Early Matters Dallas - A Historic Coalition on Early Education

In 2006, the board of The Dal­las Foun­da­tion deter­mined that ear­ly child­hood learn­ing was one of the most impor­tant areas of lever­age for their phil­an­thropy. In part­ner­ship with The Mead­ows Foun­da­tion, they embarked on a learn­ing tour which took them to San Anto­nio, Hous­ton, and Austin. After a year of learn­ing, the group decid­ed that they want­ed to do some­thing big­ger than they could indi­vid­u­al­ly, and agreed to each invest as one unit: Zero to Five Fun­ders Col­lab­o­ra­tive. They chose a place-based approach in a neglect­ed neigh­bor­hood and an out­come of school readi­ness for the community’s chil­dren. The Zero to Five Fun­ders Col­lab­o­ra­tion now includes 34 indi­vid­u­als, fam­i­ly, cor­po­rate and com­mu­ni­ty foundations.

Sev­en years of fund­ing lat­er, with addi­tion­al men­tor­ing from orga­ni­za­tions in Tul­sa and Hart­ford, the ZFFC opened a phys­i­cal loca­tion, Bach­man Lake Togeth­er Fam­i­ly Cen­ter, that serves fam­i­lies with young chil­dren with a vari­ety of pro­grams includ­ing edu­ca­tion, health ser­vices, and finan­cial coach­ing, all aimed at increas­ing school readi­ness in this neigh­bor­hood. This col­lab­o­ra­tion was impor­tant because it gal­va­nized much of the giv­ing com­mu­ni­ty around a sin­gle, impor­tant top­ic about which they had become educated.

This project required col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Dal­las Inde­pen­dent School Dis­trict because area ele­men­tary school prin­ci­pals were crit­i­cal to neigh­bor­hood suc­cess and the abil­i­ty to deter­mine if the pro­grams were, in fact, rais­ing the lev­el of school readi­ness. Because area prin­ci­pals were recep­tive, sup­port­ive and, most impor­tant­ly, good lead­ers for their cam­pus­es, this col­lab­o­ra­tion offered an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the fund­ing com­mu­ni­ty to con­tribute to the improve­ment of Ear­ly Child­hood Learn­ing and prac­tices at the District.

About 3 or 4 years into this project, retired Gold­man-Sachs exec­u­tive Todd Williams stud­ied a suc­cess­ful cra­dle to career pro­gram, Strive Part­ner­ship in Cincin­nati, and brought the pro­gram to Dal­las. He start­ed a col­lec­tive impact project called the Com­mit Part­ner­ship that began doing two key crit­i­cal things. The first is bring­ing the vari­ety of agen­cies, orga­ni­za­tions and dis­tricts to the table in a neu­tral set­ting. Because of the ZFFC, every­one was aware of the fun­ders’ desire that more col­lab­o­ra­tion take place at the ser­vice provider lev­el. Com­mit was the enti­ty which could con­vene the group.

Com­mit also began to col­lect, inte­grate, ana­lyze and report out data from a vari­ety of sources to quan­ti­fy the prob­lems and chal­lenges in objec­tive terms. The abil­i­ty to infuse the con­ver­sa­tions between providers, dis­tricts, and fun­ders with data enabled our com­mu­ni­ty to coa­lesce around com­mon goals and objec­tives. Addi­tion­al­ly, beyond Dal­las, data has had the impact of shap­ing and chang­ing pri­or­i­ti­za­tions of oth­er local school dis­tricts: Mesquite and Fort Worth ISD, which col­lec­tive­ly edu­cate 120,000 stu­dents, have made 3^rd grade lit­er­a­cy the hall­mark of their strate­gic plans.

In 2011, a Dal­las ISD trustee led the effort to move the dis­trict to full day from a mix of half day and full day Pre‑K. In 2013, the dis­trict cre­at­ed an exec­u­tive direc­tor posi­tion focused exclu­sive­ly on Pre‑K, and Alan Cohen moved from Com­mit to Dal­las ISD to fill the role, with the goal of increas­ing the num­ber of chil­dren ready for Kindergarten.

With a few key ini­tia­tives under­way, Cohen also began work­ing with the com­mu­ni­ty in 2014 to devel­op a more com­pre­hen­sive long-term plan to increase kinder­garten readi­ness. That strat­e­gy, for the first time, artic­u­lat­ed a focus on improv­ing kinder­garten readi­ness through four key levers: increas­ing access for fam­i­lies, cre­at­ing demand for Pre‑K, devel­op­ing qual­i­ty, and a con­tin­u­um of care.

