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The Current Situation
Across the nation, many schools in underserved communities face the threat of closure due to leadership, financial and operational challenges. This comes at a time when, more than ever, our nation needs these schools not only to survive, but also to rise up to impact even more students from underserved communities and to close the socially devastating Achievement Gap.
Our Mission:
Our mission is to make best practices in education a new national norm by empowering collaboration among school leaders, teachers and students. We seek to make high-quality educational experiences accessible to all children nationwide and thereby narrow the Achievement Gap.
What We Believe:
- Every child deserves and needs an excellent education
- Exceptional schools can deliver excellent educational results for all students
- Great leadership needs strong support to develop and be sustainable
- With great leadership, exceptional schools can thrive and impact even more students
Who We Are:
Schools That Can (STC) is a national nonprofit network of stand-alone, high-performing independent and charter schools operating in underserved communities. Our member schools serve over 15,000 children, and graduate more than 1,000 students a year. We focus on finding, supporting and investing in schools with strong leadership that are committed to giving their students a quality education.
By building on the success of existing high-performing schools with a proven model, we can address the challenge of the Achievement Gap that children from underserved communities face and help our schools grow, allowing them to serve even more students. STC is dedicated to providing our schools, and their leaders, with the support they need to achieve the results their communities deserve.
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What We Do:
- Identify high-performing schools in underserved communities nationwide
- Validate candidate schools based on our best-of-class validation process
- Monitor and confirm annually that member schools continue to maintain high standards relative to their peer group and meet the criteria set by STC to be defined as high-performing
- Identify each school's strengths and challenges for sustainability and provide the STC network with tools to share best practices and support for each other
- Provide structure locally through Regional Advisory Councils that conduct regular roundtables, foster collaboration between regional schools and provide the necessary support to member schools in the community
- Seek opportunities for member schools in each community to come together and benefit from the whole being bigger than the sum of its parts
- Seek opportunities for high-performing member schools to transfer their cultures of success to lower-performing schools in their community
- Provide a national structure in which successful initiatives in one community can be exported to other communities and have greater impact and scale
- Provide individual schools with national programs and alliances that would not otherwise be available to them
- Create awareness, both locally and nationally, of STC member schools, their accomplishments, their values and their company impact
- Seek financial support for the self-sufficiency of member schools
Alliance Partnerships:
Currently STC has a menu of Alliance partnerships to support STC member schools that includes:
The Story So Far:
Consider the following amazing results from selected STC member schools:
100% of Providence-St. Mel's high school graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges and universities every year since the school’s founding nearly thirty years ago. Many in the Class of 2008 were accepted by some of the most elite institutions of higher education in the country, including Cornell, Emory, Georgetown, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Penn State, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tufts, and Washington University in St. Louis.
The Wisconsin Charter School of the Year Award was presented to Milwaukee College Prep in 2008. Being recognized as the best of the 221 charter schools currently serving more than 35,781 students in Wisconsin is a tribute to Milwaukee College Prep’s achievements.
Once again, Roxbury Prep stands as one of the highest-performing middle schools in Massachusetts, outperforming nearly 80% of all middle schools in the Commonwealth on the 2008 MCAS exams.
97% of the 2008 eighth-grade class at Trey Whitfield scored at levels 3 and 4 in the New York state English language arts and math exams. Trey Whitfield continues its 25-year history of strong eighth-grade placements, with the majority of graduating eighth-graders attending private and parochial high schools.
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