A backbone’s role in a collective is often to facilitate collaboration among partners and help the group make progress toward a shared goal. This can be a complex challenge, as the backbone doesn’t hold formal authority or decision-making power. Instead, it must rely on its central coordinating position to influence, build alignment, and advocate for the collaborative’s mission.
In this podcast episode, we explore how a backbone can influence partners to take action, without holding a position of authority. We talk with Susan Dawson, the founder and former CEO of E3 Alliance, and author of the new book, Changing Education Systems: Wisdom Gained by E3 Alliance and Driving Effective Changes in Data and Collaboration.
Through her years at E3 Alliance, Susan learned many ways a backbone can influence change. In this conversation, she shares the necessary “best-ats” or core competencies a backbone team needs to activate multiple layers of influence, including:
– Delivering results
– Building relationships of trust
– Having the best data
– Facilitating stakeholders with diverse missions and perspectives
– Being doggedly persistent
The discussion also dives into powerful examples of E3’s work, showcasing their own dogged persistence to deliver meaningful results in education for children and families in Central Texas.
Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
- Book: Changing Education Systems:: Wisdom Gained by E3 Alliance in Driving Effective Change Using Data and Collaboration by Susan Dawson
- E3 Alliance
- E3 Alliance Data and Trends Portal
- The University of Texas at Austin College of Education
- The University of Texas at Austin Education Research Center
More on Collective Impact
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we explore how a backbone can influence partners to take action, without holding a position of authority. A backbone’s role in a collective is often to facilitate collaboration among partners and help the group make progress toward a shared goal. This can be a complex challenge, as the backbone doesn’t hold formal authority or decision-making power. Instead, it must rely on its central coordinating position to influence, build alignment, and advocate for the collaborative’s mission.
To better understand how a backbone can influence without authority, we talk with Susan Dawson, the founder and former CEO of E3 Alliance, and author of the new book, Changing Education Systems: Wisdom Gained by E3 Alliance and Driving Effective Changes in Data and Collaboration.
Through her years at E3 Alliance, Susan learned many ways a backbone can influence change. We talk about the necessary “best-ats” or core competencies a backbone team needs to activate multiple layers of influence, and dive into some powerful examples of E3’s work to deliver meaningful results in education for children and families in Central Texas.
Serving as interviewer today is the Collective Impact Forum’s Executive Director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. I’m Jennifer Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum. You all are in for a treat today. I am thrilled to be joined by a longtime leader and dare I say legend in the field of collective impact, Susan Dawson.
Susan is the founder and recently retired CEO of E3 Alliance, a cradle-to-career collective impact initiative in Central Texas. Since its founding in 2006 E3 has profoundly influenced the education and related systems in Central Texas leading to improved outcomes for thousands of young people and families across the region.
I have known Susan and the work of E3 for more than a decade. There are so many wisdoms that we could explore with Susan today and in fact many have been captured in her recent book, Changing Education Systems: Wisdom Gained by E3 Alliance and Driving Effective Changes in Data and Collaboration. Having recently read the book it is truly a master class in collective impact and includes scores of examples, case studies, and vignettes from their work.
In today’s conversation we’re going to dive deeply into one of the many areas that Susan reflects on, how a backbone team can influence without authority. This is an essential skill and posture for a backbone team to take to really accelerate and drive toward outcomes when the backbone team doesn’t formally have authority over your partners. You aren’t the boss of many people around the table. You aren’t always a funder of the work that’s happening, and not a policymaker.
So learning how to influence folks in service of moving toward a common agenda is so essential. So, without further ado I am delighted to introduce Susan and bring you into the conversation. So welcome, Susan.
Susan Dawson: Thank you so much, Jennifer. I’m glad to be here and I appreciate you doing these podcasts because it’s great to share wisdom with others and learn some others at the same time.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Wonderful. So, Susan, I did a bit of a brief overview but I’d love to start by asking you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what brought you to this work.
