Our Roots
We started 10 years ago with a big idea and a lot of heart. We resolved to increase educational opportunity for every person. That was a tremendous undertaking. So we first focused our efforts, then gained momentum, and eventually expanded our scope and our reach to become the national enterprise that we are today.
Ensuring access
We knew that even the best educational system is limited in its impact if it doesn’t reach large numbers of students. So we started there. We worked to ensure access to quality education for all students, no matter where they lived or how much money they had. We created and networked college access programs so that more people could realize the lifelong benefits of continuing their education beyond high school.
We also focused on low-wage workers and other adults who could use education as a springboard to better jobs. Our workforce development initiative yielded substantial results:
- Reorganization of adult education in Ohio so that it’s easier for workers to acquire new skills.
- Creation of career pathway programs that point workers toward fields with growing demand.
- Other initiatives to lift barriers to adult participation in education.
We fostered community involvement in the planning of new school facilities to ensure that designs for new buildings would use the best research and apply community priorities to all decisions. Most critically, we ensured longevity by building critical expertise in supporting policy changes to sustain these initiatives.
Creating better schools
Access is critical. But access alone isn’t enough. It doesn’t ensure the level of opportunity and accomplishment that we envisioned for every student. It was obvious that the quality of schools was a tremendous barrier to success. So we focused on improving urban high schools, with a special emphasis on creating small learning environments.
In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, starting in 2004 we created 35 small high schools in eight urban school districts and opened six early college high schools in partnership with universities.
These efforts touched 50,000 students and trained more than 2,000 teachers in Ohio’s urban school districts. And the results have been dramatic – increasing graduation rates, improvement on test scores and students earning large numbers of college credits while still in high school.
EdWorks, a KnowledgeWorks subsidiary, optimized the school improvement models behind this success by providing curriculum and instruction, supportive high school culture, aligned assessments and comprehensive student support.
At the same time, we focused on the need to create school systems that supported students from birth to career and created our community-based subsidiary Strive.
Transforming education from schooling to learning
You can’t create schools for the future without understanding what the future will require from our children. Since 2006, we have been engaged in a disciplined study of the trends shaping the future of education. We developed the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning to help anticipate and prepare for change.
We came to see that our factory-era education system had to be turned on its head. Instead of focusing on the needs of the institution and handing down information from on high, schools needed to respond to the needs of the learner and allow them to discover knowledge through hands-on experiences.
We began working to transform our outdated system of schooling into a world of learning – a place rich with opportunity for every student and capable of fostering the creativity and critical thinking that a fast-changing global society demands.
As our forecast and high school work began to garner national attention, we began to expand our thinking and work nationally to become the national organization we are today. We joined forces with New Tech Network, whose commitment to high school innovation matches our own. And we continue to have a very strong commitment to Ohio through our Ohio Education Matters subsidiary, an organization that helps chart the course for Ohio education policy and innovation.
Acting on our vision
Today, KnowledgeWorks is helping others envision and create an education system dynamic and responsive enough for today and tomorrow. At the same time, we’re putting what we’ve learned into practice as we bring a learning revolution to America’s high schools and spread it through communities and states.
