PSC-ED-OS
Moderator: Greg Darnieger
03-19-15/12:00 pm CT
Confirmation # 3005743
Page 1
PSC-ED-OS
Moderator: Greg Darnieger
March 19, 2015
12:00 pm CT
Coordinator:Welcome and thank you for standing by.At this time all participants are in a listen only mode until the question and answer session of today’s conference call.
At that point if you would like to ask a question you may press star and then one.This call is being recorded.If you have any objections you may disconnect at this point.Now I will turn the meeting over to your host, Mr. Greg Darnieder.Sir, you may now begin.
Greg Darnieder:Thanks (Zel) and good morning or afternoon to everyone.Appreciate you tuning in to today’s call.You are in for quite a fascinating conversation with friends in Seattle, Washington but before I turn this over to them first of all I want to make an apology for last week in that we inadvertently sent out the wrong number in part of our communication to you so I totally apologize for having done that.
Many of you figured out the correct number and were able to dial back in but we - if you didn’t listen last week I would encourage you to go to the College Access Affinity Group site and the entire presentation and recording, along with the Power Point is posted there.
Last week’s call was focused on commitments that came out of last November’s San Diego State University convening where we had over I believe 350 people and 32 states represented along with many of the national organizations like (ASKA) and NACAC and (INCANN) and such but we heard from people in New York City and New York state and Stuart Chen-Hayes from Lehman University facilitated the call and was joined by Lily Morgan Owen from Goddard Community Center and Gloria Jean President of the New York State School Counselor’s Association.
So again I apologize for that mix-up.The challenge here is that they change these numbers every week and your participant code to dial in and we just picked up the wrong number so anyways before we get going on today I just want to give a little shout out for next week’s call.
It is going to be from our friends in the Gear Up Community around mentoring and their intentional strategies around near peer mentoring so we are actually going to have several presentations around mentoring and the power of it over the next five or six weeks so this will be the first focused on that broad topic.
Thanks to all of you who submitted video to the First Lady’s Competitions around Near Peer and also around FAFSA.The FAFSA deadline was this past Monday and we have been looking at our computers and reviewing the fascinating videos that were submitted to hopefully win the heart of the first lady and come speak at your high school this spring and we have pretty much narrowed down the college that we will be recommending to her once she comes back from the Far East to give a commencement address as well.So thanks for participating in that.
A reminder that May 1st, Friday May 1st is signing day and we are encouraging you to let us know whether you will be doing signing day events.Our hope is to send various secretaries and the first lady out across the country on May 1st.We - as we collected information we realized that a number of these events won’t be happening on that exact day, some will be happening earlier that week.
Some of them are quite large and will be occurring inside of professional sports arenas with 10 or 12 or 15 thousand folks.Some of them - most of them will obviously not be quite that large but there are some pretty significantly large events taking place.
So whether it is an individual high school level or the community level we would love to hear about that and I will make sure we post as we have a little form to send back to us just letting us know when your events will be taking place.
So with that let’s jump in today’s presentation.As you can see from the cover it is the Roadmap Project, a Collective Impact Approach to Building a College Going Culture.
I was actually in Seattle last week, a week ago today, where we had a fascinating statewide conversation around college access and the role of non-profits and school counselors in building cause and career readiness knowledge and next steps and just around data points and such and so we are fortunate to have Mary Jean Ryan who is the Executive Director for Community Center for Education Results Roadmap Project and Kirsten (Avery), College and Career Success Director for the same and who have been putting this work together.
It is quite exciting and what you are going to hear is a number of messages I have gotten back about these calls is can you give us some practical examples of how folks are using data to really inform their programmatic strategies and efforts and you are going to hear a lot about that from Mary Jane and (Avery) this afternoon and during today’s presentation.
You are also going to hear about a community where the opportunities and importance of post second education couldn’t be greater both for the economic vitality of the Seattle region and but by the region that is facing a very low college attendance rate.