This strat­e­gy could not have got off the ground with­out the deep sup­port of the DISD Board of Trustees, or with­out the Boston Con­sult­ing Group, who invest­ed a team to help with devel­op­ing the strategy.

One of the major out­comes of this strat­e­gy was a major mar­ket­ing push to increase Pre‑K enroll­ment, includ­ing the launch of the first Dal­las Coun­ty Pre‑K reg­is­tra­tion cam­paign, where 5 dis­tricts and more than 75 com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions ral­lied togeth­er to increase Pre‑K enroll­ment by more than 250 per­cent across the coun­ty. Today, this effort goes far beyond Dal­las ISD to include 16 dis­tricts aligned on a com­mon Pre‑K reg­is­tra­tion week with the sup­port of near­ly 150 com­mu­ni­ty partners.

It was also dur­ing this peri­od that the Dal­las ISD team began to grow, with an empha­sis on inten­sive, job-embed­ded coach­ing for teach­ers. DISD hired its first Pre‑K Spe­cial­ists, a group of coach­es ded­i­cat­ed to part­ner­ing with Pre‑K teach­ers across the dis­trict to improve the qual­i­ty of instruc­tion for kids.

Only 2 years after the com­bined efforts of Dal­las ISD and the com­mu­ni­ty began, Dal­las was already see­ing some encour­ag­ing results. Pre‑K enroll­ment had grown and Kinder­garten Readi­ness was up by 13 per­cent­age points. Fur­ther­more, Dal­las ISD became the first dis­trict in the state to pass a pol­i­cy man­dat­ing that all eli­gi­ble 3 and 4 year olds would be served by 2025, a $60 mil­lion bud­get pri­or­i­ti­za­tion over ten years. The results gave us con­fi­dence that we were on the right track as a com­mu­ni­ty, but look­ing ahead, it was clear that to con­tin­ue the momen­tum we would need sig­nif­i­cant­ly more resources and sup­port to build on these ear­ly successes.

In recog­ni­tion of the impor­tance of align­ing the ear­ly years, the dis­trict added the own­er­ship of K‑2 to the exist­ing Pre‑K depart­ment and brought them all togeth­er under Ear­ly Learning.

In March of 2016, Derek Lit­tle joined DISD as the assis­tant super­in­ten­dent for Ear­ly Learn­ing. Supt. Lit­tle is now focused on build­ing on those ear­ly suc­cess­es by expand­ing to 3 year old pre‑K, rais­ing enroll­ment by more than 1,000 chil­dren, increas­ing align­ment from Pre-K-2^nd grade, strength­en­ing the focus on birth to eight oppor­tu­ni­ties through part­ner­ships with com­mu­ni­ty-based providers, and pilot­ing a robust, com­pre­hen­sive approach to fam­i­ly engage­ment, and improv­ing quality.

In par­al­lel to the great work at DISD, some oth­er lead­ers of ear­ly learn­ing in Dal­las (a group of folks who’ve been around these issues in key roles for sev­er­al decades) were meet­ing. They believed DISD’s suc­cess­es could be expand­ed into a strat­e­gy that incor­po­rates coun­ty­wide lens.

This idea came from a vis­it to Hous­ton for the launch of the Ear­ly Mat­ters Hous­ton ini­tia­tive. Dis­cus­sion ensued and a plan to copy the good work of Ear­ly Mat­ters Hous­ton (now a part of Good Rea­son Hous­ton) was hatched. Like Hous­ton, Dal­las had a group of cor­po­rate and phil­an­thropic lead­ers who were will­ing to take on the respon­si­bil­i­ty for lead­ing the charge on behalf of Dal­las Coun­ty chil­dren. Ear­ly Mat­ters Dal­las was formed as a vehi­cle to coor­di­nate the aware­ness and advo­ca­cy efforts and to increase fund­ing of qual­i­ty ear­ly child­hood devel­op­ment, expe­ri­ences and learning.

Ear­ly Mat­ters Dal­las, Hous­ton, Austin, San Anto­nio, Waco and El Paso have joined forces and are advo­cat­ing at the state lev­el with one voice when it comes to issues relat­ed to ear­ly learn­ing. We hope to con­tin­ue speak­ing on behalf of the 40% of chil­dren in Texas who live in one of these regions. Local­ly, Ear­ly Mat­ters Dal­las has sup­port­ed on scal­ing best prac­tices across Dal­las Coun­ty dis­tricts, result­ing in a 9%pt increase in STAAR 3^rd grade Read­ing scores since 2015.