Susan Dawson: Well, I’d start by saying I’m an engineer by training so if I talk in outlines, you’ll have to forgive me for that because I think that’s required in the rulebook for engineers. But I worked in the tech sector for about two decades after getting my MBA and I was also the chair of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, and you mentioned master class before. Being chair of the Chamber offers a master class in learning deeply about your community and in learning about all areas of our community, transportation, air quality, workforce development, education, on and on. The one thing that I have really always been passionate about is education being a platform for changing lives and for preparing future generations.
So after two decades in the private tech sector I decided to leave and found what became E3 Alliance for education equals economics to create a platform for real systems change in education.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: So for folks who aren’t super familiar with E3, can you tell us a little bit more about the work and some of the results that E3 has contributed to in Central Texas?
Susan Dawson: Sure, I’d be glad to. E3, we officially founded it on May 1, 2006, so we’ve been working through this journey for almost two decades in driving systems change. We have a lot of examples that are not necessarily straightforward. We found that you have to iterate and fail forward and try and try again and see what works and use the different tools of continuous improvement to have the kind of impact on systems, not just on individual students or 10, or a hundred, or a thousand students, but for tens and hundreds of thousands of students, how do we change systems. So we have many examples of that and I’ll share more in detail, but for instance, closing the gap between high-performing students, accessing advanced math pathways by over 90 percent, saving our region $37,000,000 just by reducing student absences, and many others that we can share.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yes, there are so many and those are two really illustrative ones that really already bring to life the system change dimension of what E3 has taken on.
So I already alluded to this but you’ve recently written a book, so first, congratulations. That’s a huge undertaking. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about what motivated you to take on the book project.
Susan Dawson: Well, so, first, if anybody has ever described writing a book as a pain in the ass, they were correct. Not so much writing the book, capturing the ideas and putting them on paper was actually pretty easy, but the whole publishing process is a lot more tedious than one might think, and we’re really trying to get this out into the hands of practitioners as quickly as we can.
But the history is that we’ve been, as I said, doing this work in education systems change since 2006 and well over a decade ago, Hanna Gourgey and I decided that we needed to take all the lessons that we’d learned and write a book about it, and for a whole variety of reasons that just never happened. And over Thanksgiving break, after I had announced my retirement, which has turned out only to be a semi-retirement, but nevertheless, on Thanksgiving break I woke up one morning at 3:30 in the morning with an outline of the book in my head, and so I said, damn, I’ve just got to go ahead and write it. So I took a few days and did a first draft and of course it’s been through some edits, but now we’re very excited that it’s coming out and hopefully in the hands of practitioners right in the middle of May.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, and you share an incredible breadth of lessons and as you call them, wisdoms, in the book. And as I mentioned, one area that you discuss that I think is really relevant to so many folks engaged in collective impact work is reflecting on this idea of how a backbone team can have influence without holding authority.
This is really a trick for all the reasons that we’ve begun to surface. You’re guiding the work, you’re not controlling the work, and you’re nobody’s boss of folks around the table. And so you actually share several strategies for working through this which are super helpful and unique. That’s where I want to dive in. There are many other areas you explore in the book but we’ll focus on this area today. And you mentioned six best-ats, which is really what you are referring to, what it takes to influence without authority. So, what are those six best-ats and how did you come up with them? And maybe we could talk a little bit at a high level and then take them one by one to understand more about each.
Susan Dawson: That would be great, Jennifer. I will say also that you’re absolutely right that they are all tied into how do you lead through influence rather than authority. In fact, my marketing people always get appalled when I say this, but I say all we’re trying to undertake is massive systemic change with utterly no authority over anybody to do anything. And it’s true because no school district boards report to us, no college admissions officers have to follow what we ask. We have to work in conjunction with students and families and communities and education partners at all levels of the spectrum to be able to enact the change that we want to see that our data shows needs to happen, but we can’t tell people what to do. We have to work together to be able to develop, to understand root causes first of what’s behind the data and then to develop potential solutions, to vet those with communities, and then to undertake them.
So, in doing so, we developed these six what we call best-ats. Other organizations might call them core competencies. They’re the things that as an organization we really need to be better at than anybody else in this work in order to succeed the way that we want to succeed. So what is it that we need to do, not individually because any given individual will be best at something or some things but as an organization what do we have to be absolutely best at?
