"The only thing that is broken in my community is the will to achieve."
T. Willard Fair, Co-Director; President and CEO of The Urban League of Greater Miami
"Good educational policy should make it easy for sincere, hard-working individuals to produce extraordinary results; superheroes need not apply."
Monte Joffee, Ed.D., Co-Director; Co-founder and founding principal, The Renaissance Charter School, New York City.
The Will to Achieve: A K-12 Education Surge Policy is a comprehensive national education reform proposal. It will enable all students to crack the code and break the barriers to academic achievement.
The Will to Achieve is intuitive, non-ideological, and parent-centered. It consists of only four initiatives; yet it has the power to revitalize American education. It is a "surge policy" which can rapidly launch wave after wave of human talent with a "can do" spirit that will enable all our children develop the will to achieve. Educational stagnation will yield only to such united and protracted efforts of parents, educators, policy-makers, academics, entrepreneurs, family members, and community leaders.
Our pilot project is with 13 schools within the Miami community of Liberty City. Working with Miami Dade County Public Schools, the first stage of implementation began with the 2016-2017 school year. Planning has started on the second stage which will launch in the 2017-2018 school year.
Our four initiatives are: (1) comprehensible standards that all parents can understand and support; (2) smart and open assessment; (3) personalized instruction through mobile technology; and (4) new models of the schoolhouse where needed.