Giving Compass' Take:

• In nine different cities across the United States, various community-led educational initiatives part of 'By All Means Cities' implement programs that are strengthening opportunities for youth engagement, development and high quality strategic learning.

• How can other cities that are not included in the initiative develop the same goals and similar programs? Can philanthropists help expand these efforts?

• Read about why it is important to invest in youth leadership.

For too long, our answer to the problems of poverty, inequality, diminishing social mobility, and unfair access to learning opportunities has been “the schools will fix it.” However, U.S. public schools, even after a quarter-century of well-intentioned, vigorous, and expensive school reform, have been unable to fix these problems or close the achievement gaps that are symptoms of them.

Based on that evidence, we need to step back and rewrite the problem statement that education reform was designed to address. A new statement might acknowledge poverty and inequity as directly implicated in failures by schools and individuals to achieve success for students.

Taking this into account means reform needs a new theory of action: If we hope to prepare all students to succeed in college and careers, our communities will have to provide all children with the supports and services (comparable to what affluent children take for granted) needed to guarantee that they can come to continuously improving schools each and every day ready to learn.

In our work with Harvard’s By All Means cities, visionary mayors, superintendents, and children’s advocates in and outside of government have been joining together in powerful “children’s cabinets” to set goals for child and youth development, to determine strategies, to jointly build new systems of support and opportunity, and to hold themselves accountable for real progress.

Here’s what some of this work looks like:

  • In Salem, Massachusetts, every child from kindergarten through grade 8 has an individual success plan, which maps strategies inside and outside of school, customized to the needs of the particular student.
  • In Providence, 850 students received high-quality summer learning opportunities in 2017, with consistent program elements including requirements for the number of weeks of programming and data-sharing with the district.

Read the full article about community led education initiatives by Paul Reville at The 74