ALLIANCE FOR REGIONAL COLLABORATION TO HEIGHTEN EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS (ARCHES)

Background

The Alliance for Regional Collaboration to Heighten Educational Success (ARCHES) was launched in 2005 as an initiative of the California Education Round Table Intersegmental Coordinating Committee (ICC) and the California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP). This initiative is focused on addressing the proverbial achievement gap among student groups through regional collaboration through a strategy premised on the belief that multi-sector involvement is required to ensure that all students succeed academically. The 20 ARCHES collaboratives share the common goals of increasing college readiness, enrollment, and completion rates for students in communities with historically low college-going rates, but the specific strategies that they use to achieve those objectives are dependent upon the particular complex of issues in their region. As such, ARCHESfills an unique role in the efforts to improve California’s education system by promoting a strategic framework of deep collaboration between education -- at all levels from pre-kindergarten through graduate and professional schools -- business, parents, and community sectors as well as creating an alliance among these regional collaboratives in order to share effective practices and lessons learned across this network.

Progress Report

Over the past year, ARCHES has focused on providing support for individual regional collaboratives in three main areas: technical support, financial assistance, and professional development opportunities.

  • Technical support to assist with the development and growth of an effective collaborative: The ARCHES Intentional Collaborative Building (ICB) process provides direct service focused on collaborative growth through continuous improvement. ICB was piloted as an initiative with three collaboratives in 2014 and is being built into a sustainable aspect of the services offered by ARCHES. IBC’s goals are to ensure that ARCHES delivers support that address a collaborative’s challenges and provides a leadership role in collaborative building that is effective, value-added, and meets the unique needs of each collaborative.

An example of ICP is the “just-in-time” support provided to the African-American Regional Educational Alliance (AAERA) -- an ARCHES collaborative in Alameda County -- as the collaborative launched a student-centered STEM Program in which over 350 African-American students and their families participated this winter. ARCHES supported the collaborative by developing protocols, facilitating meetings to gain support of a large number of partners (including elected officials), and providing data and evaluation assistance.

  • Sustainability Grant Funding: To ensure that collaboratives have sufficient fiscal and human resources to operate successfully and effectively, ARCHES provides information about grant opportunities and offers grant writing and editing assistance. In the past year, the postsecondary education partners from six ARCHES collaboratives were recognized with Awards for Innovation in Higher Education and nine collaboratives were part of successful Career Pathways Trust grant applications.
  • Professional Development: ARCHES is partnering with the Madera County Compact to develop a professional development program to promote and accelerate Common Core State Standards implementation in math and increase academic rigor for all students. This partnership-- an evolution of the ARCHES STEM Learning Opportunities Providing Equity that was an Investing in Innovation (i3) i3 grant project, is funded through a California Math and Science Partnership (CaMSP) grant.