 And I really appreciate that, and the council here in Bear County, of those individuals who may be more than part of this entity, we've got to be exorbitant, right? So Judy is absolutely no stranger to this particular building, this particular entity, in terms of the education partnership. She served as the deputy director of the partnership, she served as the board of directors for the partnership, and frankly she is serving as the board director for private and public high schools in this building area. And this is all in half of her career, at least three years career in USAA, in banking. So we're very pleased to have, again, two private sector entities who are now very much putting their time in the public sector and helping us think through their entities for very much more time. Of course. Thank you, Jacob. Hi, everybody. I'm really excited to be here in San Antonio today with so many wonderful things through my colleagues that have worked with many of you all through the San Antonio Can effort. And I know that this is such an amazing city that has really brought together just some wonderful resources, talent, and energy and momentum around where the city can go as a community. And so I'm really delighted to have this opportunity to come out and speak with you all today. As Jacob mentioned, our organization Educate Texas is a public-private partnership that was formed nearly nine years ago with the state education agency, the governor's office, and some tool for all the support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bill and Susan Dell Foundation, and our housing organization, the Communities Foundation in Texas. You all probably recognize a lot of the work that we used to do within the Texas High School project portfolio of our STEM and early college high school work, as well as some of the support that we led across the turnaround practices. Well, over the last couple of years, we clearly have built out a really robust network of partners and supporters across the state. And while we have done really great good for close to 150,000 students across our state of Texas, that is still a small percentage of the overall state student population. And so two years ago, when I came into this role in Educate Texas, we revisited the strategies and the plans that we wanted to take forward to really try and drive greater success and impact across the state, because we know that our demographics are changing across the state. We know that resources are constricting, but we know that achievement and outcomes still need to accelerate and grow. And so we really did some good sort of internal reflection and research on the things that were happening across the state and across the country. And we ended up realizing that while we were fortunate to have had this opportunity to work across the entire state, from El Paso to Texarkana, from the Panhandle down to Brownsville, we knew that one organization couldn't create the kind of critical mass and the kinds of changes that needed to happen across the systems to be able to affect the change in a fast enough pace. So we did some research and started to understand the focus of looking at our work at a regional level or at a community level. We started to understand that so many of our students end up not only going through the public education system in one region, but then they end up going into their higher ed experience in the same region. So depending on where you are across the state, 65 to 85 percent of the students get to sustain the higher ed system within that same geographic community. And so if we were really trying to make some big changes across the state, we needed to start looking at this at a community or region-based level. And so over the past year and a half, you know, I've become a big student and fan of this work that's happening all collectively. And so how many of y'all have heard of collective mass? The word gets thrown around a lot, right? Everybody, you know, has been talking about it. They've been saying, you know, this is the, you know, great solution for all of our social ills. And, you know, well, I think there is some potential and standard to the possibility of that. I think we're still at the early stages of really seeing whether or not this has that kind of transformative impact that I'm going to see. But at the same time, we know that what we've been doing over the past, you know, 15, 25 years, you know, we've seen greater levels of investment in some marginal growth and productivity and outcomes. And so we know that we may need to look at some alternative ways of helping bring together all of these great ideas and practices and innovations to become more consistently embedded across a community across the region. And so when I've read this article about collective impact, you know, the Stanford Social Innovation Review 18 months ago, you know, a light bulb flick for you. And what they were talking about was not something that was, you know, earth-shattering and some outrageous crazy innovation or innovative idea. This was about, you know, using common measures of understanding where we want to go as a community. So setting out, you know, please talk through to here. You know, what is the sort of common vision for where we want to go as a community? Where are the goals that we want to set for ourselves? How do we want to start measuring our ability to achieve those those goals and those targets? How do we start to understand the successes that we're seeing and accelerate and enable those practices to continue to flourish? And then how do we start to learn from the areas that have not been implemented and the areas that have not been producing the kind of results that we want to see? And then ultimately how do you then sort of orchestrate and bring together all of these different players across the community