A look back and a look ahead: Lessons learned from an education movement

December 19, 2019
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When our community started 55,000 Degrees in 2010, we knew it would take time to see changes in Louisville’s higher education attainment numbers. It would take institutional soul-searching, deep dives into data, relentless drive and multi-sector collaboration on a scale we hadn’t yet seen in our city.

In short, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. And we were right.

But nine years of hard work later, we know these efforts have been worth it.Our city has increased the number of degrees by 39,000 – up from 38.5 % to 45.5% of the population with a college degree – and are on track to make even more gains by the end of 2020. While this falls short of our goal of 55,000 college degrees, we know that the lessons learned through this initiative have helped us to gain momentum, and will guide our community as we continue to work toward increased education attainment. It has set a road map that led to the creation of a comprehensive, collaborative governance approach and a successor organization, Evolve502. In its early stages of implementation, the intention is to build a lasting civic infrastructure to effect system change at scale, and to fund the Evolve502 Promise Scholarship to guarantee free tuition for a two-year community college degree for any JCPS graduate.

As we head into the last year of this 10-year initiative, 55,000 Degrees is looking back and looking forward. On this page, The View From 55,000 Degrees, we will reflect on what we have learned, what has worked for our community, and what more needs to be done. There are lessons to be learned in the stories of that work, so over the next few months we will be talking more in-depth about these efforts and learnings. Among them:

  • The importance of all stakeholders working together, collectively, toward a common goal.
  • How our local postsecondary institutions have increased graduation rates despite declining enrollment.
  • How data collected and shared by 55K improved the way we work in Louisville.
  • The importance of crossing sectors and breaking down silos between institutions.
  • How we, as a community, learned that the path to college starts far earlier than high school and the work that must be done to remove those early barriers.
  • The difficulty in closing equity gaps, and the courage needed for changes in policy and practice to make that happen.
  • The challenge of helping adult learners – those with only a high school degree, or those some college, but no degree – come back to school and complete a quality postsecondary credential.

55K and its partners have worked hard to make progress in increasing postsecondary attainment. Changing systems and removing barriers to education is not easy. It’s arduous, it’s complex, and it takes time. But it is necessary and, with continued collaboration, we believe it’s possible. We look forward to sharing with you our perspective from the last nine years in the trenches, so that our community may use these learnings to bring lasting, generational change to Louisville.

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.