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah. So you have a list of best-ats and maybe I will list them and then we can dive into them one by one. So you talk about delivering results, building relationships of trust, having the best data, facilitating stakeholders with diverse missions and perspectives, and being doggedly persistent. Now we’ve whet folks’ appetites but let’s take them one by one. So you start with talking about delivering results and the backbone can really execute on behalf of partners and that’s essential but tell us a little bit more about of what you mean when you talk about delivering results.
Susan Dawson: I’m going to back up a little bit even from there because in order to deliver results you have to figure out what it is that you as an organization can influence and can do to deliver those results. So I would say our number one best-at is doing the right things. We’ll never have enough resources, enough people, enough money, enough public influence, enough political influence to do everything that we want to do. So how is it that we determine what are the right things to do? What’s going to create the largest impact? What’s going to benefit the most number of students in the best possible way?
No organization can be a hundred percent right at this, and as I said, you have to iterate, you have to learn from what’s not working and move forward. But we try to make sure that 75 to 80 percent of the time we can make sure that the data tells us which direction to go, what strategies we can try to undertake in conjunction with, because again, we can’t tell them what to do in conjunction with our partners and then figure out are those things working, are they delivering the results that we want to see?
And if not, we have to be willing to let them go to be able to focus on other efforts. So 75 to 80 percent of the time we have to be doing the absolute right things that we think are going to have the most impact on the most number of students in a positive way, close equity gaps, and then measure the impact that they have and if we need to change course.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Can you tell me a little bit more about how you go through that process of determining what the right thing is to do?
Susan Dawson: First of all, all the work that we do is grounded in data, so we look for data insights about what are the trends, what are the outcomes, what are the gaps that we see between different student populations, what is the potential cause of those gaps, how do we promote equity, how do we promote higher outcomes. All this is based on data but then it can’t happen without collaboration so we bring together collaborators often who may never have worked before but may be experts in a particular area like attendance or like math pathways or developing school readiness, and we bring together those experts and influencers and then vet possible solutions or possible strategies with a broader community with the communities that we are working with, and then once we develop what in the collective impact jargon would be called a common agenda of what is it that we want to change and what would success look like and how would we measure it.
Then we start working on that to deliver the results that we need because sometimes as you know well, Jennifer, in education systems and in any large complex social systems change can be appallingly slow and creating the sense of urgency to deliver results that we know need to happen to improve student lives and student outcomes is paramount.
So we also just need to be willing to look at and say, is this working the way that our common agenda said that it should? Are we delivering the results that we wanted to, needed to, or do we need to change course or do we need to entirely drop that line of work, that initiative, and move on to something else?
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, thank you, Susan. As you’ve said, there’s so many directions you could focus in trying to shift these complex systems, so hearing you talk through that makes a lot of sense. And you already just mentioned again delivering results, so let’s stick with that one and hear a little bit more about how delivering results is one of the best-ats and helps you influence without authority.
Susan Dawson: In delivering results we find that it’s a balance. We also talk about embracing creative tensions. So for instance, there is a creative tension that we have identified between urgency, because we want to make change happen quickly, and inclusiveness, because we want, not everybody because that’s impossible, but at least the right people, the right influencers, change agents whether or not they have a formal title, a formal phone number that you can reach out. Who are those people that influence change? How do we bring them together and how do we create an inclusive environment of collaboration to drive that change?
So that balance between urgency and inclusiveness often guides how we deliver results. We want to do it fast. We want to show the results. We want to measure the results but we also don’t want to leave players behind, those whose lives are impacted by the kinds of changes that we are trying to make that need to be at the table and need to not just be informed about changes that we’re making but actually part of the designing the changes that we’re trying to make.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yeah, balancing urgency and inclusion is such an art in this work, so that really resonates. The next thing you talk about, Susan, is building relationships of trust. This probably isn’t surprising for folks doing collective impact work but tell us a little bit more how you see this tied to that area of like creating influence with your partners.