who have in many cases, you know, had the right intentions but had not had the opportunity to come together and really kind of do that transformative change and see what our students are doing. And so over the last 18 months not only have I been a student but I've been a practitioner of it. I actually have embedded this into my everyday life. I picked up running this fall and so I ended up working out with my brother in law who was out in New York and he ended up we set this goal in July when we were vacationing and we said oh, you know, it looks like we can run seven miles. Well, let's set a bigger goal for ourselves. Let's set the common vision of where we want to go. And so we set the target and being able to complete a half marathon. And so that was the common agenda that we've established for ourselves. Then, you know, over the next three months we ended up having a process where we were training, we were trying to measure, you know, our progress towards getting to that point and he had said oh, I want to use my Nike app to track how I'm running. And I said I want to use my Map My Run application to track how I'm running. We needed to set ourselves on a common measurement system and so we used the same application to start measuring our progress. And then, you know, as we went through our first month, you know, I was doing okay, he was doing far better than me. Or he was younger, six foot one, far better shape. And so I started to learn from him and well what are you doing in terms of your diet, how are you training, what are some of the things that you're learning about, you know, stretching and pacing yourself, because this was both of our first runs through an experience like this. So we had that opportunity to sort of learn from one another and utilize the practices that we were doing to play. And then lastly, there are two other parts, the communication piece. So clearly, you know, as he was out pacing me, there's a lot of trash talking that was going on. Clearly that was upsetting to me. And it was good though, because we had that dialogue and we had a communication between each other. And then the last part of what we'll be talking about from a collective impact perspective is the backbone. So how do you have a culture that is there to help keep everybody on the same track, on the same path day after day, week after week. And so I fortunately have a wonderful wife that is my backbone. And so, you know, she gets a little you know George, you gotta get out of this education speak at home. We don't need to do that at home. Let's just talk normally again. You know, it sometimes happens, but you know, this has become something that has been really important to me. And so I've been fortunate to have engaged with FSG, Social Impact Partners, who are the original authors of this work. And one of the big collective impact organizations that they ended up highlighting in that initial standard social innovation review article was a group called STRIVE out of Cincinnati. And I've been able to have opportunities to work really closely with Jeff Edmondson, who was the original you know, sort of designer and implementer of this work in Cincinnati for four and a half years. And so I've had that opportunity to really sort of dig in and pick the brains of the folks that have been not only leading and implementing this work, but then also the organization that has been trying to codify it so that other cities across the state and across the country can start to implement this. And so I want to sort of just give a quick quick notes version. I know we don't try and do that in education, but given the time that we have I've got just a few slides that I wanted to highlight. So I think over over time, you know, we probably started out a lot sort of at this bottom level around isolated impact and you know, I think a lot of us have been doing really great and innovative and high impact things but I don't think that they have been well coordinated, well aligned, well communicated to help advance the progress of the community. We've seen success on an individual level, on an individual organization level but we've not brought those resources and those learnings to drive and accelerate the success of what we see across not just one district or two districts or three districts but potentially an entire community or across an entire system of public education, higher education and workforce consistent. And so I think there's an evolution and there are then sort of aligned impact efforts where kind of we start using some common language around how we want to sort of target what we want to go after and sometimes we have comparable data systems that enable us to look at the comparisons across our organizations in a really familiar and identical way but in many cases that doesn't happen in the system. And so the ability to translate the success that I'm seeing versus the success that someone else is seeing in a school or a district down the road doesn't get communicated and shared across that community to sustain it. And so then the direction and role of where we think this can go is really around what we've been talking about today this idea of collective impact. So we start with a common role of building a college and career culture within all of our schools across the public and across K-12 or pre-K-12 we know that the role of the students at 85% of our students were college ready in the next 8 years and then we can then start to dig into some strategies that we're all testing and we're learning from but we're embedded into common metrics that we're capturing across all four of these districts. We'll have that opportunity one year, two years, three years down the road to be able to make that comparison. The work that's happening in Farlandale clearly has demonstrated significant growth in progress and the