While there are amazing public schools across the country, few cities have been able to increase educational opportunity for all children.
Over the past fifteen years, this has begun to change. Denver, Washington D.C., and New Orleans have made their entire public education systems better. Other cities, like Indianapolis and Camden, have taken these breakthroughs, tailored them to their local contexts, and seen promising early results. Because of this work, hundreds of thousands of children have benefited from a better public education. These students are more prepared than ever to further their education, get good jobs, and lead lives filled with opportunity. We are now creating a new non-profit organization, The City Fund, to expand on this work.
Previously, several of us operated within a dual structure supporting the education giving for both the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Hastings Fund. We are in the process of changing this structure and have added new team members to create The City Fund. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Hastings Fund will continue their support of the work as anchor funders.
The new organization includes leaders from Education Cities, as well as expert practitioners from the state, district, charter and non-profit sectors. This new team will help us provide better support to local leaders. We are just getting started and will have a website up in short order, but now that our team is hired, we wanted to share the news.
All of us are united by a common perspective. First, right now, too many students do not have access to a great public school. Second, we believe this can change.
We share this belief because we have seen better schools improve the lives of families in all of our respective work. We’ve seen awesome teachers inspire children to build the knowledge, skills, and values needed to make the world a better place. We’ve seen world class public schools provide rich educational experiences to all their students, regardless of race or economic circumstances.
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Our nation’s education system is a complicated patchwork of thousands of local school districts. Improvements will not happen overnight, nor should they.
Rather, cities across the country are constantly innovating, and when a few cities do something that seems to be working, philanthropy can help shine a light on these local successes. If other cities are interested, philanthropy can help test these breakthroughs at a little larger scale.
The cities we have supported have made things better in their own way, but several commonalities stand out: each city increased the number of public schools that are governed by non-profit organizations; each city created an easy to use enrollment system that helps families find a great public school for their children; and each city provides families with transparent information about public school quality. We believe these strategies hold promise.
While we are optimistic that the work we’re supporting will succeed at the next level of scale, much more work, innovation, and research is needed. Over the coming years, we’ll continue to support a small set of local education leaders. We’ll also work with university researchers to study these local efforts. If cities show progress, we hope other cities will follow. If they don’t, we hope other promising innovations are able to scale, so that all students can have access to amazing public schools.
Chris Barbic
Gary Borden
Ken Bubp
Beverly Francis-Pryce
Ethan Gray
David Harris
Kevin Huffman
Noor Iqbal
Neerav Kingsland
Jessica Pena
Liset Rivera
Kevin Shafer
Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo
Gabrielle Wyatt