend 10th, 11th and 12th grade and graduate from a Syracuse City School District high school are eligible for free college tuition at more than 100 Say Yes compact colleges in New York state.

The Project’s “non-negotiables” and Theory of Change:

We at 20/20 are especially pleased with Say YES’ commitment to outcome transparency and will be monitoring their progress with great anticipation.

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.

The likelihood that a ninth-grader in one of the nation’s biggest cities will clutch a diploma four years later amounts to a coin toss — not much better than a 50-50 chance, new research finds.

Cross into the suburbs, and the odds improve dramatically.

The findings, which are being released today, look closely for the first time at the gap in high school graduation rates between public schools in the 50 biggest cities and the suburbs that surround them. Among the alarming disparities: In 12 cities, the gap exceeds 25 percentage points. Of those cities, nine are in the Northeast or Midwest.

Source: “‘Crisis’ graduation gap found between cities, suburbs,” USA Today (8/1/2008)

Still another reason why urban churches need 20/20 Vision for our schools.

“Fourteen urban school districts have on-time graduation rates lower than 50%; they include Detroit, Baltimore, New York, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Denver and Houston. …

“Among the nation’s 50 largest districts … three graduate fewer than 40%: Detroit (21.7%), Baltimore (38.5%) and New York City (38.9%). …

“52% of blacks graduate, and 57% of Hispanics. …

“The study, which uses 2002 and 2003 data, the most current available, finds that public schools graduate 69.6% of an estimated 4 million eligible students each spring, meaning about 1.2 million students likely won’t graduate this year. That means about 7,000 students drop out per school day, Swanson says.”

Source: “Big-city schools struggle with graduation rates,” USA Today (6/20/2006)

+ 32% of black males graduated from NYC’s high schools on schedule in 2006
+ 57% of white males graduated on time
+ Both percentages are unacceptable, but the discrepancy is yet another example of educational inequities
+ New York City public schools ranked 54th out of 63 of the nation’s largest school districts surveyed in a new national report, “Given Half A Chance: The 50-State Report on Public Education and Black Males” by the Massachusetts-based Schott Foundation for Public Education.

Article.

Mayor Bloomberg and NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced the results of the largest ever school satisfaction survey yesterday. More than 800,000 stakeholders, including students, parents, and teachers responded, a remarkable achievement. As the Dept. of Education noted, 800,000 people represents 1 in 10 New Yorkers, and over 200,000 more people than the entire populations of Boston, Washington DC, and Denver. But City Hall praised the survey results as evidence of dramatic improvements citywide, and exposes itself to criticism as a result.

Most misleading is the bold, italicized headline: “More than 90 Percent of Parents Satisfied with the Quality of Education their Children Received.” Deeper into the announcement, that number is significantly qualified, as only 40% of the eligible parents actually completed the survey. Ninety percent of the 40% who completed the survey is a lot less than 90% of parents overall.

I’m by no means a qualified statistician, but my introductory stats class taught that a scientifically selected random sampling would produce more reliable results than voluntary returns from every parent, student and teacher. Without reviewing the actual survey, it’s a fairly safe assumption that the response rates were significantly higher in well performing schools, where parents, students, and teachers have greater incentives to comply with school requests, than in chronically underperforming schools.

In fairness, school performance metrics have trended upwards the past few years — so much so that the NYC DOE received the Broad Prize for improvement last year.

Critics say the metrics have improved, at least in part, because of funny math that has fundamentally changed what the metrics measure and ignore entire student populations in some cases. For example, literacy metrics used to include ESL (English as Second Language) students’ test results, and now they don’t. Removing their scores artificially inflates the numbers; as a result touting any “improvements” by comparing those data sets is fundamentally misleading.

Another example: In the wake of No Child Left Behind, when schools were threatened with diminished funding after successive years of underperformance, the city began restructuring suspect schools. Specifically, they would take a building that housed a threatened school, “close” the poor performing school and reopen multiple smaller schools within the same building. Often these “new” schools had fundamentally the same students, teachers, and administration, plus an additional layer of bureaucracy to manage the new schools. But because they were technically new schools, their funding was safe as they had no history against which to hold them accountable.

All that said, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein deserve credit for staking much of the legacy of his administration on the success, or lack thereof, of their education reform initiatives. The results remain mixed, but efforts to give voice to stakeholders — like this survey, flawed though it may have been — give us reason for hope.

20/20 Vision anyone?