The Problem

14,000. That’s about how many different school districts there are in the United States. Local control of education is a good thing – one of ESN’s founders taught in rural Mississippi, the other in suburban Phoenix, and those are two very different places. Yet we both saw the same glaring problem: what one district did effectively, the district just down the road struggled with. Even if districts have a desire to adapt what other districts are doing, most are so swamped with the day-to-day demands of running schools that they lack the ability to do so. At best, districts contract with outside service providers but do not permanently build their internal capacity. This is a fundamental crisis of our educational infrastructure, and it’s holding us back. Success is not being shared, and students are suffering as a result.

The Opportunity

There is a stirring need for an organization that will exist in the space alongside school districts, working with them to identify their unique needs and priorities, then finding proven-successful programs and adapting them—or developing a new program from these successful models—for the local context. The Education Success Network (ESN) will be the first organization of this kind. We are more than just consultants—we are collaborative thought-partners that work through development and implementation, connecting our partners into a powerful network. We believe in community development and meeting the unique needs of each community, not providing a panacea or one-size-fits-all solution. We are not aimed at helping only one district or state, scaling other nonprofits, or working only in large urban areas. This need exists for millions of students in hundreds of districts, and we must meet the challenge with equal scope. We are facing a unique moment in history and a renewed push for innovation in education; if successful, we can improve the very foundation of public education in this country by focusing on what works and building the capacity of our educational communities from their very core.