Susan Dawson: Yes, that’s a great founding tenet of ours because we often talk about, we don’t need to be loved as E3 Alliance. We don’t need to even be liked, but we need to be trusted. If people don’t trust us that we are doing something because we believe that it truly will improve the lives of our students and our families and not because we have a vested interest in it or not because we’re trying to drive a political agenda. If we can help them understand what’s the data behind this and does this objectively have the potential to make the change. It may not always make the change but is it based on objective data and is it something that we can develop those deep relationships of trust with different players across the community. That really is the foundation not for bringing people to the table, but for keeping them at the table because systems change is really hard. It takes not months but often many, many years, and so if you want to keep people at the table driving towards this common agenda of the change that you wanted together improve, that you wanted together make, you have to have those relationships of trust to keep people willing to work together through this hard slog.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: The next one you talk about, Susan, is having the best data and one of E3’s superpowers really is using data to learn and to motivate and influence partners. So tell me a little bit more about how you’ve used data to influence without authority.
Susan Dawson: So as I said in the introduction, I am an engineer so I’m naturally a geek but we have brought together people who can understand data not for data’s sake, not for publishing papers or publishing articles that are going to sit on a shelf somewhere but to drive action. How do we understand if we had the answer to this question, is that something that we could potentially take action on, and if not, why are we spending time looking for that data?
So we designed the research questions about does this really have the potential to drive action and then we do sometimes shallow research, sometimes shallow data collection that might be capturing what the state already publishes and putting it into a format where it’s not just accessible but it is understandable and it is actionable by our partners, and then sometimes we have to do much deeper research to follow a student cohort for instance over a long period of time to see what factors changed either with that student population or in the external environment in which they live so that we can understand can we influence these trends, can we influence these outcomes. But having that baseline of data is critically important.
We’re fortunate here in the state of Texas because Texas was one of the first three states that passed legislation way back in 2005 that allowed the three different agencies in Texas, the Texas Education Agency which oversees pre-K through grade 12 systems, and then the Higher Education Coordinating Board which looks at, as it says, higher education, be that two-year or four-year universities, and then the Workforce Commission.
So those three groups, the education agency, the higher education commission, and the Workforce Commission, all were asked to provide data into a common warehouse that we call the Education Research Center, which is a very, very powerful tool so through that data warehouse we can access data for every individual student who has ever been in the system in the state of Texas for the last 30 years, de-identified of course. I can’t tell you this is Jennifer Justice or Sarah Brown but I can tell you that by a de-identified number and encrypted data space in secure ways and private ways what the actual trends are for this population, for this group, for this set of individuals over time and what are the outcomes that we saw and what are the changes in those outcomes that we have the potential to make.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Susan, is there an example of a time where you all did a new sort of analysis and then, as you said, presentation of the data that made it more accessible where you saw an aha or a lightbulb go off or it led to some sort of change or prioritization that was different than had been possible in the past based on how you all brought data to the conversation?
Susan Dawson: Yes, yes. I will go way back. Again, we started E3 Alliance in 2006. One of the first things that we did is went to the Texas Education Agency and said, look, you publish data by race and ethnicity student or the group of students and you publish data based on household income of the family but how can we even start to understand what’s driving the gaps that we see, the inequities that we see without intersecting both race and ethnicity and family income.
Very surprisingly, Texas Education Agency said, well, we’ve never collected that data, no one has ever asked. That was, again, shocking to me but having a technology background I said, well, we really need that data, and so literally I sat down with TEA, Texas Education Agency, for about three months and we developed the first algorithms in the state of Texas to intersect race and income by student population. So we were able to get much better insights into what actually drove outcomes.
Fast forward many, many years later under the Obama administration there was a national movement that many of you are probably familiar with called My Brother’s Keeper, and Austin was one of the areas that was asked to form a My Brother’s Keeper partnership and so our community was very enthusiastic about that and decided that was the right thing to do and how do we understand through the data what’s impacting especially young men of color who are seeing much greater challenges in most of the datasets than any other population, and so we met and we divided into different committees and we started talking and we went nowhere.