The rates - this Roadmap Project is also raised to the top grantee of the Department of Ed and so that adds excitement to my life in terms of how our own investments here are translating into really powerful work at the local level.
So let me be quiet and turn this over to Mary Jean and to Kirsten and ladies it is all yours.
Mary Jean Ryan:Great, thank you Greg, I am here with my colleague (Avery) and my name is Mary Jean Ryan.I want to just say that (Avery) and I are really honored to present some of our work to you all today.We feel like we are among kindred spirits that are trying to do this hard work in our country and what we are going to try and do today and I guess I will just mention the - as we advance wise just so we all stay on the same page if we go to slide - or page three, the agenda we are going to - just - I am just going to give you - this is Mary Jean, I am going to give you just a real quick overview of the Roadmap Project and the work we are trying to do to build a college going culture inour region and to touch on lessons learned.We are going to go quickly so we have plenty of time for questions.
Next slide - so the Roadmap Project we call it a Collective Impact Initiative and I will talk more about that in a second.We are a project that focuses cradle through college and career because we believe that all stages of a student’s life are really critically important.
Obviously today we are going to focus on our work from the high school to college completion area but we are a project that focuses cradle through college and we talk about our geography here being South Seattle and South King County.Those are the areas and I will touch on that in a few minutes but those are our areas of highest need in our region which is where we put our project’s focus.
Next slide - so you see kind of a crazy slide - this is page five of puzzle pieces and this kind of is a slide that we use to bring to life the idea of collective impact - some of you are probably familiar with this term, maybe some of you are not but the idea is a pretty intuitive one, especially when you are trying to do something really hard like building a college going culture or changing educational outcomes for a whole region.
The theory is that no one entity working by itself or alone or in silos can pull off the magnitude of change and improvement that is necessary.This term began to be written about - as far as I know the first writing showed up in January of 2011 in the Stanford Social Innovation Review but it was an article by (Kayne and Kramer).They are leaders in a consulting company called S.S.G. and there is an article by the name, “Collective Impact,” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.If you are interested in reading a little bit more about it you might check that out.
One of the ideas also that really resonated with me that explains collective impact a little bit came from a project that many of you probably know of Strive of Cincinnati, also a cradle through Career Collective Impact Project.
When they first started one of their founders said about Cincinnati they observed that they were program rich but system poor.Lots of individual efforts going on - some really good things at individual schools but no real significant positive trajectory yet at scale so these ideas we think are pretty powerful and the idea is to really build a common agenda that all the sectors, all the players, anybody that can influence the outcomes our goal is to get them working together and we believe by doing that - next slide, we can change the educational attainment for the kids in our region.
Next slide - our region is, as I mentioned, South Seattle and South King County and we actually chopped our - the city we love, Seattle, in half because the education outcomes and the level of poverty is much higher in the south end of Seattle and so we really wanted to put our project’s focus there but we also then went south because our suburbs south of Seattle are experiencing very rapid increases in poverty and we wanted to really help put together a regional approach to this issue.
So I won’t read all the statistics to you on the slide but you can see the magnitude of low income students and students of color and English language learners in the region that we are working in.
Next slide - we are - Greg has kind of touched on this - we are a place of contradiction and really one of the things about our project which started back in 2010 we are really trying to bridge this divide.We have - there is so much being written nationally about income and equality and we are kind of a poster place for that phenomenon.We have a very knowledge intensive economy and we are a real bright spot from an economic development standpoint but in many respects we are doing that because we import people with college degrees and advance degrees at such a high rate.We are not doing so hot when it comes to growing our own talent and really you come here - you would say we are in the midst of plenty but we are also a place with a great acceleration of poverty.
And the slide shows you some really stark statistics that what is happening here is either growth at the very high end of the income scale or at the low end and our region is the place where it is kind of ground zero for these issues.
Next slide - the Brookings Institution actually has a really interesting book and it has implications far beyond the Seattle area.There is a phenomenon going on around the country which they write about called the “Suburbanization of Poverty,” and they write a lot about South King County.Ifyou are interested or you happen to be in a community where this is occurring you might find this work interesting and useful for catalyzing action.
