Building A School Readinesss Movement in the Nation's Most Decentralized School District: From Data Collection to Community Engagement

The Orleans Public Education Network (OPEN)  is an education-focused community-based organization committed to ensuring school success and equity in public education in New Orleans, leveraging particpatory research and civic engagement as essential elements to sustain positive outcomes.

In 2011,  OPEN assumed leadership of the city’s effort to collect Early Development Instrument (EDI) data citywide. Analyses provide population level data about the percent of children in Kindergarten who have or lack the developmental foundations to master the curriculum.  In the nation’s most decentralized school district, reaching high levels of neighborhood saturation required working with more than 80 public schools and 40 governing entities.  

Building a local coalition of organizations with vested interest in school readiness representing early childhood, K-12, charter schools, philanthropy, and other nonprofit organizations, OPEN built an advisory council to support data collection. Since 2011, the organizaton and its collaborating partners have taken available data on readiness of the city’s five-year-olds from 2 percent to 65 percent of children of this age. Along the way, a coalition has spun  off a parent leadership program, a collaborative of funders have worked as active partners supporting the program and building local capacity to institutionalize EDI data collection. Today, OPEN is working actively in three communities with parents, neighborhood associations using the data to strengthen supports for families with young children through its Parents as First Educator Working Groups. Policymakes and business leaders are cultivated through a campaign to build Champions for the Young Child.

OPEN will share its successes and lessons learned.