Educational Impact Strategy

Through a partnership of local educational institutions – including public, private, charter, and alternative – best-practices will be identified to successfully educate kids from low-income, minority communities to apply in schools serving the Zone. Resources will be developed to institute these practices to scale to drastically improve educational outcomes in the Zone.

The Guarantee: Identify and support effective and innovative strategies for educational programs, schools, and classrooms, to promote high achievement and close the achievement gap for all students in the Zone. The overarching objective is that all students graduate from High School prepared for college.

Key Leadership: Sondra Samuels (sondra@citypeace.org) & Anne Long (along@pcyc-mpls.org) are Education Team leaders; Dr. Betty Webb (betty.webb@comcast.net) is serving as a consultant to this Coordination Team process. Dr. Betty Webb is a Senior Consultant with the Panasonic Foundation and retired educator who retired from Minneapolis Public Schools after 30 years of service. She is consultant to many school districts nationwide will provide guidance and direction for the educational initiatives.

STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

Capacity Funding: We will fund education schools involved with NAZ that are teaching students in the Zone to implement innovative education strategies to break the achievement gap. We hope to raise funding in 2010 to support several critical strategies that will be agreed up by the Education Team in the Zone. Promising practices that address problems of achievement will be identified, implemented, and studied for producing positive results for all schools serving kids in the Zone. The cross-functional education team with representation from Minneapolis Public Schools, Charter and Alternative School-based Leaders, MN Dept. of Education, Univ. of MN, the Center for School Change, community agencies, parents, students, business leaders, and city/county staff, will manage the development and implementation of the proposal’s Theory of Action components.

Long-term Project Goal: To increase the number of high performing schools (thus more high performing students) serving a designated geographic zone in North Minneapolis. The Zone was identified because of its over-abundance of under-performing schools, and because of the high level of risk factors found in this geographic zone.

Theory of action: Schools have a difficult job of intentionally engaging and managing a complex set of relationships that impact the performance of adults, which impacts the performance of students, and which ultimately results in low performance of schools. To help low-performing schools accelerate their performance, we are pursuing a place-based strategy that focuses
on the Instructional Core. The intent of the educational impact team is to develop and test strategies to implement the Instructional Core (the interaction between students, teachers, and rigorous content researched by a team of educators from Harvard University) and to publicize a portfolio of promising options for other school personnel to adopt to accelerate student/school performance in their settings.

Team Members

Plymouth Youth Christian Center (PCYC)
LDA
North High School
Pillsbury United Communities
City of Minneapolis
Metropolitan Federation of Alternative Schools
Teach for America
Minneapolis Public Schools
Seed Academy/Harvest Preparatory School
Blake School
MN Dept. of Education
Ascension School
The Minneapolis Foundation
University of Minnesota, Center for School Change
KIPP Stand Academy
Nellie Stone Johnson
The Village
PEACE Foundation
University of Minnesota, Coordinator Minnesota Early Learning Foundation
Wise Charter School