E3 Alliance presents regional education plan

E3 Alliance presents regional education plan

Written by Tiffany Young Friday, 01 August 2008

At the end of the school year, E3 Alliance presented The Blueprint for Educational Change, a comprehensive regional plan based on two years of research and input from more than 1,000 community members.

It is the first of its kind for Central Texas. According to E3 Alliance, The Blueprint for Educational Change is Central Texas’ commitment to building the most successful educational pipeline in the country by setting priorities and detailing strategies so all Central Texas children start school ready to learn, have an equal opportunity to reach their academic potential and are fully prepared upon graduation for college, career and lifelong success.

“We are doing something that’s never been done in Central Texas, and we should be proud of that,” state Sen. Kirk Watson said at the presentation. “Our schools are getting better, but incremental change is not enough. We need systemic change. We all have a responsibility to commit ourselves to the future of our children.”

More than 60 Central Texas business leaders are participating in The Blueprint for Educational Change, along with Austin, Round Rock, Leander and Pflugerville school districts, seven colleges and numerous nonprofit organizations.

E3 Alliance Executive Director Susan Dawson said while there are many districts working toward similar goals, the districts keep their identities through their elected school board officials. Since participation is free for the districts, E3 Alliance is still working to bring on more districts and add private schools.

“It is critically important that we all work toward the success of our students,” said Dr. Jesus Chavez, superintendent of Round Rock Independent School District, in his opening remarks at The Blueprint presentation. “Graduates are made, not born. This community-wide effort embodies the promise that all Central Texas students start school ready to learn.”

E3 Alliance

E3 Alliance, which stands for Education Equals Economics, was created in 2006 to develop a regional plan to help each child in Central Texas become a qualified employee and citizen.

Dawson left the private sector as an engineer and technology entrepreneur to run the organization. According to her, the idea came from years of conversations among Austin Area Research Organization’s business community.

“We created E3 Alliance to foster systemic change in the Central Texas region to say everything we are doing is sort of incremental around the edges and it’s not going to be enough,” she said. “If we want to build the kind of sustainable economy that we want to see in the future, we have to vastly change the system and the outcomes we see from the system in terms of reaching the potential of every student.”

Background

In January, more than 150 regional leaders gathered at The Blueprint for Change – 2008 Leaders Summit to set educational priorities to drive systemic change over the next decade in Central Texas.

After the summit, dozens of meetings were held with school districts, colleges, organizations and regional experts to gain feedback and share ways to measure progress toward these goals.

Leaders, including Dr. Ed Fuller of the College of Education at the University of Texas, Cathy Doggett of the Region XIII Education Service Center and Dr. Susan Millea of Children’s Optimal Health, then reviewed research from E3 Alliance and feedback from the community and identified and prioritized four strategic goals as the basis for The Blueprint for Educational Change.

“It is unprecedented,” Dawson said. “It is regional in scope. No region in the state of Texas has ever had a blueprint for change. Student performance has gotten better, but population is changing. We simply cannot afford anyone not to reach their full potential. We cannot afford for anyone to drop out. It’s a work in progress — it’s not finished. The responsibility belongs to Central Texas, not any one district.”

Next steps

While much of the work to date on The Blueprint sounds theoretical, Dawson said they are now in a transition stage from planning and prioritizing to making it happen.

According to Dawson, the launch brought about two things: It brought 150 leaders and community members together to say these are the priorities we are going to base our work around, and it launched the beginning of the public campaign “Graduates Are Made Not Born.”

Task forces that include field experts are meeting to help develop broader community groups.

According to Dawson, E3 Alliance is in the process of rolling out community champion teams, consisting of business and community leaders from across the region to help drive the four priorities in The Blueprint to answer these questions: how do we baseline these indicators; how do we set appropriate targets for the districts, schools, colleges or community institutions; how do we report back to the community on those goals; and how do we move forward the action strategies associated with them?

“These champion teams are the structure that we’re putting together to really execute and put into action The Blueprint,” Dawson said.

Dawson pointed out that some action strategies are more tangible and easily measured than others. For instance, goal one is to create, from many existing sources, a checklist for parents to understand what their kids should know at different ages. The champion teams hope to develop a list that would help answer questions, such as what should I be doing with my 2 year old and what should I expect my 3 year old to know?

Others are less tangible, such as goal number four, which has to do with community ownership for student success — a goal harder to define and measure.

Visit www.theblueprintforeducationalchange.org to find out more about The Blueprint or to participate in this regional undertaking. The website not only tells about the goals and action strategies, but allows users to indicate what priorities they are interested in and how they would like to be involved.

The Blueprint for Educational Change goals

Goal 1: The Blueprint for Educational Change has set the objective that by 2015, 70 percent of children enter kindergarten “school ready” and by 2020, 95 percent enter kindergarten school ready.

Now: Forty percent of Central Texas kindergarteners have up to an 18-month delay in skills for their age, according to data by United Way’s Success by 6 program that aims to make sure students enter the first grade prepared.

Goal 2: To eliminate achievement gaps for all students while improving overall performance, The Blueprint objective is to have all eighth graders across all subpopulations achieve 20 percent higher outcomes on state assessments in meeting standard and commended performance by 2015.

Now: English Language Learners and low-income students, the students with the highest population growth, traditionally have the lowest performance rates in the region.

Goal 3: Objectives for the third goal are that by 2010, Central Texas graduation rates hit 95 percent or more and by 2015, students who are college-and-career ready have doubled.

Now: According to E3 Alliance’s “The Problem with Too Many Names: Defining and Identifying Central Texas Dropouts 2008,” high school dropouts cost Central Texas a minimum of $425 million in increased social services and lost income each year.

“Our workplace has changed,” Dr. Stephen B. Kinslow, president/CEO of Austin Community College, said at The Blueprint presentation. “Over 90 percent of our jobs now require more than a high school degree, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. To have a world-class economy, we must have college-ready graduates. To make a graduate it takes being ready for college and a career.”

Despite the U.S. Census Bureau’s ranking Austin fifth among the most educated cities in the United States, only about 43 percent of the region’s high school graduates are considered “college ready” based on Central Texas TAKS, SAT and ACT scores.

“Even with all the great things we are doing, too many students struggle in math and science, and too many of them never get their diploma,” Chavez said. “For the region to succeed, all of our students need to reach their highest potential.”

Goal 4: The last goal is to ensure Central Texas, as a community, prepares children to succeed.

Now: “We’re not pointing at each independent school district and saying, ‘They are the solution.’ They are only a percentage of the solution,” said David Balch, president of United Way Capital Area.

United Way Capital Area is aligning many of its programs with The Blueprint for Educational Change. The organization has especially been focused on education, since an assessment by the University of Texas showed the No. 1 thing people were worried about was disparity in education.