Increasing Baccalaureate Degree Attainment in Louisville: A Proposed Blueprint for Community Action

Overview & Synopsis

Across the country, cities and regions have used community-wide partnerships to improve the educational attainment of their citizens. The most established of these partnerships have seen substantial education gains during their tenure. The community of Louisville, Kentucky has embarked on a similar effort to improve educational attainment. Nearly two years ago, the Business Leaders for Education (BLE), coordinated through Greater Louisville Inc., asked the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), a Washington, DC-based organization with experience in community-wide education improvement efforts, to guide them in assessing how best to improve educational attainment within Louisville. In 2008, BHEF agreed to provide strategic guidance to this group of education leaders and recommended it convene key education and community leaders. At the same time, Mayor Abramson convened the Mayor's Education Roundtable (MER), a group comprised of community leaders from all sectors--including business, K-12 education, postsecondary education, and community organizations--to address the education challenges facing the region. Following these developments, BHEF committed to working with the Louisville community to develop a plan that will help the community reach its goal of increasing educational attainment. This document is the end result. While developing this plan, BHEF interviewed dozens of community stakeholders and attended many meetings of concerned stakeholder groups. The goals, strategies, and recommendations in this plan were all garnered from this work. The framing goals are: (1) Create a strong college-going culture in Louisville's schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods; (2) Increase alignment and rigor across the K-12 and postsecondary education systems; (3) Ensure that the citizens of Louisville can access and afford postsecondary education; (4) Ensure all Louisville students will be able to progress through postsecondary institutions to ultimately attain needed postsecondary credentials; and (5) Galvanize Louisville's education, business, and community leaders to achieve a long-term, common education agenda. In turn, the plan presents strategies and recommendations that arise from the dozens of interviews conducted and from analyses of successful community efforts across the country. This blueprint for action is designed to provide comprehensive and systemic guidance for the Louisville community toward its 2020 education attainment target. In achieving this end goal, Louisville will serve as a national leader for community education improvement and as a model that can be replicated in other regions of the state. (Contains 1 footnote and 14 endnotes.) [Draft plan presented to the Mayor's Education Roundtable retreat, July 23, 2009, Louisville, KY. Revised plan delivered to the Mayor's Education Roundtable on August 28, 2009.]