News
(Portland, Ore.) November 4, 2010 – Hundreds of education, business, and community leaders have launched a new “cradle to career” initiative that creates a new path to success for young people in Multnomah County.
The sweeping countywide effort will track key measures of educational, social, and economic progress from birth to job entry in an annual report that will guide community leaders and hold them accountable for the results. This approach is not another report card on schools – it goes beyond measuring educational achievement to help shape outcomes.
A broad coalition of supporters – including Portland Mayor Sam Adams and Portland State University (PSU) President Wim Wiewel – came together Thursday at PSU to announce details of the new strategy, review the first report, and discuss how to coordinate their work to better support children, teenagers, and young adults.
“Every Portland parent – every Multnomah County parent – should have the expectation that their kid will cross the stage (to get a diploma),” Adams said. “We can do it starting today.”
Marcus Mundy, president of the Urban League of Portland, urged supporters to find a better way to work collaboratively to improve educational outcomes for all students.
“One thing people in this room can do is put the urgency back in urgency,” Mundy said. “How can we take the data and the knowledge that we have of what works and put them into action?”
Partners in the new strategy include the city of Portland, Multnomah County, Portland Public Schools and other Multnomah County school districts, PSU, the Leaders Roundtable, Portland Business Alliance, and other civic organizations. The non-profit Portland Schools Foundation will guide the effort. PSU researchers developed the key metrics in the report.
“Our community is frustrated by the failure rate and the dropout rate in our schools, and we need a community-wide effort to help more students succeed,” Wiewel said. “The initiative is more promising than past efforts because it will be based on proven strategies and by practices that can be sustained over time.”
With this approach, rigorous data and analysis guide educators and community leaders to support policies and programs that work and reject those that don’t.
The initiative is modeled after an effort in Cincinnati called the Strive Partnership, which brought together more than 300 organizations to focus on education across a metro area that includes southern Ohio and northern Kentucky. After more than four years, Strive reports increases in reading, writing and math achievement as well as the high school graduation rate in Cincinnati schools. Those improvements have spurred metro area leaders in Houston, Texas, to launch a similar effort called All Kids Alliance.
School success is a crucial goal of the Multnomah County effort, but it also is designed to better measure progress in child care, preschools, health care, child and family services, and colleges and universities.
A downloadable copy of the 2010 Report to the Community is available at www.cradletocareer.wordpress.com.
About Portland State University
Portland State University (PSU) serves as a center of opportunity for more than 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Located in Portland, Oregon, one of the nation’s most livable cities, the University’s innovative approach to education combines academic rigor in the classroom with field-based experiences through internships and classroom projects with community partners. The University’s 49-acre downtown campus exhibits Portland State’s commitment to sustainability with green buildings, while many of the 125 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees incorporate sustainability into the curriculum. PSU’s motto, “Let Knowledge Serve the City,” inspires the teaching and research of an accomplished faculty whose work and students span the globe.
