National education think tank lauds Strive cradle to career efforts

Respected D.C.-based education think-tank, Education Sector, praised the cradle to career efforts of the Strive Partnership in a report released Tuesday on shared accountability titled "Striving for Success: Shared Accountability and School Improvement."

Against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind Act, which ushered in a new era of accountability in education, the report posed the questions: What if instead of putting the entire achievement burden on schools, what would it look like to hold a whole community responsible for long-range student outcomes? How can accountability for youth development, health, and safety - as well as for academic achievement - be shared by non-profits, public non-school agencies, foundations, cities, corporations, and others?

In the report, authors Kelly Bathgate, Richard Lee Colvin, and Elena Silva look at communities that are working to create these shared accountability systems. In particular, the authors highlight the work of the Strive Partnership, a coalition of partners founded five years ago in Cincinnati, Covington and Newport.

The report takes an in-depth look at where shared accountability works, and how other communities can use this approach to help all students succeed.

The authors note that no one should underestimate the work involved in making such partnerships succeed. "Making shared accountability more than notional poses technical, operational, political, and financial challenges," the authors write. "Such systems require engaging multiple players in decisions about priorities, resource allocation, performance measures, responsibilities, and consequences for participating organizations if performance lags."

According to Jeff Edmondson, founding Strive president and Managing Director of the newly formed national Strive network, "in education, data has traditionally been used for punitive purposes, not for improvement. It is the relentless focus on data that, more than anything, has been the key to the partnership's success."

The Education Sector report comes on the heels of the Strive Partnership's release of its fourth annual report earlier this month. That report offered an update on the encouraging progress being made to improve student achievement and growth, cradle to career, in the cities of Cincinnati, Covington, and Newport. Of the 34 measures of student achievement on which the partnership is focused, 81 percent are trending in the right direction versus 74 percent last year and 68 percent two years ago, the report said.

Education Sector is an independent think tank that challenges conventional thinking in education policy. The nonprofit, nonpartisan organization is committed to achieving measurable impact in education policy, both by improving existing reform initiatives and by developing new, innovative solutions to the country's most pressing education problems.

Founded in 2006, The Strive Partnership unites common providers around shared goals shared issues, goals, measurements and results, and then actively supports and strengthens strategies that work. The national work was launched in January of 2011 based largely on community requests for assistance in replicating the work. Both are subsidiaries of KnowledgeWorks.