We talk a lot about acknowledging the growth in poverty but not letting poverty be an excuse for inaction.
Next slide - one of the things that comes with poverty and I am trying to giveyou a little background on our project and sort of the rationale - why did we need to start this regional initiative back in 2010 - so the growth in poverty, the big differences in our region between the have and have-nots.Another phenomenon that we see and it is a real rationale for working regionally is very high mobility and that generally comes with high rates of poverty, lots of housing instability - we are seeing growth in - really quite a disturbing rate of growth in homelessness in our region and when you analyze the student data what we saw is the students - lots of transferring intra or inter district and intra district in - so the superintendents that we were working with initially began to talk to each other about the fact that really we have to start to look at students as our collective students and our collective responsibility, not just the responsibility of one school district.And that has really engendered a lot of regional collaboration.
Greg talked about this briefly, the importance of post-secondary education for our economy - we are an incredibly knowledge intensive economy.Many of you probably have seen this work that Anthony Carnevale came out with a couple of years ago from Georgetown but they did an analysis of every state and in our state they said that by 2018 67% of the jobs would require some form of post-secondary credential and then when you look at our region when we got going we were only just over a quarter of our young people who came through the roadmap area were getting some kind of credential - that could be a BA or an AA or some kind of industry certificate that has labor market value.So you can see the big challenge that we face.
Next slide please - just adding fuel to the reasons to get in gear - Greg mentioned he was out in our state, this issue of our low post-secondary attainment for kids growing up here is not just a problem in our region, it is a problem in our state.There is actually a statistic about the chance - what is the chance that a kid will be in college by age 19?In Washington State believe it or not, it is 47th in the United States.
Next slide - so the roadmap has a big goal and this goal was set back in 2010 and it is to double the number of students in South King County and South Seattle who are on track to graduate from college or earn a career credential by 2020 and to close our very significant opportunity gaps.
Next slide - we talk about our work again as collective impact and that implies taking a team approach.I won’t go into the details of this slide but I just wanted you to see the graphic and (Avery) will be talking in detail about one of the work groups, the high school to college completion work that is going on in our region.
Next slide - back in 2010 and again those of you familiar with Strives you might be familiar with the way that they began and we took a lesson from them and so when we started we did a lot of work - hundreds of people participated in this and we developed our indicators of student success and we set our big goal.
Next slide - we also committed ourselves to then collecting the data so that we could report against those indicators of student success each year.We set a baseline and then we report annually.These results reports are all on our Website, roadmapproject.org if you are interested in looking at any of this.
We set targets as well and having a goal and having specific targets for many of our indicators we think is really important.We think it keeps us focused and makes us confront when we are making headway and also where - when we are not because we have a big list to do in our region.
Next slide - we also, I will just say didn’t want to be a project that simply reports on whether we are making progress or not, we want to make things happen.So we did a whole set of action plans after we set the indicators and (Avery) is going to be talking more about the high school to college work group and its initial action plan.So I am going to turn it over now to (Avery) and we will move to the next slide which for reference is also page 18.
(Avery):So hi this is (Avery).My job at CCR is to staff the High School to College Completion Work Group and this work group was originally about 30 people and was made up of representatives from the seven school districts, regional colleges, college access providers and other non-profit and at the time it was co-chaired by Dr. Deborah Wild who is the President and Chief Operating Officer for the College Success Foundation and Dr. Jill Wakefield the Chancellor of Seattle Community Colleges.
The group’s initial charge was to develop an action plan that would improve college readiness and post-secondary completion outcome.Starting in 2011 we met about every month or every other month and looked at research and local data to identify our strategy.
In May of 2012 we approved our first action plan.If you go to the next slide you will see an image of that first action plan.The action plan itself was fairly high level, a simple one-page document - there was another side to it.When I look at it now it scares me a little because the strategies are atdifferent levels and the wording wasn’t the best but in any case the document led to a lot of work.