Schools Are Main Focus of Collective Action but Don’t Account for the Biggest Successes

Many of the most-ambitious “collective-impact” efforts under way focus on education. One of the boldest efforts is in Dallas, where the Commit! Partnership aims to double the percentage of students who earn a college degree or certificate.

The approach known as collective impact—now one of the hottest concepts in the nonprofit sector—involves many diverse local organizations coming together to tackle a persistent problem, using mutually agreed-upon data points to guide their progress.

In Dallas, only 14 percent of high-school graduates countywide are considered “college ready,” based on standardized-test scores. Commit!, an effort to help children from early education through the time they start careers, began in 2012 and has signed up school districts that enroll 500,000 students—making it one of the largest collective-impact efforts in the country. Commit!, the organization that supports and coordinates the work of 135 participating groups, tracks 11 data indicators, ranging from kindergarten readiness to college completion.

Todd Williams, a retired partner of Goldman Sachs, has put $500,000 of his foundation’s money into Commit! and is taking no salary for serving as the organization’s executive director.

For him, collective impact isn’t necessarily the answer—but it is a mandatory starting point.

“When you take on this work there are things that are within your control and things that aren’t,” he says. “We don’t pick what the school board prioritizes. We don’t get to choose the type of people who enter education as a career. But if you don’t bring data to the table, you’re nowhere.”

Education may be where the action is with this popular new approach, but the record of collective impact is mixed, even for efforts hailed as exemplary.

Project U-Turn is an effort to solve the drop-out crisis in Philadelphia, led by the Philadelphia Youth Network. School-district leaders, city agencies, foundations, youth-serving organizations, parents, and students meet regularly to devise strategies. The effort has attracted $175-million in government and private funds.

The city’s graduation rate now stands at 64 percent—up 12 percentage points from when Project U-Turn started eight years ago but still far below the state’s average of 84 percent.

“We’ve made remarkable progress, but we still have quite a ways to go,” says Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend, president of the Philadelphia Youth Network.

Mixed Results

In the Strive Partnership, a “cradle-to-career” effort in Cincinnati and surrounding areas that began in 2006, young students are improving on marks like kindergarten readiness and early grade-level reading, but older students aren’t showing as much improvement on ACT scores or postsecondary readiness.

“We’re making progress, but it’s slow,” says Greg Landsman, the partnership’s executive director. “We’re going to keep going until the system is fundamentally changed.”

The E3Alliance (Education Equals Economics) in Austin, Tex., is, like the Strive Partnership, one of the older efforts using collective-impact principles to improve education.

The alliance has worked with 11 districts, four colleges, and eight local companies to bolster interest in engineering and technology careers.

The effort has led to 500-percent growth in the number of students taking secondary-level engineering classes. But on some basic measures that the alliance tracks, little progress has been made.

Kindergarten-readiness measures have remained stuck at about 53 percent since 2010, and black and Hispanic students haven’t closed the gap on eighth-grade math scores.

Susan Dawson, the alliance’s president, says her group often weighs tradeoffs between expediency and inclusiveness.

Wait to get everyone to the table and five years may pass with no action, she says. Move too quickly and you won’t have buy-in from the schools and low-income communities.

What’s more, she points out, the E3Alliance has no regulatory power.

“We don’t make the decisions—schools boards do,” Ms. Dawson says. “All we’re doing is undertaking massive systemic change, with no authority to do anything.”

Steve Patrick, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Forum for Community Solutions, acknowledges that the evidence to date is underwhelming.

“The biggest take-away for everybody in this work, is ‘Wow, this takes awhile.’ ”

Turnover an Issue

One concern is how collective-impact efforts will survive amid changes in political and school leadership. The theory is that the rigorous focus on data to guide progress should make it possible for the efforts to continue even if charismatic champions depart. “It can’t be a personality-driven agenda,” says Mary Jean Ryan, executive director of the Community Center for Education Results, which staffs the Road Map Project, a cradle-to-career effort in South Seattle and surrounding areas.

Road Map is just four years old, and already the superintendents have changed at six of the seven participating school districts. The new hires are quickly briefed on the project. “We haven’t really lost momentum,” Ms. Ryan insists.

The E3 Alliance, in Austin, worried from the beginning that any political involvement in the effort might set the alliance up for failure when a leader was swept from office. The alliance still prohibits elected officials from serving on its board. “It’s just something that scares us,” Ms. Dawson says.

Inherent Tensions

Some collective-impact efforts have stumbled while trying to engage the community they’re trying to serve. Any effort aimed at eliminating racial disparities in education needs to have community-based cultural organizations at the table early on, say experts.

Dan Ryan, chief executive of All Hands Raised, an effort to raise educational achievement in six school districts in the Portland, Ore., area, says the process can be difficult because white people interested in equity work often want to talk about data, while black and Latino residents may prefer to focus on actual stories.

Mr. Ryan says his organization has its hands full trying to keep school superintendents and CEOs of local cultural and ethnic organizations at the table to discuss how to remedy Portland’s “discipline gap.” Black, Latino, and Native-American students in Portland, as elsewhere, are suspended and expelled at much higher rates than white students.

“There’s tension in every community when doing this work,” Mr. Ryan says. “The good news is that we have a system that is allowing key stakeholders to have forthright conversations and move the action forward.”

‘Quick Wins’

Since fully rolling out a collective-impact effort can take years, FSG, a consulting company that champions the approach, urges communities to look for “quick wins.”

“It’s important to be both planning and doing at the same time,” says Fay Hanleybrown, a managing director at FSG.

The Road Map Project seized on such an opportunity, shortly after its inception, by pushing school districts to take responsibility for getting their low-income students signed up for a generous scholarship opportunity. Washington State’s College Bound Scholarship promises to cover tuition at in-state public institutions for students from low-income families who sign up during their eighth-grade year and maintain at least a 2.0 grade-point average through graduation.

Only half of eligible eighth-graders were signing up each year when Road Map started. Road Map sent weekly sign-up data to mayors, local newspapers, and parent groups, igniting a friendly competition among the districts to see who could register the most students.

Now, 98 percent of eligible eighth-graders—about 5,500 students—are signing up. Ms. Ryan says Road Map plans to push for more support services, including college advising, for the students.

Will it be enough to help Road Map meet is ambitious goal of doubling the number of students who are on track to graduate from college or earn a career credential by 2020?

Ms. Ryan says she thinks the project will hit its goal by 2022, at the latest.

“It takes a little time to build up that sustained quality of service that will impact a cohort of kids and get them to this higher level of system performance,” she says.

The Road Map Project is very well supported, thanks to the U.S. Department of Education, which awarded a $40-million Race to the Top grant to the seven districts participating in the project, and to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which covers about half of the operating costs of Ms. Ryan’s organization.

Other collective-impact efforts aren’t so fortunate. In spite of increasing interest in the strategy, many donors and foundations are reluctant to invest in projects for which they can’t claim credit and that have no fixed termination date.

Ms. Dawson, of the E3 Alliance, says she has struggled to get donors and foundations in the Austin area—a philanthropy market she describes as “immature”—to help pay for her team’s work persuading local universities to grant college credit to high-school students taking the challenging engineering courses.

“All that systems stuff is nice,” she says, offering her take on the perspective of some local donors. “But I want to see 25 kids who were crying last week not crying, and I want to say that I did it.”