practices that we've tried over at Northwest or Northside have not had necessarily the same level of success. Well what is it that we're learning from Farlandale that we can port over to the learning and the progress that needs to happen at Northwest? And so that's really the sort of utopian world of where we're going and I think today's conversation in that last hour that we ran through was a great demonstration of how this starts to come together. You all had spent the better half of the day together talking about where you all wanted to go you sort of voted with your stickers and you talked about where you thought there were commonalities well we can start to agree on those areas and then we thought about capturing the progress that we're seeing consistently across different strategies that we're trying we have an opportunity to really help highlight the successes that are happening and continue to push those efforts forward and then start to think about how we better allocate our other resources that are producing as well through the practices that we're using. And so that's a collective impact on that real quick snapshot. Now how does this actually take place? You know there are some practices and some principles that STRIVE and FSG have highlighted as sort of the core elements of a collective impact community. The first one is what we talked about, setting that common agenda. Knowing that my brother in law and I wanted to finish a half marathon but we across these four districts want to create a college and a remote culture. That is the common agenda. We know that that is where we want to go. One level below that is then what is the metric? What are we targeting across these four districts that are so critical to where we want to go. We all have done a really wonderful job of having great leadership within the district across the city, across your partners to be able to get to something that we can all say that's where we want to be in the next eight years. It may change a little bit I think, but 85% and that's the target at the end of our efforts. The second part is then the shared measurement piece and I'm talking about how do we create consistent ways for us to evaluate the efforts that we're all doing in a way that is consistent with one another as we come back together. Elizabeth, you highlighted this and we're saying Patrick is the one guy or this is the one initiative that's going to help bring us all together. How do we end up leveraging all of the learning that's happening at the district to then be able to come back together and say what I'm learning on this practice is comparable to the comparison point that we're trying out in this area. And that we need to be able to come together across a common sort of measurement system that we can start to realize to evaluate our programs across the community. The third part, you know, mutually reinforcing the activities. This is the sort of continuous improvement cycle that we all need to be leaning on. Now how do we continue to not prove that our practices are better than another district's or prove that a partner's practices are better than another partner's practices? But how do we end up learning from each other? How do we refine and enhance the work that we're doing individually based on the collective knowledge of our partners across the community? So that's the sort of continuous improvement cycle. The next piece is really then the communication strand. So how do we ensure that we have a safe environment where we can come together and think about bringing together, and not just practitioners in the public education space, but the business community, the civic leadership, the non-profit organizations that we're partnering with in this goal to create a career and college-going culture? How do we create a safe environment that enables us to have those open and honest dialogues around what's working, what are the drivers of those success, what are the things that aren't working, and what are we learning from those that we can then utilize to enhance what we're doing? And then the last element of this is then creating a backbone organization, having somebody that has that objective, independent we're doing what we're doing, because we know we need to do this for our community, not just for one organization, not for one community, but for the collective group as a whole. And so this is one of the most critical aspects from what I've seen over the last 18 months in building out these efforts in Dallas and in the Grand Valley, that the backbone organization is one of the most critical components to seeing the kind of success that we all want to see happen. So I'll stop right there and see if there are any questions that you all may have. Yes? Absolutely. Absolutely. That was an easy one. You know, this process and I've learned both through seeing this from people that have created this, but then also through my own participation in our Dallas effort is not the linear, clean pin-outs logical path to get there. It's a hot mess. This stuff is never easy. The fact that there are organizations that have so much good input and so much success in what they've done for so long, they've operated on their own track for a really long while and they continue to get supported and continue to do great things. But we know that our students need even greater support and they need even greater resources to be at the level that we want them to be at. This process of helping bring those tracks together and align those efforts isn't challenging because there's territory, there's history, there's legacy there's resources, all the resources that come into play around this conversation and so it is a process that is challenging but I think it is a really powerful platform for where we need to go to ensure that it's a little hard question to go when is