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Details on SUNY Strategic Plan

WBFO’s Joyce Kryszak talks to Chancellor Nancy Zimpher.

By CHARLOTTE HSU

Published: November 4, 2009

The “Group of 200” charged with leading SUNY’s strategic planning initiative met yesterday at UB for the second in a series of seven town hall meetings devoted to discussing goals and challenges facing the 64-campus system.

The theme of yesterday’s SUNY Conversation was the “education pipeline,” with participants—including students, faculty, staff, administrators, state legislators and other community leaders—listening and sharing ideas on how to improve students’ progression through school from “cradle to career.”

The day started with an open forum, followed by remarks by speakers including Robert Bennett, SUNY chancellor emeritus; Joe Scantlebury, senior policy officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher. Members of the Group of 200, a cross section of stakeholders from across the university system, broke into small groups of about eight people for a lunchtime dialogue.

Bennett, Scantlebury and Zimpher all portrayed building a solid education pipeline as an imperative in a world where legions of students abandon their studies before finishing high school, and where large numbers of undergraduates begin their college careers with remediation courses in English and math.

“At a time when far too many students don’t finish high school, and when far too many arrive at college without the skills and knowledge they need to succeed, this issue is critically important,” Zimpher wrote in an opinion piece The Buffalo News published before this week’s event.

Prior to joining SUNY in June, Zimpher, formerly president of the University of Cincinnati, helped found Strive, a partnership of educators, nonprofits, philanthropies, elected officials and corporations who use evidence-based programs and strategies to strengthen the education pipeline in the greater Cincinnati region, encompassing parts of Ohio and northern Kentucky.

Through Strive—the focus of Zimpher’s remarks yesterday— organizations and individuals with similar missions come together to work toward shared goals.

A timeline laying out milestones that can determine a child’s long-term academic prospects provides guidance to stakeholders formulating plans for collaboration. Benchmarks in the so-called “Student’s Roadmap to Success,” which begins at birth, include participating in high-quality preschool, reading at grade-level by the fourth grade, having a clear expectation of going to college by the seventh, and engaging in community and school organizations by the start of high school.

“The magic of this Strive partnership is that we use that roadmap to organize key groups of people who have like interests,” Zimpher said. “So for the first time in the history of that community, the Head Start people were actually talking to the United Way people who do Success By 6, who were actually talking to the people who run early childhood programs.”

At lunchtime, over soft drinks, sandwiches and sugar cookies in the shape of UB’s logo, members of the Group of 200 discussed the education pipeline and how SUNY could help develop Strive-like alliances in different areas of New York State.

Ideas participants and speakers shared in those small group discussions, during the morning’s open forum and at other times throughout the day included:

• Streamlining articulation agreements to enable students to transfer more easily from high school to college and from one higher education institution to another.

• Bringing separate organizations together by identifying common, easy-to-understand goals, such as increasing children’s exposure to science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers, or providing better early childhood education.

• Building a database with information on student achievement that individuals and organizations that invest in education could access.

• Encouraging an environment that emphasizes collaboration among like institutions instead of competition between them.

• Working with K-12 schools to cultivate great teachers.

• Creating more programs that allow high school students to take college classes.

• Providing incentives for nonprofits and other community groups to partner with SUNY and K-12 schools in tackling problems related to education.

• Establishing partnerships with K-12 schools to identify talented youth who could excel at specialized institutions, such as the Fashion Institute of Technology.

• Opening more SUNY resources to the public by providing free tickets to community groups for cultural events on campuses that do not sell out.

• Asking more SUNY students to mentor teenagers.

• Creating a common library system that would enable a fifth grader or a high school sophomore to access the same materials a doctoral candidate uses for research.

• Preparing students for challenges such as working for multinational corporations by teaching them foreign languages early in life and instilling in them, at a young age and during college, an appreciation for diverse cultures.

The next SUNY Conversation, which will focus on arts and culture, will take place Dec. 1 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.