Key Partnerships & Alliances:

The Ready-for-fifth Initiative is about bringing about a dramatic improvement in education and not about establishing a lasting organization.  It is our hope we can have the desired result and then simply disappear.  As a result, we strongly hope to partner with existing organizations and initiatives wherever possible (or at least leverage what others are doing).  The following are some key partnerships and alliances we hope to establish:

  1. Education Organizations

Some key

 

For example, once we have mobilized students to be willing to put in the effort and teachers to be committed to getting every students to succeed, we have to ensure that they have the resources needed:

  1. Computing devices, internet bandwidth, access to online learning tools, technology support services, etc.
    1. we see the role of the initiative being to:
      1. get providers to pledge to help ensure those that need resources will get them
      2. make teachers aware of the availability of resource help and encourage them to take advantage of it
    2. we would prefer not to develop our own Needs Clearing House where teachers and other can post needs and providers can find and satisfy those needs but rather work with an existing organization that provides such functionality such as DonorsChoose.org.
  2. Volunteer Mentor/Tutors
    1. we see the role of the initiative being to create a strong desire to help with a national interest movement and therefore the desire to volunteer (among senior citizens and older students)
    2. we would want to work with existing organizations that organize and provide volunteer tutoring services such as AARP-Experience Corps, United Way, etc.

Other Desired Partnerships:

  1. Press/Media Community
    1. There are a lot of aspects of this initiative that involve the press and media.
      1. Press coverage of the initiative kickoff in September
      2. Ongoing local press/media coverage during the year
    2. To that end, we hope to establish partnerships with National Press/Media Associations as well as School Newspaper Associations.  In addition we are building an advisory panel of people in the industry to advise us on both the kickoff and ongoing publicity measures and also to help us set up a mentoring functionality to help student reporters report on local educational efforts, successes and, if applicable, problems.
  2. Engaged High School Students
    1. We see that youth have the greatest stake in the welfare and productivity of their generation.  This is dependent on the educational achievement of all members of their generation.  As a result, we want older students playing a very major role in mobilizing their communities, motivating and helping younger students to learn, etc.
    2. There are a many organizations and initiatives involved in mobilizing youth and encouraging them service for their community.  We hope to be able to partner with many of these organizations to reach out and mobilize high school and university students to support the Ready-for-fifth Initiative as the start of a larger initiative to raise the potential productivity of their entire generation.
  3. Education Community
    1. We believe there is no one better positioned to bring about dramatic improvement in educational achievement that the education community itself.  As a result, we fervently hope that many educational organizations and associations will cosponsor the entire initiative.
    2. Organizations we envision partnering with us include the teachers’ unions, associations of teachers of mathematics, associations of school principals and superintendents of schools, etc.