the half very final? No, I completed it and I'll just say the tortoise in the hair story is alive. Congratulations. Congratulations. I'm not going to be a tortoise. So, what's happening with this collective impact work is something that is actually huge. The whole idea of bringing together all of these different stakeholders across the community to define a common agenda, to set the measurement, to be able to talk about the progress that they're seeing and the progress that they're not to have the open communication and support. This is not something that is just in five cities now. Judy and I were up in Milwaukee with Alma in October and there were 70 communities across the country and eight countries globally that participated in this national convening of this concept of collective impact. And it is something that I think is catching so much attention and so much enthusiasm because of all of these and sort of its real public story, and it's a desire to continue to grow and see success and accelerated outcomes but with the shift in demographics and the restricting of resources and dollars that are in play. And so I think there's a huge opportunity for San Antonio who has been doing a lot of this work to really start to come together and utilize some of these principles. And so just to give you some last words you know, I know Elizabeth you really love the idea of counting to be able to have some quick wins and that is absolutely valid but I think at the same time this process of building relationships and building the kind of trust that needs to happen across communities is something that takes time. And we've seen in Dallas that we had a couple of false starts in this process and I think it took us a little bit of time to sort of reset ourselves out there but I think we have come out in this stronger as a result of answering taking that first step and realizing it was far too aggressive and then pulling back and re-setting the timeline to then be able to go back and be successful. Second part you know, from a time perspective you know, what you guys did in 36 hours is a great starting point but it's just the beginning of the vice-perch in the Rio Grande Valley the work that all of our team has led with 12 superintendents and 5 higher ed presidents and we've been able to help shorten the cycle time to be about 6 to 7 months to be able to come together and align ourselves against that common goal of measures. The data systems are going to start putting in place the opportunity to have that over the dialogue in Dallas and then on that floor end it has been 18 months we've had this conversation amongst a small intimate group but it is now at the point where we're now seeing greater attraction and greater likelihood for success because we took the time to make that happen. Speed versus inclusion again this is I think another piece that's tied into this and we all want to be able to start utilizing these convenings to see great success immediately and then at the same time we also think about how many differences how many different stakeholders do we need to have what we're seeing is that we get to a smaller or a reasonable size group like Ford District there's actually a lot of progress that can be made amongst that as well as the team in a faster way than having this easier effort where we include many more organizations many more districts many more higher end institutions many more stakeholders Facilitation the ability to have an external party be a part of this dialogue I think it's really important it goes back to that back bone I think somebody that doesn't have a steak how this plays out it is all about bringing together the different players that is there to help align the resources the data and be the honest broker of this process is really important because we know that there are often times where we have our own self-interest and that's part of to check your habit more when you come into these conversations having a third party independently to be able to be that objective party is really important and it makes help a lot in the world and then lastly this process is really fluid and dynamic what we talked about today and over the last 3-6 months around what we had said this is the plan this is the model that we're going to take we may come back after we've all thought about this in our next meeting and realize that there actually may be a shift and we may be pivoting and course correcting because we've learned something new or we've heard about a different approach or a different practice that we think has great bearing potential and so as I was listening to you guys the strategies one of the things that I was thinking about we know that this is the primary metric that we're targeting 85% of our students being college and career ready how are these 5 strategies and clearly this is part of the brainstorming process how are these 5 strategies delivering clear outcomes that will help you get to this data and we may realize that investing in a career college ready matrix is a really wonderful idea may not be the most effective and efficient way to help process up to get to that part and so it's okay that we started out here by saying that that was one area that we wanted to prove out but we do need to be able to have some data points that enable us to capture whether or not this is contributing as much to this end goal that we're targeting on or if we redirect the dollars towards for guidance and exploration could be more meaningful, more impactful and have even greater likelihood for us to see that end goal as we realize it can happen and so I think this is a fun process to be a part of because you guys are doing some great groundbreaking things for this community that hopefully can be a model and an example of how other parts of San Antonio and that's our county can start to flirt