Cities for Success: A BHEF Leadership Summit
Held October 28-29, 2010, in Louisville, KY The summit was held to spotlight the powerful and effective education improvement and degree attainment efforts in Louisville and across the country. High-level delegations from Des Moines, Iowa, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, including the cities’ mayors; superintendents; business,
higher education, and philanthropy leaders; and dozens of other national leaders engaged in education improvement attended Cities for Success to gather information about launching projects similar to the one in Louisville in their respective cities.
Why Louisville? Because Louisville is home to one of BHEF’s most successful member-led regional efforts and its strategy can be a model for the nation on how to create lasting leadership networks to improve education attainment.
BHEF believes that systemic improvement across the P-20 pipeline is achieved most effectively when business and higher education leaders are equipped with the high leverage strategies and tools they need to provide sustained leadership in this arena. BHEF works with its members and their peers to do just that in Louisville and in other communities across the country.
Key insights from the summit include:
- Sustained business leadership is essential to enable a community to develop its long-term economic development and education vision, to work with P-12 and higher education to achieve that vision, and to inspire the community to have the tenacity to stick with the hard work of systemic education improvement.
- Successful communities institutionalize shared accountability and differentiated responsibility, identifying clear goals and the stakeholders responsible for achieving them.
- Strategic linkages to regional and national efforts help education stakeholders develop dynamic networks and capitalize on best practices.
- Metrics and data are necessary drivers of change. They enable stakeholders to clearly communicate progress toward goals and keep business engaged and at the table.
- Alignment between K-12 and postsecondary education is important to help ensure that students graduating from high school genuinely are“college ready” and can progress more easily through the system.
- Successful communities foster widespread public awareness through marketing campaigns and mentoring about the importance of obtaining a college degree and the steps to making it possible.
To read the proceeding from Cities for Success click here. For more information about the summit and/or to discuss education improvement efforts, contact BHEF Director of Programs Jeanne Contardo at jeanne.contardo@bhef.com.
Cities for Success is a hallmark of BHEF’s College Readiness, Access, and Success Initiative (CRI). The CRI is a dynamic platform for business and higher education to work together to promote college readiness, access, and degree completion for underserved populations, particularly in math and science. To learn more about the CRI and BHEF’s other key initiative, Securing America’s Leadership in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Initiative, go to www.bhef.com. For more information on how to make a positive impact on, and invest wisely in, the pre-school through graduate school pipeline, go to www.StrategicEdSolutions.org®.
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