We just, you know, were doing the same thing and talking about the same thing that we had been talking about for decades, and E3 Alliance said, wait a minute, how about if we help this process? Is there a way that we can dive much more deeply in the data? And so we did what we called 16-say splits where we actually, for a variety of different metrics, all the way from pre-K to college enrollment and success, for many different metrics we said, OK, if we split the data out by both race, ethnicity, and income and gender, how do we understand which of those populations are succeeding or not succeeding the way that we want them to, and so that gave us some huge insights because often different populations were achieving or not showing the results that we’d like at different levels that were surprising.
For instance, young African American and Hispanic boys were taking career technology education classes at higher levels than their other peers and this potentially had the opportunity for them to succeed at higher levels. Why are they taking those classes? We also found differences, for instance, in disciplinary referrals. Almost 50 percent of our low-income Black middle schoolers, almost 50 percent were receiving serious disciplinary referrals. Well, what is happening in the system that’s causing us to identify and discipline, not just any discipline, not going to the principal’s office but suspensions, expulsions, for almost half of our young Black boys from low-income families, and so we looked at this data in new and different ways and by doing so were able to develop strategies for each of these different committees to try to close these gaps that we were seeing in different student populations.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Those are super powerful examples. I know some folks listening are probably going to envy the data capacity and skills that the E3 team holds but I hope it can serve as an inspiration and motivation to really use data in these intentional ways, looking as closely and as precisely as possible and then reflecting on the what and the so what and what do we need to do about it. So those are just really great examples, Susan.
OK, so we have a couple other wisdoms that you uplifted in this space and the next one is facilitating stakeholders with diverse missions and perspectives. Say a little bit more about this.
Susan Dawson: This is certainly something that any backbone organization has to understand and be able to develop the capacity for. Again, not every single individual will be an excellent facilitator but across the organization, across the spheres of influence that you want to have, you’re going to be bringing together people at different levels of organizations, people with different backgrounds and expertise, sometimes people with different agendas, different authority that’s described in their own job description that may be different from what you’re trying to achieve together so how do you bring together these different perspectives?
Let’s say a historically Black college and university, 1,700 students with a University of Texas with 52,000 students, and get at a common table and work together to develop strategies and a common understanding about what can be done across these diverse entities.
So really that skill of being able to bring together the conversation in a sense of trust and understanding and then facilitate that conversation towards a what is it that we really want to achieve and then drive action is really a core competency that everybody needs, a best-at that we think we need.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yes, absolutely, and I also will underscore how you mentioned that not everyone on the whole team has to be best-at all of these but you do need folks on the team that are best in all of these so great facilitators, great data folks, those may or may not be the same person but across the team those are all really important skillsets to hold.
Susan Dawson: Absolutely.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: The last one in this area that you talk about is being doggedly persistent. I love the expression. Tell me more.
Susan Dawson: Well, certainly when you are trying to drive change in complex systems, you’re going to run into a lot of barriers. You’re going to have, again, a lot of people who have different agendas or may just be mired in the way things have always been done and yet if the data shows that it’s something that we need to take action on, we need to change, how do you not take no for an answer? How do you go around, underneath, through whatever it is that it takes to drive that change to allow it to happen?
I often use the phrase the assumptive close so I often coach people when they join E3, if we can determine through the data and the common agenda that this is the right thing to do, that we shouldn’t ask someone if they want to do it but we should say, how is it that we can work together to do something? You go in with the assumption that you are going to work together because it is what is best for students and best for families and best ultimately for our community and, in fact, our economy.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I love that. How is it that we can do this together? That’s great advice. This is another area, I’m curious, Susan, if you have any examples of what this looks like, not taking no for an answer, and using that dogged persistence to lead to change that folks might have written off in the beginning.
Susan Dawson: I would say that being doggedly persistent, again, needs to be grounded in data but it also, you understand, has to take—we have to be willing to take the time that it takes to do it.
So, for instance, one of the first goals that our combined region identified in our Blueprint for Educational Change is that all students should enter kindergarten school ready. So first we had to define what does school ready mean? How do you measure it? What would be the appropriate ways to look at that? And we got together people who said, well, you know, is this really going to change? I don’t want to come to the table.
