This week the Annenberg Institute for School Reform will host a conversation in New Orleans that we hope will produce a dramatic impact both in that city and across the nation.

The meeting is the sixth of an annual series of conferences we call our Emerging Knowledge Forums. We created this series for a simple reason: we believe that the pace at which we produce knowledge is too slow. That is to say, knowledge from researchers, practitioners and policy makers, and even from organizations like ours that research and produce publications, really doesn't get into the hands of people fast enough. New knowledge is being generated all the time in urban communities. Rather than wait for knowledge to be formally collected, we thought that we could convene an annual meeting where we could begin to share with lots of participants what we're learning and what its implications are for policy and practice, and form an ongoing learning community that works together over time around a set of questions that the sites generate that are important.

So in our view, the purpose of the Emerging Knowledge Forum is captured in its title: it's for the people who come to this meeting to share the lessons they've learned from their work, to support each other’s work, to transform those lessons into tools, and to get to the hard work of implementation as soon as possible--without waiting for knowledge to be formally collected and analyzed and put on shelves in wonderful print publications.

This year’s Emerging Knowledge Forum is focused on the efforts of the city of New Orleans, in partnership with the state of Louisiana, to fundamentally transform its educational system. What we are trying to learn is how states, districts, and communities can come together and co-construct the re-engineering and redesign of an education system that enhances equity and excellence for all students.

The work in New Orleans has important implications, because of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. It's critically important that school development coincides with the reconstruction of homes, the transportation system, and the health care system. I think what New Orleans is doing differs in a degree of scale, but New Orleans faces the same challenges as the challenges we face here in Rhode Island, with our Urban Education Task Force, and the challenges faced in Chicago, and New York City, in Chattanooga-Hamilton County, and in Nashville. So we hope that sites and participants who come together and share what they learn and inform and advance the work in New Orleans have a national impact, because we as a nation are committed to rebuilding the education system in New Orleans, not just the citizens of Louisiana. We want to make a contribution to that effort, and we also want to learn from it, so we can use it in the various states and cities the participants represent.

In the past in the Emerging Knowledge Forum, we've brought together multiple sites to learn from each other. This year, we're focusing very heavily on the work in New Orleans, and how that work is addressing several dimensions: how, in a system of choice, they are developing the kind of human capital they need, particularly teachers and principals; how they are using data, which is very critical in a system of choice to inform the quality of the schools as well as the judgments of parents and the judgments of students and to foster continuous improvement; how they are building an infrastructure that allows the communities that are involved to engage in cross-sector development, meaning how the education system works with housing and health care and other systems to fundamentally create the support that families and students need to thrive; and also how communities are informed and organized so that they can advocate for those kinds of changes.

Those issues are going to be the focus of our attention in New Orleans. We're going to be looking at these dimensions and the progress that's been made in these areas in three other communities: Chicago, Boston, and New York. These communities acknowledge that they have strengths and they have weaknesses, and their contribution is to share what they have learned with New Orleans in order to accelerate New Orleans’ progress, but also to inform and advance their own work. It's a wonderful opportunity for three other communities to say, here's what we've learned from the efforts that we've made, and we hope this advances the progress of New Orleans. But it's also an opportunity for Boston, Chicago, and New York to learn from what New Orleans is doing, and for the participants to make contributions.

If the past years’ experience is any guide, we expect that the conversations and partnerships that develop at the Emerging Knowledge Forum will inform and lead to initiatives in the coming months. That was certainly the case last year. The information, the activities, the rich experiences that were shared at last year’s Emerging Knowledge Forum are now finding their way in several national frameworks that are being developed--The Community Agenda, the Broader, Bolder Initiative--and several funders are funding demonstration sites, and some of the early sites are those attending the Emerging Knowledge Forum. So the ideas and the learning communities that come together at our Emerging Knowledge Forum actually fosters change in policy and practice, and reshapes and formulates philanthropic initiatives and, increasingly, in the coming years, amplifies the voice of urban communities in shaping the initiatives of the federal government.

Contact Person
Robert Rothman
Senior Editor, Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Robert_Rothman@brown.edu