and you guys can be champions of this work after the first 6 months, the first 12 months of going through and so I'm not going to go through the next couple of pages because we'll see them in the document that will be posted wherever it is but here are some examples of this work in Dallas and the Rio Grande Dallas is 18 months into it I think we're much further ahead than where the valley was because we just started that 6 months ago but the valley has quickly picked up the pace and I think through the straight and what we've gained in Dallas and now are reporting down to the valley I think we're shortening the cycle time to be able to see the kinds of successes that we want to see in just the sort of design and framing of what this structure is and so I'll pass it over to Judy because I know she's been really one of many that have been so tightly open into all of the different things that can happen in San Antonio and they'll walk through the next areas of the house and help you with that Okay, the P-16 uses a collective impact model we're actually an emerging strive organization what that means is that we're in the process just like Dallas, just like several others of how do I get to be a grown-up cradle to career sanctioned organization there are lots of things you have to do to accomplish that we're trying to measure things that are coming and they're commonly understood by our community I'm more of an example person so the example is that I worked with our council on the definition of graduation rates and the definition of completion rates and yes, the state has all these definitions but everybody has to kind of be on the same page on what is it you want to mentor so we all agreed on the four year graduation rate and the completion rate which is that comes from the TEA so that's back to what did we agree on we agree that we get the data from TEA we agree about the definitions and we keep track of that and then I have part of the P-16 charges to have data so we have multiple multiple years of data so that we can see trends and some of the things and data that we provide are working on a common kindergarten readiness point we are working in united way on an early developmental indicator where we're investigating and assessing a kindergarten in Harlandale, San Antonio and Edgewood and this year we'll be adding more signs why is that important because we'll have a common number of investment in five factors for over 10,000 kindergarten now when you have a common measure we'll say are kindergarteners ready or not so we'll actually have one and right now we don't you have anything in common the first grade reading score is the Texas primary reading we have that, Lloyd Potter's going to be getting that from the schools and so that's the measure we'll use for that third grade reading in math proficiency we track that you'll see a lot of these common measures all tie to the SA 2020 goals kindergarten readiness we want to have our third graders reading on grade level or proficient well how are we doing so we've gone back and gotten the data and now we can look at trends and start to dissect what that is also help scale practices proven by data periodically convene educators and share data evaluate data on the practice by nonprofits and assist in scaling what works my example of this is we're working with three school districts now seven school districts this year but let me tell you what happened last year we worked with three school districts we identified 12 elementary schools and we were focusing on how do we get third grade reading better in those schools and so we dissected what we thought would work we identified chronic non-attendee children because if they're not in school they're not learning to read so we worked on a process we trained we commonly P-16 was the backbone organization but it was the school that was actually being trained the people going to the houses and talking to the parents why I know collective impact works is because when we did that and we tracked the data and we analyzed the data we were going to see finding by improving our context of the parents and finding out what was causing the reason why they weren't going to school their attendance for those non those chronically non-attendance children went up 50% within five months because they contacted them they found out what the issue was and we laser focused and you know if you talk to parents oh you're paying attention there's some other things that go along with that so this year we're trying it with 30 elementary schools and 7 school districts collecting the data to see if what we learned in those 12 schools can be scaled once we figure out the data from the 30 schools we'll go in front of all the 15 superintendents with Dr. Woods Health everybody else will help us get under agenda and say this is what we found out this is what we did is this something we can scale to all 15 school districts how much did that cost absolutely except the cost of the backbone which was to call the meetings to work on the process the time in the schools they were contacting parents anyway usually with letters good letters, second letters, third letters then a phone call and the assistant principal changing a process but I know it works because you don't get a 5% improvement you get 50% improvement so that's because you're all working together the other thing is is to advocate for the entire community looking at a manner of policies to improve education system that's why we're working with Region 29 Avatar and we're working on other things because we know if we can fix with aligning some of those things it helps all of our school districts it moves everything faster from schools and then communicating to their community because we've only been using this model in P16 for less about a year now less than a year this will be our first