We ultimately were able to bring people to the table and they developed competencies across language and communications, early literacy, early numeracy, and social-emotional skills that would define a proper assessment that we could use to measure kindergarten readiness. We took that out to our kindergarten teachers and it was a lot of extra work for them to be able to do these assessments within the first six weeks of kindergarten on all of their students, and this is not a one-point-in-time standardized test. This is an observational assessment on a rubric that you have to understand how to do it, and there were a lot of kindergarten teachers that, you know, that was adding a lot to their workload but we knew that this data was absolutely necessary to be able to understand and then drive the interventions and changes that we needed so we worked in some cases developing relationships with individual teachers and having them help to influence their peers. We worked sometimes from the top down by working with principals and saying, look, this is why we really need your staff to help with this. So we worked from bottom up, top down, but we weren’t willing to say, take no, and we wanted to make sure that it happened and ultimately, we did a sample for many years across the region to be able to collect this data and understand really the trends and the outcomes, and, of course, far too few students were actually school ready when they got to kindergarten and understand what was behind that.
We took all that data and I’m not going into the great detail here but we took that ultimately to the Texas Legislature and the Texas Legislature was at first not willing to fund the kind of changes that we would need that would help build the school readiness. So this was going to take a significant investment in full-day, high-quality pre-K to prepare students to do that. That was a many, many hundreds of million-dollar investment to be able to do that, and we at first got nos and we spent a lot of time at the legislature, we and other partners from around the state, presenting the data, bringing in business partners, creating a common understanding about what the community and industry needed and what the data showed, and ultimately we were able to pass legislation in 2013 I think it was that allowed the state to fund full-day pre-K across the entire state.
So that was a good example of having to be doggedly persistent, not taking no for an answer because we knew that it was going to benefit so many tens of thousands of students that we had to be on it.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: That is such an awesome example of being doggedly persistent and also everything else that you’ve just talked about about using data, about building relationships and trust, doing the right thing, what the data told you was necessary and not giving up, and then getting the results, and not only were you impacting the work in Central Texas and in the classroom but across the entire state based on the work that you all were pursuing in Central Texas, taking those learnings and bringing them for the statewide systems change to shift policy and resources into supporting that- the offering a full-day pre-K so that is an amazing story, Susan. Thank you. I’m so glad that you shared that.
We’ve gone through the list of what—your reflections on what it takes to influence without authority, and you shared such a powerful story there. I’m wondering if there is another case study or vignette that you’d like to bring in from the book because, for listeners to know, there is a set of nine case studies at the end of the book that Susan reflects on what E3 and partners have accomplished, and they’re all powerful like the example that she just spoke to. So I’m wondering if there’s another story you’d like to share here on the podcast that is demonstrating the impact of E3 and your partners.
Susan Dawson: Sure, I’d be glad to share an example, and this one will be all about absenteeism and the impact that collectively we were able to have on student absences.
So in 2008 when the recession hit across the country but across certainly Texas, we didn’t actually realize the impact on schools that this would have until the following legislature session. In Texas we have legislative sessions every two years so there was a delayed understanding of how much money schools were really going to lose as a result of the recession. So as that started to emerge and we understood the real impact financially on districts, we had Central Texas education funders who are a group of philanthropists come to us and say, what is it that we could do to help in this funding crisis to help school districts get through this? And we said, well, rather than us answering that, let’s bring together our partner superintendents because we partner with superintendents from across the region from different school districts ranging from a few thousand students to 80,000 students, let’s bring them together and have a joint conversation between education funders and the superintendents about what they thought could be done about the financial impact.
So we had a great brainstorming session and ultimately the common message that we heard was there are many ways that we could help students and need to help students but in terms of financial impact, the most urgent and apparent one is in reducing student absences because in Texas like many other states, schools and school districts are paid based on average daily attendance so every day a student is not in the classroom for any reason, the school loses money, about in our case, $40 a student a day, and that adds up really quickly. The average comprehensive high school loses $12,000 a week just from student absences.
