Envision Learning Partners is delighted and honored to introduce Alliance College-Ready Public Schools. ELP and Alliance kicked off our partnership in the 2018-19 school year. In our first year we worked together to deeply engage around building Alliance’s Graduate Profile (shown below). In 2019-20, we have been engaged with the Alliance team to develop a vertical articulation of the graduate profile.
Fifteen years ago a group of Los Angeles educators, civil rights activists, and community leaders believed in great public schools. They believed all kids could learn, regardless of zip code or background. They believed they could make a difference––and they did. Together, they founded Alliance College-Ready Public Schools to challenge the status quo for public education.
Today, 95% of Alliance seniors graduate high school and are accepted to college; 73% to a four-year college or university. In comparison, when Alliance opened its first public charter school in 2004 at the corner of Western and Martin Luther King Boulevard, the high school graduation rate in Los Angeles was 49%––many Los Angeles high schools were known as drop-out factories.
Eva Luc is the Director of Strategic Initiatives and College Success at Alliance and has shared her thoughts on our work together below.
Alliance Design Team working at a Vertical Alignment Workshop
What have you learnt during this process?
It’s critical to authentically engage the communities we serve and the staff on the ground, because they are ultimately the ones impacted by and carrying out the work, and they deserve to be front and center in the process. Otherwise, you risk creating for and not with folks. We are proud that school leaders, teachers, counselors, parent specialists, families, and scholars past and present co-created the Alliance Graduate Profile, and are also part of the vertical articulation and design teams.
Based on our scholars’ experiences, research and best practices, we know that academic strength is just part of what makes a successful Alliance graduate in whatever their chosen path beyond high school might be. The Graduate Profile provides a north star of the full set of skills (beyond just the academics) that we, as a network, should be focusing on. It allows us to have a cohesive vision of scholar success that we work towards collectively.
Is there one story you can share that illustrates how this work is benefitting your school and your students?
So far, the Graduate Profile has already impacted Alliance scholars in a positive way. Our Graduate Profile emphasized social and emotional learning so much so that Alliance created a new team – Scholar, Family and Community Services – this year to develop a framework for Social Emotional Learning and align resources to support that framework.
Read more about our partnership with Alliance in our January Guest Blog, written by Deeper Learning Coach, Morgan Vien.
