Why underserved students need support

December 23, 2012

Today’s New York Times features a front-page story about a South Texas trio that is academically able, but who face a litany of challenges as they seek to get a college education. It’s a story that is repeated way too often in the United States, where a college education can open the door to the [...]

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Pushing High Achieving, Low Income Students to Competitive Colleges is Critical

December 19, 2012

A new study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University and Christopher Avery of Harvard University highlights how low income students with high academic ability never apply to a single competitive college. We need to be sure that the high achieving, low income students in our high schools are being encouraged to apply to competitive colleges. [...]

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Cradle to Career approach as a competitive advantage

December 11, 2012

Sometime during the next few weeks, the U.S. Department of Education is expected to announce 15 to 25 winning applications for a federal Race to the Top-District. Winners will be awarded close to $400 million “to support locally developed plans to personalize and deepen student learning, directly improve student achievement and educator effectiveness, close achievement [...]

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Head Start Report Recommendations Aligned with Cradle to Career Collective Impact

December 5, 2012

The Advisory Committee on Head Start Research and Evaluation, established two years ago, recently released an outstanding final report containing recommendations for the future of the federal Head Start and Early Head Start programs.  U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius lays out 3 broad recommendations: a data-driven focus on school readiness and [...]

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Using data to help youth overcome tough obstacles

November 23, 2012

Earlier this month, Strive Network’s Jennifer Blatz discussed how President Obama was able to use big data to drill down deep into voter habits and tendencies. That strategy helped Obama win a second term in the White House. In the president’s hometown of Chicago, New York Times reporter Erica Goode writes a compelling piece about [...]

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Dayton’s Learn to Earn plays key role in work force development

November 23, 2012

Dr. Thomas Lasley, director of Dayton’s Learn to Earn cradle to career initiative, has long been a champion of early college high schools because he has seen the difference they have made in the lives of kids in Ohio. These schools report an average graduation rate of more than 91%. In addition, more than one [...]

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What If We Invested As Much Analysis In Our Kids As We Do Our Stocks?

November 19, 2012

Jeff Edmondson, Managing Director of Strive, is guest blogging for Forbes about how we can make smarter social investments.  In the first post of this series, he shares the idea behind Strive and building the cradle to career civic infrastructure needed to make disciplined decisions about the investment of precious educational resources. To read the full [...]

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The Difference between Collaboration and Collective Impact

November 12, 2012

We recently hit the benchmarks of having over 150 communities reach out to us and 80 communities having completed the Site Readiness Assessment to join the Strive Network.  As we start our discussions with each community on the work of collective impact through building civic infrastructure, I would estimate at least half have declared “we [...]

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Big Data: What can be learned by the 2012 Presidential Election and how it can transform education

November 9, 2012

The way in which the Obama campaign used big data to drive strategy is something that will be studied, published about and emulated in future campaigns. Let’s hope that the next big story is about how big data is being used to transform education. In a recently published report from Brookings, Darrell M. West ponders the learning environment of the future in which technology enables instant feedback and the teacher becomes a “data scientist.” Why must we wait for the future to achieve this? Big data is all around us. It was used to elect a President. Now, let’s put the systems and infrastructure in place so that we can use big data to ensure every student achieves, cradle to career.

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Collective Impact, Discipline and Reverse Engineering

October 26, 2012

Erin Zimmerman, education initiative manager at the United Way of Larimer County, Colorado, eloquently defined “collective impact” in a column in the Business Section of Wednesday’s Fort Collins Gazette: “Collective impact begins with setting an overall community goal and working backward to achieve it,” she wrote. This realistic approach mentioned by Zimmerman is a point [...]

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