[While mayor of Indianapolis] I [Stephen Goldsmith] engaged in a ten-year battle with the independent school board—and the even more independent school bureaucracy—to reform the city’s public school system. Despite tens of millions of dollars of social programming and countless hours of professional and volunteer service, we could claim nothing but consistently awful results.
Many years later the issue popped up again with a call from the respected innovator J.B. Schramm, whom I knew from my work as chairman of CNCS [the Corporation for National and Community Service]. Schramm, the inventor of the College Summit program, wanted my advice in his effort to bring the program to Indianapolis. College Summit claimed it could help generate enough change to improve the city’s dismal high school graduation rates (at that time less than one-third for young men of color).[1] I knew Schramm was succeeding in other cities and assumed he could change the future trajectory for many Indy students.
The story of how College Summit ended up in Indianapolis provides hope not only for the city’s youth, but also for thousands of Americans who aspire to make a transformative difference in their communities and in the country. Just after Schramm graduated from divinity school in 1990, he started tutoring students at a teen center in a low-income housing project in Washington, D.C., in the hope that they would pursue higher education. Over and over, Schramm watched capable students fail to matriculate to college for lack of the institutional and family support and social networks available to most middle-class youth.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Civic Entrepreneurship — Social Edge
Author:Excerpt from "The Power of Social Innovation"
