JOINING THE CHORUS

What We’ve Learned: Advocacy groups are more effective when they speak with one voice.

Our goal is to ensure that every student graduates from high school with the skills to succeed in college and life. In practice, that often means focusing on those most often deprived of that opportunity: low-income, minority students. According to almost every measure we have—including graduation rates—African American, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian students fare worse than white students. Moreover, the worst schools in the country—the roughly 10 percent of schools that account for about 50 percent of the dropouts nationwide—are overwhelmingly composed of these students.

That’s why civil rights organizations are a natural champion for better high schools. On their own, many of these organizations have been working on education for years, but they have never before come together to make high school reform a key civil rights issue.

That is, until now. Last year, we gave a series of grants to help create the Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE), a coalition of nine leading civil rights organizations focused on education and equity. CHSE has two goals. First, to help each member organization expand its individual efforts to promote change in our schools. Second, and more importantly, to help all the members unite around a common policy agenda for high school reform. Instead of nine different groups with nine different messages, CHSE will act as a single coalition advancing a single message about the reforms our schools need.

CHSE has agreed to organize its work around six specific policy positions, ranging from better ways to make sure schools are accountable for their students’ performance to more sophisticated data systems to measure progress. They have been sharing their policy recommendations in a series of co-authored editorials, briefings on Capitol Hill, and roundtable discussions with other key education organizations.

CHSE is quickly becoming an important national voice for school reform, but its influence also filters down to the community level. Ultimately, high schools won’t improve until people in the communities being poorly served by failing schools demand change. The organizations that make up CHSE have been working to empower minority communities for decades.

So as CHSE begins to speak out more forcefully on education issues, so will their constituents at the grass-roots level. In fact, two leading Hispanic organizations, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, recently brought more than 200 parents from around the country to Washington, D.C. to meet with their representatives about education reform.

CHSE aims to continue to collaborate to build a broad base for a new civil rights movement for better high schools.