Current Strategies

The goal of the Good Schools program is to have children attend high-quality schools, to graduate from high school and to attend college so they can lead self-sufficient and prosperous lives. To accomplish this goal the Foundation focuses on four areas: creating a city-wide schools infrastructure, ensuring high quality early care and education opportunities, improving schools in target neighborhoods, and generating parent and pubic will for high-quality education.

Citywide Infrastructure

The goal of the citywide strategy is to fundamentally alter the educational landscape in Detroit to normalize the expectation that all children will graduate from high school prepared for college without remediation. Through grantmaking and changemaking strategies and, in concert with educational partners and the community, the Foundation is working to create the conditions necessary for education reform to take root and be scaled.

Early Childhood Education

A high-quality early learning experience significantly improves the academic success of poor children. The Good Schools early childhood strategy is focused on scaling quality early learning experiences for children in the targeted neighborhoods. Additionally, the Foundation is working through a coalition of area funders and stakeholders to guide the development of a comprehensive early childhood system for all children, birth to five, in the region.

Neighborhood School Improvement

Good neighborhoods require high quality schools. Vibrant neighborhoods provide a network of parents, community residents and youth development programs to ensure that young people are encouraged and supported to succeed in school. The Foundation’s goal is to ensure that the majority of youth in the target neighborhoods have access to local high-quality schools. This will be accomplished by continuing to support existing high-quality programs, improving promising schools or creating new schools.

Parent/Community Will

An essential component to creating a preponderance of high-quality schools is public understanding of the conditions necessary to achieve scale, as well as the importance of holding schools accountable for strong outcomes. The public will strategy focuses on two main areas: providing parents with the information they need to make the best possible decisions on where to enroll their children; and ensuring residents of the city identify and support the broad-scale change required to bring fundamental change to the education system in Detroit.