time we're going to go out with an annual report or a project report of what we've learned what we've measured, kind of a baseline this is what we know about Bear County and then we'll have like three years worth of data third grade reading graduation rates retention rates what's the cost of retention in students kindergarten through third grade we also know there are school districts that saved over $2 million because they've improved their retention rates in the last in the last year over $2 million because they've done a better job so sometimes it's getting out the good work school districts are doing very well not always what we need to improve on the other issue is you've always said how many of these collective impact models are there? well right now in San Antonio I'm aware of three there is the East Side Promise neighborhood there's diploma and there's P16 plus so my point is you can only use the same model but how are we the same and how are we different? East Side Promise neighborhood looks at one neighborhood it actually has a cluster of schools in one school district SAISD look over diplomas diplomas is going to be in San Antonio but with four ISDs and two higher ed basically Elmo College is a UTSA to start because that's what the charge was for the diplomas initial project P16 plus we do the whole county a region for the regional P16 for the state for this area we are the SA2020 lead education person group because what do we do? we convene we provide data we facilitate that's my whole mission I don't have another mission diplomas is a piece it has a backbone that's the partnership East Side Promise neighborhood is a program within United Way but it's huge and it's using that model we're a strive organization that's our only mission in life is to facilitate B-Switzerland look for money be a hot mess most of the time but the other thing we have to realize is that we all work together in San Antonio leadership on all three groups are cross pollinated we have the head of United Way the CEO of United Way, Howard Nolan on the council we have our superintendents that are involved in all these many of which are on our council which are on diplomas which are helping inside so by having a few leaders that are across all the versions we align so we don't duplicate them for instance P16 plus is working on 3 year olds to 8 year olds even though I'm assisting diplomas I'm working on the advisory council East Side Promise neighborhood I help with a lot of things that are going on in town because I really need to do that because I'm 3k through 34 years old people that have grown up but the issue is what am I deep diving on I'm deep diving on 3 year olds to 8 year olds because I can't work on everything unless somebody must give me a whole bunch of money but the issue for me is that we are the same model we just have different focuses the P16 is a regional focus the other one is the alignment of all three collaboratives think of how we can scale this by working together and how can we sustain this how to find a way if we find something really good we need to work with our school districts and work with our colleges and universities because otherwise if you improve in education who sustains this and it's usually the institutions the systems themselves need to sustain with our health what everyone is telling me but our mission is simple we want to ensure that every child dramatically improves their educational success in school, college and career across their county and then our vision is to convene facilitate educational enhancing efforts to inspire and prepare our community's families and students for success those are things we all agree on it's just how we get to them it's different so when we look for funding I'm looking for everything I'm looking for funding like this doesn't work for me but I'll send them over to Eastside or vice versa Eastside Promise neighborhood or Diplomas we find a funder that's really interested in Latino-specific things we can send them to Diplomas our goal is that we just make it work when we are working it's not about the credit it's about the outcomes so as long as we focus on outcomes which we do what is the number well our number we know is 85% for college revenues we know that we want 50% of people 25 years in the older to have something more than a high school education we've all agreed on that as a community so we're fortunate to have a mayor and a vision that we kind of are North Star and then all of us are kind of working toward those big outcomes but we have lots of things to do so my job is the ED and everybody that works for me is to how can we help you get there we don't see me leading a whole lot of stuff because that's not my job my job is to help you do your job or to get someone to help you do your job or to find money for you so that is the difference and that is the same of what we do so we're lucky we have millions of dollars going in this I promise neighborhood we have money coming from Lemona and P16 is out there looking for money too for these same goals so that will be collective think of it, we're all moving toward the Senate class and it's because of you you do a fabulous job very often but you do you do a great job and my job is to make sure people know that San Antonio is getting better that are in dropouts fewer dropouts higher graduation rates we have 154,000 people going to college we do need some work however I'm persistent in college and getting college degrees but I personally have hope by the numbers if you have over 150,000 people going to college you know they have hope they're just going to get cool and finish they need the skills so it's because of you you guys do a great job so I'm brief I'm open for questions and I'm gorgeous too have any questions? I'm going to wrap this up when you walk out of here just so that you know