Colleagues and friends:
In January of 2020, The Learning Accelerator team launched our first-ever formal strategic plan. Core to it was the belief that efforts to transform public education don’t fail due to a lack of interest, great ideas, or new solutions. We saw, and still see, tremendous investment in innovation and improvement across the nation, from the level of the student to the sector.
Rather, what we did see hindering these transformative efforts was a lack of connection and coherence across them. People and organizations often work in isolation, with inequitable access to the knowledge, resources, and other entities they need to move forward, and we lacked mechanisms to act together. By ensuring learning was more open, elevating and making great ideas actionable, and networking efforts against shared challenges, we set out to act as a critical “engine” to accelerate collective progress. Executing this plan (tested in the early days of and throughout the pandemic) taught us a lot about the importance and criticality of this sector-connecting work.
As we approach TLA’s tenth anniversary, our team has been working to refresh our strategy and set a vision for our next five years. Informed by conversations with hundreds of educators and stakeholders across the country as well as the lessons we’ve learned working alongside them, we’ve pondered the uncertainty communities will face as well as the richness of ideas and efforts underway. Through this, we’ve become even more convinced that building an effective, engaging, and equitable future for every learner will lie not in our ability to pick and scale one “right” solution or model, but to help decision-makers across the K-12 education ecosystem learn as quickly as we can to navigate their journeys and make choices together.
We’ll be looking back on our last decade of work and sharing more about our next five years in the upcoming months. Looking forward, we’re doubling down on a vision for learning where every child gets what they need to reach their full and unique potential. We know the advancement of this vision will look different in every community. We’re placing our bets on actively supporting the learning capacity and collective action of individuals, organizations, and the sector at large to get there — and we’re thrilled to take this journey with you.
With gratitude for your partnership,
Beth Rabbitt
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