The New Dawn

Just as a rainbow rises after a storm, today represents a step into a bold and vibrant future for K-12 education. The unprecedented global pandemic in concert with a racial reckoning in the United States has sown the seeds for a harvest of ideas and innovations designed to embrace our students as their whole selves.

In moving forward, we do not want to turn to a prior playbook that is rooted in inequity. We have an unprecedented opportunity to wholly transform how schools work in partnership with communities to effectively support our students.

The good news is we are emerging after a tumultuous fifteen months with:

• New policies and practices to support learning at-home and in-school, a deeper focus on students’ mental and emotional health, more robust school-and-community connections, expanded teacher peer collaboration models and much more.‍
• A recognition of the need for teaching and learning policies, systems and practices centered in the diversity of our 55+ million students who embody an array of experiences, environments, identities and cultures -- and that each student must be seen and valued in every dimension of learning.‍
• A willingness  to create and actualize conditions in our K-12 systems where students have equitable access to learning opportunities and pathways and are not identified by deficit-centric academic and economic constructs, such as “gaps” or “poverty”.
  

We -- the RISE UP Coalition -- call this The New Dawn. And together we have developed an Action Agenda Honoring the Vibrant Diversity of Students.

As a coalition of leaders of color representing school districts, charter networks and organizations across the country, we offer The New Dawn: An Action Agenda Honoring the Diversity of Students as a national blueprint to systems and school leaders for collaborating with communities to transform systems and practice by:

• Auditing existing inequitable policies, practices and data
• Creating the conditions for equity-centered transformational policies to take root
• Defining a set of asset-centered priorities and actions
• Implementing demonstrated solutions that have been natively-designed to effectively support the diverse experiences, cultures and identities of the student population
  

While our focus is anchored in how school districts and charter networks can design and support the conditions that enable students of color -- who have clearly been disproportionately impacted by COVID and historical inequities -- to thrive, we acknowledge that inequities are not solely impacting students of color. We recognize that white students’ across the country are experiencing high-poverty and a lack of access to quality education, from rural-to-urban areas.

We also know that the intersection of race and poverty compounds systemic inequities for ALL. Reference Targeted Universalism Policy and Practice by john a. powell, Stephen Mendenian and Wendy Ake and the report Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie Jones and Sonia R. Porter. 

By effectively addressing the intersectionality, the RISE UP Coalition’s work will support ALL students in having access to high-quality, richly diverse learning experiences.

As education practitioners, entrepreneurs and innovators, we know from experience that to address the intersection and create the conditions for students to thrive:

• Schools must deeply partner with communities and families as imagineers and co-designers of a new learning ecosystem
• Innovation must be defined by how a solution -- a framework, program, curriculum or tool -- recognizes, reflects and rewards the vibrant dimensions of a child
• Learning context is as important as content
• Every student has an identity that must be centered and celebrated for us to achieve the definition of high-quality education
  

Our hope is that The New Dawn: An Action Agenda Honoring the Diversity of Studentssparks new ideas, creates opportunities for relationship and trust building and centers innovation in communities as partners to schools.

We invite you to join us on a journey to creating a thriving equitable education ecosystem that addresses the vibrant diversity of students!

Join us as advocates and allies in this work! Sign our interest form.

We united in the spirit of engaging our national networks of leaders in supporting school districts and charter networks who are facing both tremendous challenges and, simultaneously, opportunities to design effective systems to support historically marginalized students.

As a collective, we have created and implemented a valuable portfolio of frameworks, practices, programs and tools that are effectively supporting the needs of students of color -- Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander students. We joined together to contribute our know-how, expertise, intuition, solutions and lived experiences to inform and guide the national dialog and landscape.

‍Our work as the RISE UP Coalition is to publish a national Action Agenda focused on three goals:

1. Name a set of Big Ideas and a comprehensive Priorities Map to guide a path forward
2. Identify Policy Perspectives that honor the needs of the diverse cultures and experiences of students across the country
3. Share existing Demonstrations of best practices, programs, and models that are currently being employed by school districts, charter networks and organizations 
   

The Convening Organizations joined together to lead this effort as representatives of national networks of education leaders across the country:

• Camelback Ventures: Camelback Ventures increases access to opportunity for entrepreneurs of color and women by investing in their ventures and leadership while advocating for fairness in their funding.
• Digital Promise: Digital Promise is a nonprofit organization that builds powerful networks and takes on grand challenges by working at the intersection of researchers, entrepreneurs, and educators.
• Education Leaders of Color: EdLoC is a membership organization dedicated to elevating the leadership, voices and influence of people of color in education and to leading more inclusive efforts to improve education.
• Pahara Institute: Pahara provides transformational leadership development opportunities for leaders who are reimagining the public education system for all children.
• Surge Institute: Surge educates, develops, and elevates leaders of color who create transformative change for young people, their families and our broader communities.‍
• Unidos US: UnidosUS, previously known as NCLR (National Council of La Raza), is the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization.
  

As a convening group, we invited Collaborating Organizations to join the coalition who represent an equitable cross-section of school districts, charter schools and organizations led by leaders of color from urban, rural, and suburban geographies across the country to ensure we are representing all students.

‍The Collaborating Organizations who represent school districts, charter networks and organization leaders across the country are:

It is abundantly clear that the academic, cultural, emotional and physical wellbeing of a child is paramount to their ability to fully engage in education. We have to ask ourselves as adults who are leading systems and organizations:‍

How do we design education systems that demonstrate/embody the conditions that embrace the health, wellbeing, spirit, diversity and genius of students?‍

As the RISE UP Coalition, we answer this question by drawing on:

• Our lived experience as students of color growing up in a K-12 education system
• Our lived experience as adults -- teachers, principals, administrators, entrepreneurs and policymakers -- who are leading education systems and organizations centered in equity
• The intersectionality of race and poverty and the proven impact on students of color
  

We believe that our education system is at a precipice. As a sector, we can no longer avoid or ignore the fact that an education system created hundreds of years ago designed to meet the needs of a monolithic “model student” does not work. 

We must acknowledge the impacts of a history wrought with acts of inhumanity that reverberate today to ensure our systems going forward are celebrating differences as opportunities to learn and grow, not replicating trauma.

‍The time is now. We have a moral imperative to create an education system that honors the colorful tapestry and diversity of our students and communities. This is OUR WHY.

We move beyond theory and ideas to steps that you can take, and we point you in the direction of leaders and organizations that are doing the work. We “rise up” the buried treasure of programs, tools and models created by school districts, charter networks and entrepreneurs that are effectively supporting the needs and aspirations of students of color.‍

The RISE UP Coalition Action Agenda includes the following components:

1. Big Ideas: We define eight Big Ideas aligned to a set of themes that are at the core of a reimagined education system that centers families and communities
2. Priorities Map: We identify five Priorities within each Big Idea that specifically addresses the “how” of systems change
3. Policy Perspectives: We put forth a set of Policy Perspectives that represent the actions that need to be considered at the federal, state and local levels
4. Demonstrations: We launch a clearinghouse of best practices, programs and tools that are supporting the needs and ability to thrive for students of color.
   

On June 30, 2021 we released the Big Ideas and Priorities Map. On August 4, 2021, we will release the Policy Perspectives and Demonstrations.

We invite you to utilize the Action Agenda as a flexible guide to inform your work and practices and hope that you will join us as an advocate and/or ally for this work.

Big Ideas

How do we reimagine education systems that are centered in families and communities?

Our Big Ideas outline a core set of tenets that school systems and schools can employ to inform the design, development and implementation of solutions to support the vibrant diversity of students.