A collaborative effort between the City of San Jose, the Santa Clara County Office of Education, school districts, charter schools, business leaders, and community based organizations with a mission to eliminate the achievement gap in San Jose by the year 2020.

Project Description:

SJ2020 is a collaborative effort between the City of San Jose, the Santa Clara County Office of Education, school districts, charter schools, business leaders, and community based organizations with a mission to eliminate the achievement gap in San Jose by the year 2020.

About 40,000 San José students – nearly half of all public students tested – are not proficient in their grade level skills. About 2,300 middle and high school students drop out each year. These students are left with much fewer options and are more likely to be unemployed, rely on public assistance, and engage in criminal behavior.  To address this problem, the County Office of Education, the City of San José, educators, business leaders and community organizations have launched SJ2020. The goal: to eliminate the achievement gap in San José by the year 2020.

Since we launched the SJ2020 initiative we have engaged education leaders, our business community, NGO’s, and political leaders to develop our collective impact strategy that helps take the best practices in education to scale across Silicon Valley.

SJ2020 has defined our goals, developed matrix to measure our progress towards those goals, and drafted a strategy to build a backbone organization that will be able to continue our work beyond the Mayor and Superintendent’s terms in office. We are now in the process of turning this draft strategy into an action plan that will guide us in our efforts to build the backbone organization, develop a long term funding strategy, and create a functional governance structure.  We will work with American Leadership Forum/Common Good Collaborative to develop a strategy for each goal and how to connect the four goals.  We are now challenged with how to create the right governance structure, operating plan and communication strategy that will be the business model for this organization.

Identifying a separate backbone organization, leadership, and staff independent from the Mayor and Superintendent’s Offices would help ensure that the SJ2020 initiative is institutionalized in spite of any inevitable turnovers in leadership.

We would like help from HBS Community Partners to perform a landscape assessment of the different program and service providers in the education space serving Santa Clara County/City of San Jose.  This would include a market segmentation and recommendations of the players who should be involved with SJ2020.

The results of this project will help us formulate the right operating model and governance structure for the organization.

There currently does not exist a mechanism that connects education funders to programs and schools. Restructuring SJ2020 as a conduit between funders and service providers would promote stakeholder and community buy-in to the initiative and help funders identify effective, quality programs that address the goals of the larger initiative.

Intrigued? Contact us here!