Hello!  We’re excited to kick off a regular blog about education issues and how faith communities can help bring about change.  You can look forward to hearing from different writers, as we pull in a variety of voices and experts to share their thoughts and ideas.

Just a note about a recent TEP convening: The Expectations Project hosted an education policy briefing at the Q Ideas conference in DC last week.  If you’re not familiar with Q, it’s kind of like the Aspen Ideas Festival or TED Talks — but it’s geared towards the Christian community.  700 Christians converged on the breathtakingly beautiful Mellon Auditorium in DC to hear speakers discuss everything from humility, social justice in the fashion industry, human trafficking and reforming the criminal justice system.  Q is all about “common good” issues that can make the world a better place.

Not surprisingly, the movement to eliminate public school inequity fits perfectly into Q.  We brought in a few speakers — including a public school teacher, a state level education advocate and member of the Obama Administration.  Our group spent three amazing hours wrestling with the scope of the academic achievement gap and how people of faith can get involved.  Our ideas spanned the the range of developing church-school partnerships, educating our congregations/networks about education reform, and speaking about educational inequity (as a moral issue) in our pulpits.  We committed to keeping in touch with each other, as we develop this national support network for people of faith.

I left the briefing, and Q, feeling more convinced than ever that people of faith can play a critical role in public education equity.

Now is the time to work for change in low-income public schools. Not tomorrow, not next week…and definitely not next year.  Our children need us now.  And we have more and more evidence to support what many of us suspected all along: if you set high expectations for all children, provide them with a highly effective teacher, give them necessary support and resources — and eliminate key barriers — then any kid can knock it out of the park.  Seriously.  What we used to think were one-off examples of magical teachers like Marva Collins or Jamie Escalante (two folks that you should google if you don’t know them!), are actually a set of strategies that we can replicate.

And we find it equally exciting that people of faith can step up and be true champions for kids in struggling public schools.  Similar to the way faith communities helped galvanize social change through our nation’s history, the academic achievement gap needs our efforts.  At their core, this is what our faith principles call us to do.  I think Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best: “Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.”  Amen, Dr. King.  Amen.

We have an exciting few months ahead as we fully launch The Expectations Project.  But stop by often, as we will have new content posted regularly.  In the meantime, please get involved by signing up for our email newsletter and follow us on Twitter.  Together we can change things.

Expecting more,

~The Expectations Project Team