There's a lot that's promising and new about Strive. To name just a few elements: First, from a partnerships standpoint, universities have taken the lead in new ways. Strive emerged, six years ago, out of conversations among more than 200 education and nonprofit and community leaders. Who convened them? Then-University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher. It's refreshing to witness the active role of local universities not just in supporting these initiatives, but finding ways to measure their own success in relation to K-12 work. Second, from a policy standpoint, there is a long-overdue focus on early childhood education--often the forgotten stepchild of ed funding. Third, from a jurisdictional standpoint, Strive is not just Cincinnati: it also involves the smaller Kentucky cities of Newport and Covington, just across the Ohio River. And the efforts don't just comprise public schools--multiple parochial schools are actively included in the partnership.
The report covers a lot of the same ground dealt with elsewhere, but here are some nuggets I haven't seen in other reports:
- Strive's shared accountability is both in line with the edzeitgeist in its focus on data, and cuts against it by moving the focus beyond individual teachers or schools
- The Feds' Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which echoes Strive and is centered on schooling, nevertheless requires that the lead partners of each PNI be a nonprofit or institution of higher education: this "serves to broaden the range of desired outcomes beyond the purely academic to include the developmental needs of student"
- Sharing data is really, really hard--many partners at Strive "often collect, store, and analyze data in incompatible and disconnected way"; but they're working on improving the scene
The whole report is short, to the point, and free, so it's worth a complete look.
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