Partnership Between Achieve and the Dana Center
Achieve, Inc., is a bipartisan nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, that helps states raise academic standards, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability to prepare all young people for postsecondary education, work, and citizenship. The Charles A. Dana Center is an organized research unit at the University of Texas at Austin, working to improve mathematics and science education by providing direct service to districts, to local, state, and national education leaders, and to professional organizations and nonprofits concerned with the improvement of American education.
Achieve and the Dana Center have partnered in three national initiatives, the American Diploma Project Network, Practices Worthy of Attention, and the Urban Mathematics Leadership Network (UMLN).
- The American Diploma Project Network is a coalition—responsible for educating 80 percent of our nation’s public high school students—that seeks to restore the value of the high school diploma. We work with the network of states in aligning expectations for secondary mathematics achievement with the demands of postsecondary education and the workplace, thus building the capacity of states to produce graduates who have a deep and flexible knowledge of mathematics.
- In our Practices Worthy of Attention project, our goal was to document practitioners’ descriptions of what is really happening in the field to strengthen secondary mathematics education around the country. These initial investigations set out to mark these practices for future rigorous scientific inquiry by Dana Center and other researchers. Ultimately, we hope to create a community of inquiry made up of university researchers working with administrators and teachers from featured schools and districts to better understand practices for improving secondary mathematics learning for all students.
- The Urban Mathematics Leadership Network was launched in 2004 by the Dana Center and Achieve to serve as a vehicle for the rapid dissemination of advances and promising practices in mathematics education. The network enables state mathematics leaders and the leaders of large urban districts—including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles—to work together to better align their mathematics improvement efforts and thus raise student achievement.