Raise DC tries to bring coherence to education chaos

DC is up to its ears in nonprofits and governmental agencies focusing on children and youth, some of them duplicating efforts and others even working at cross-purposes. A new initiative called Raise DC is trying to bring some order to this chaos, and to produce better results.

The seed for Raise DC was planted in 2011, when a group of community leaders came to Mayor Vincent Gray with the idea of creating a public-private partnership that would focus on ages zero to 24.

The approach is based on a model pioneered by a group called Strive, which started in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky in 2006 and now has a network of seven fully launched “Cradle-to-Career Communities” across the United States. Strive has been able to tout some promising results in the Cincinnati area: a 9% rise in kindergarten readiness, an 11% increase in high school graduation rates, and a 10% increase in college readiness.

Can the same thing happen in DC? The one thing that can be said with confidence at this point is that it’s too soon to tell. For the past year, the partnership has been engaged in collecting data in order to come up with some baseline statistics and goals for improvement, collected in a Baseline Report Card issued last month. While that may not sound like much, working from a shared set of data is a cornerstone of the Strive model, also known as “collective impact.”

Just getting your hands on this kind of data has been a major challenge in the past, according to participants at a recent panel discussion on Raise DC aimed at the philanthropic community. In fact, much of it is still unavailable.

One of Raise DC’s five goals is to increase the percentage of children who enter kindergarten ready to learn, but there’s still no accepted measure of kindergarten readiness in the District and hence no baseline to work with. And a study of which high school students are dropping out and why, conducted by the Parthenon Group, has just begun and won’t yield results for a year. Nevertheless, said Lucretia Murphy, Executive Director of the See Forever Foundation and Co-Chair of Raise DC’s Leadership Council, the group felt it was important to go ahead despite gaps in the data.

The idea behind Raise DC and similar endeavors is that the traditional approach to philanthropy and social change, which has individual nonprofits seeking funding for particular projects, doesn’t work when it comes to complex issues like education. A terrific after-school program, for example, may not make much difference in a child’s life if other problems such as schooling and health aren’t addressed as well. And a child who ages out of the program may later fall through the cracks.

As described in an influential 2011 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the collective impact approach tries to bring together nonprofits, government, philanthropists, and business to address the entire educational continuum. These groups agree on a common agenda and constantly share information and data as they work toward their goals.

The core of Raise DC are five “Change Networks,” each one attached to a particular goal. In addition to kindergarten readiness (“Every child is prepared for school”), Raise DC’s goals are:

1. Every child succeeds in school
2. Every youth who is not in school reconnects to education, training, or employment opportunities
3. Every youth attains a postsecondary credential
4. Every youth is prepared for a career

But as one member of the audience at the panel discussion pointed out, it’s not clear who is in the Change Networks. There’s no publicly-available list of members, although Jennifer Leonard, Interim Deputy Mayor for Education and the other Co-Chair of the Leadership Council, promised one would be forthcoming. And up till now, at least, funders haven’t been included in the Change Networks, although they may be in the future. Update, March 25: The list is now online.

A specter hovering over the panel discussion was that of the DC Education Compact, an organization formed in 2004 by Mayor Anthony Williams and shut down in 2009 after the election of Adrian Fenty. In addition to acting as a conduit for private funds to DCPS (a function that has since been assumed by the DC Public Education Fund), the DCEC was supposed to coordinate private and public efforts around “hubs” like college success and early education. The similarity to Raise DC was obvious to some participants, who wanted to know why this effort would succeed where DCEC failed.

One answer was that Raise DC will have an “anchor institution” designed to be independent of any governmental administration, most likely the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region (its board has yet to approve the plan). Although Raise DC will have a dedicated staff member in the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education, the anchor institution is where the organization will “live.” The idea seemed to be that while politicians (and their initiatives) may come and go, philanthropists and nonprofits will always be with us.

Still, as Terri Lee Freeman, President of the Community Foundation, pointed out, even having an anchor institution is no guarantee of success. “The community has to own this,” she said. “If we don’t have their support, this will fall apart.” While the collective impact approach doesn’t require that all participating organizations move in lock-step, it does depend on the willingness of nonprofits and funders to work together and sometimes subordinate their own interests to the common good.

Will DC’s welter of nonprofits and foundations buy into the idea? Let’s hope so. There’s a lot of heart out there, but what we really need is a brain that can make sure we’re not stepping all over ourselves.