So we first started just a general campaign. We thought, do parents even know this? Are they aware of the impact if they take their student out for a ski trip and they miss a week of school? Or if they know their student is not really sick but just wants to play hooky and is at home, do they understand the impact? So we started working with the community. We put signs up in on yellow cabs. We put signs in our public bus system. We put magnets on refrigerators. We created an awareness campaign in that missing school matters, and this is why, and this is the kind of impact that it has. And that really started to make a difference and raise awareness among the business community, among parents and families about the impact of students being absent.
But then we knew that we had to go much deeper. Why which students absent and when, and did that lead us to possible solutions? So we looked around and could not find any good research on this in the country about why which students were absent, and so we worked with a partner to fund an absence reasons study that had never been done before because most districts and schools just coded students as excused or unexcused. We had to know much more. Were they absent because of a contagious illness and we didn’t want them in the classroom sharing that with other students? Were they absent because they didn’t have an asthma inhaler and for $50 we could invest in something that could help that student both from a health standpoint and from an absenteeism standard?
So we got some—we funded some contractors to go into a sample set of elementary, middle, and high schools to log much more detail into why which students were absent when, and the results were interesting, very surprising I thought. I mean maybe they shouldn’t be surprising but they were interesting.
For instance, young men especially in middle and high school would often just say that they were absent because they played hooky even though they knew that that would give them an unexcused absence and there would be disciplinary actions based on that. They still told the truth.
In contrast, young women were most often absent because of taking care of a sick sibling at home. They were four times as likely to be absent because they were taking care of a brother or sister than young boys were so there were many different strategies that we had to learn to be able to address what was actually needed for these students and families.
So we worked through a whole variety of strategies and to make a long story short, we were able to work with the community, work with our superintendents and our partners across the Central Texas region, and in just a few years, I believe it was four years, we could show that while school enrollment continued to grow, student absences were actually declining, and the overall compounded revenue return to school districts was $37,000,000.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, that is amazing and good for so many reasons and paid for itself and then some. So I love that example. Thank you for bringing that in. Again, the nuance with which you approached addressing the issue and the breadth of community involvement in identifying and creating the solution is just so important to uplift so that is a really, really powerful story, Susan. Thank you for sharing.
Susan Dawson: Absolutely.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Susan, as we wrap up, I’m curious if there’s anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to share in the context of this conversation.
Susan Dawson: I think that the most important reason that we took the time and effort, and I was the main author but there were many other editors and reviewers and whatever and contributors to this book is that we want to learn from others and we hope that by people getting ideas, they will share them with E3 Alliance and allow us to continue to move things forward but also that we can share these practices and these lessons that we’ve learned with the greater community of collective impact practitioners so that we can together move the world forward because we’re all here to make things better and we hope that this is our contribution from E3 to be able to do that.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, thank you so much for that contribution and for chatting with me today. If folks want to continue to follow the work of E3, where should they go?
Susan Dawson: We will have a book out in publication in about the middle of May, and it will also be electronically published through University of Texas Press so we can work with FSG. We don’t have it yet but we’ll have a code and a link to be able to order copies for your shelf or to be able to see reviews and summaries of the book. All those will be available electronically through UT Press sometime by mid-May.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Awesome, and what is the URL for E3 Alliance for folks that want to check out the work of the organization on an ongoing basis?
Susan Dawson: Easy enough, just E3alliance.org.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Awesome. Susan, thank you so much for, again, not only writing the book but your leadership of this work across Central Texas. We have learned so much from you and your colleagues over the many years so I’m so glad the book will be out there to share some of that learning with others and that we had a chance to talk today so thank you again, and I hope everyone is able to check out the book and E3’s website to learn more so thank you all.
Susan Dawson: Thank you, Jennifer.
And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for our online two-day workshop, Facilitating Collaborative Meetings, which will be held this July 29 and 30. This is one of our most popular workshops and is a great session if you are new to facilitating collaborative spaces and meetings and are looking for foundational resources and guidance. Please visit our events section at collectiveimpactforum.org if you would like to learn more. We hope you can join us.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
