What Makes Educational Campaings Succeed?

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Dynamics of Dengue epidemics using optimal control

We present an application of optimal control theory to Dengue epidemics. This epidemiologic disease is an important theme in tropical countries due to the growing number of infected individuals. The dynamic model is described by a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations, that depend on the dynamic of the Dengue mosquito, the number of infected individuals, and the people's motivation to combat the mosquito. The cost functional depends not only on the costs of medical treatment of the infected people but also on the costs related to educational and sanitary campaigns. Two approaches to solve the problem are considered: one using optimal control theory, another one by discretizing first the problem and then solving it with nonlinear programming. The results obtained with OC-ODE and IPOPT solvers are given and discussed. We observe that with current computational tools it is easy to obtain, in an efficient way, better solutions to Dengue problems, leading to a decrease of infected mosquitoes and individuals in less time and with lower costs.Comment: Submitted to Mathematical and Computer Modelling 25/Oct/2009; accepted for publication, after revision, 22/June/201

Keeping Parents and Student Voices at the Forefront of Reform

Presents a case study of community organizing for school reform by Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project and Youth United for Change: how developing leadership, relationships, and research shaped district policy, school capacity, and student outcomes

Securing a College Prep Curriculum for All Students

Presents a case study of community organizing for school reform by Los Angeles' Community Coalition: how its intergenerational campaign for college preparatory classes shaped leadership development, district policy, school capacity, and student outcomes

The Strengths and Challenges of Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy: What the Research Says

Outlines the advantages of community organizing as a reform strategy, such as its ability to address power relationships and build political will for broad reform; evidence of impact; effective strategies, including working via alliances; and challenges

Greater Power, Lasting Impact: Effective Grantmaker Strategies from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

CPER (also referred to here on as the "Fund") is a national funders' collaborative committed to improving educational opportunities and outcomes for students -- in particular students of color from low-income families -- by supporting community-driven reforms led by grassroots education organizing groups. CPER originated in discussions among funders active in Grantmakers for Education's Working Group on Education Organizing.They launched the collaborative in 2007, in partnership with NEO Philanthropy (then Public Interest Projects), the 501 (c)(3) public charity engaged to direct the Fund. CPER's founding funders saw that, in the education debates of the day, the perspectives of those closest to the ground were often left out. These funders recognized that students and families have a crucial role to play in identifying, embracing, and sustaining meaningful school reform. Students and families know their own needs and see first-hand the inequities in schools. Organizing groups help them get a seat at the decision-making table and develop workable solutions, building on community assets that are vital to addressing the cultural and political dimensions of reform. These grassroots groups are essential to creating the public accountability and will needed to catalyze educational reforms and ensure they stick. They can be the antidote to the ever-shifting political conditions and leadership turnover that plague reform efforts. At the same time, they help community members develop leadership and a grassroots base, building individual civic capacity and community power that strengthens our democratic infrastructure for the long term. Because educational improvement requires tackling persistent inequities in race and income, supporting leaders in low-income communities of color also helps build the social capital needed to solve integrally related social challenges. CPER was initially conceived to run for a minimum of three years -- a timeline consistent with most foundation grants but short for the transformative kinds of changes the Fund hoped to achieve. CPER's lifespan eventually stretched to eight years because of the recognized power of its supported work. Over this period, NEO Philanthropy engaged a highly diverse set of 76 local and national funders in the CPER collaborative. Incentivizing new resources through matching dollars, CPER raised close to $34 million and invested nationally in some 140 community groups and advocacy allies in national coalitions and in six target sites of varying scale (California, Chicago, Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Philadelphia). These groups, in turn, developed local leadership, national coalitions, and cross-issue alliances that helped to achieve over 90 school-, district, and state-level policy reforms that strengthen educational equity and opportunity. CPER's history of impact illustrates the efficacy of community organizing as an essential education reform strategy, along with the more commonly supported strategies of policy advocacy, research, and model demonstration efforts. But CPER's story is also more broadly instructive. In this period of "strategic philanthropy " when focused, foundation-led agendas are increasingly seen as the surest route to achieving desired ends, CPER offered a very different, bottom-up, multi-issue alternative that proved effective. In sharing CPER's story, we hope to deepen understanding of the value of community organizing for education reform while contributing to the larger conversation about how grantmakers can effectively support social movements to strengthen opportunity and justice

The Strengths & Challenges of Community Organizing as an Education Reform Strategy

Based on a literature review, examines the role of community organizing in ensuring the long-term sustainability of school and district reform efforts by addressing patterns of inequality in underserved communities; effective strategies; and challenges

A Positive Future for Black Boys: Building the Movement

After identifying black boys as the population that is the least well served by U.S. public education, the Schott Foundation hosted a conference which determined that public policy, community efforts, and the public would be necessary to reverse this outcome. The report presents findings on how to build a social movement and includes worksheets to serve as a template

Building Capacity to Sustain Social Movements: Ten Lessons from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

Most funders agree that effective grantmaking requires pursuing a range of complementary approaches.Direct grants are the lifeblood of organizations and the cornerstone of funder practice, but grantmakers also provide critical value when they help grantees develop organizational leadership and governance, strengthen strategic collaborations with peers, network with new allies, and expand field knowledge, among other things.This report explores how grantmakers can leverage their investments by coupling direct grants with strategically delivered capacity building supports. It focuses on building capacity for community organizing and advocacy groups, though many of its lessons are more broadly applicable

Optimization of Dengue Epidemics: a test case with different discretization schemes

The incidence of Dengue epidemiologic disease has grown in recent decades. In this paper an application of optimal control in Dengue epidemics is presented. The mathematical model includes the dynamic of Dengue mosquito, the affected persons, the people's motivation to combat the mosquito and the inherent social cost of the disease, such as cost with ill individuals, educations and sanitary campaigns. The dynamic model presents a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The problem was discretized through Euler and Runge Kutta schemes, and solved using nonlinear optimization packages. The computational results as well as the main conclusions are shown.Comment: Presented at the invited session "Numerical Optimization" of the 7th International Conference of Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics (ICNAAM 2009), Rethymno, Crete, Greece, 18-22 September 2009; RepositoriUM, id: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/1083