How To Use This Toolkit

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If your company is looking to use its talent and resources to help America’s public schools improve, the Business Tools for Better Schools Toolkit contains the innovative ideas, checklists and resources you need to accomplish your goal – and maximize your company’s return on investment. This “How To” provides tips for using the Toolkit to make your case for business involvement in education reform both within and outside of your company.

Make the case to your company. Whether you know a little or a lot about public education, your first step is to make the case within your company to strengthen corporate involvement to get better results or to commit additional resources. The Toolkit can help.

Step One: Educate yourself. Spend some time in the Case for Action section. In the How Education Stacks Up section, you can learn about education in your state and how it measures up across the country. And in Education Priorities you can get background on the national business community’s current priorities for reform.

Step Two: Assemble your case. To help you make the case to your company’s decisionmaker(s) that your company will benefit from getting strategically involved in education, we have put together ready-to-use and adaptable tools with the information you need. Simply print them out and assemble them in a kit that you will present to the decisionmaker(s).

Why Your Company Should be Involved in America’s Public Schools
Benefits to Business of Investing in Education: Maintain a Competitive Edge in the Global Economy
Benefits to Business of Investing in Education: Improve the Pipeline of Qualified Employees
Benefits to Business of Investing in Education: Grow the U.S. Economy and Build a Customer Base
Benefits to Business of Investing in Education: Open More Doors for America’s Youth
State Data Fact Sheets
An example: Providing a concrete example of business involvement in education often helps a decisionmaker(s) better understand your case. The Toolkit features over 75 descriptions of corporate initiatives and business-led organizations that are currently underway at the local, state and national levels to address key challenges facing public education. Take some time to look through these. You may find a program or organization in your state or community that would help you make your case, or you may identify with a company that is already involved.

Step Three: Make your case. You are now ready to present your case. Request a meeting with the decisionmaker(s) in your company. Share with him/her what you have learned and provide him/her with the kit of materials you have assembled. If you do not get an answer right away, give him/her some time to think, and make sure to follow up and provide additional information if needed.

Plan your strategy for your company's involvement. Once you have your company's commitment to get involved, you are ready to start thinking about the most effective way to invest your time and resources in public education. To help you determine the right strategy for your company, you may want to form a team of your colleagues to allow for a number of different perspectives. Or, the executive decisionmaker(s) may prefer that you partner with others in the company to assemble a top-line education strategy before she/he makes the final call on whether and how to get involved in education.

Either way, the Toolkit can help you tailor-make a program that works for you.

Step One: Get ideas. The website features Snapshots of Strategic Corporate Investments that are currently underway to address key challenges facing public education. Take some time to look through these snapshots. You may find a program in your state or community that appeals to you or you may identify with a company that is already involved.

If you believe that involvement of your company's CEO and executive team in education reform will be critical to the company's success, you can hear what business leaders think about education reform and read snapshots of what it takes to make a difference.
Another common approach to maximize business effectiveness in education reform is to found or join a nonprofit "business-education partnership." These partnerships exist both at the state and local levels and are one of the best strategies to leverage the voice and expertise of the business community to improve education. The Toolkit provides many examples of successful partnership models that may work for your company:

Step Two: Get real. The Toolkit provides ideas for four ways in which your company can be involved: (1) Conducting advocacy, (2) Using philanthropy, (3) Lending expertise, and/or (4) Mobilizing leadership. Your team should spend some time thinking about the right approach for your company. Perhaps your company's government relations and communications teams can make a difference by influencing education policy. Perhaps you have a robust philanthropic program through which it would make sense to work. Or maybe your company has a history of lending technical expertise and volunteering employee time in other ventures and might like to do the same here. The following checklists can help you determine a realistic approach to education for your company:

Step Three: Get focused. The Toolkit encourages business involvement in three key education reform areas: (1) Preparing all high school graduates for college and careers; (2) Getting more innovation workers in the pipeline and (3) Maximizing data-driven decision making. You should think about which of these makes most sense for your company or program. These are the top priorities of the national business community because the companies that have been involved in education reform for a long time have found these will have the most success improving public education.

Step Four: Get specific. Once you have laid out the ideas and the options, it is time to put your plan together so that you can put it into place. Lay out the general framework, and identify where you might need knowledge and expertise from others to put your plan in motion. To be most effective, your company's plan should involve a partnership with a school district, education group, business organization or others, so you should schedule time to talk with these organizations before you finalize the plan so that they feel that the plan was done "with" them, rather than "to" them.

View Ten Tips for Creating a Dialogue To Improve Student Success to help you establish a partnership with educators.

Put your plan into action. Improving education is not going to happen overnight. Change takes time and it will not always be easy. You should be prepared to make a commitment to program implementation for a few years. The Toolkit provides helpful tips and tools to keep you on track and allow you to assess the effectiveness of your program.

Step One: Set goals. Identifying short-term and long-term benchmarks will help you gauge your effectiveness and will allow you to report back to your company on the progress the company is making in education reform. Goal-setting should be part of your plan preparation and should reflect the types of investment your company wants to make. You should regularly refer back to your goals to make sure your program is on track and that you are accomplishing what you set out to do.

Step Two: Be flexible. While your plan should provide a good framework, it should also be flexible enough to change as you learn from your strategic partners. You may find that you need to make adjustments to your program along the way as you learn from the successes and challenges you will inevitably face.

Step Three: Evaluate. It is important to measure the effectiveness of your program along the way to determine if you are meeting your goals. Not only will formal evaluations help you answer the inevitable "how's it going?" question, they also will allow you to receive credit both within and outside your company for the good work that you are doing. You should establishment a formal evaluation system and stick to it. In addition to formal evaluations, you should also establish a formal reporting mechanism within your company so that the decisionmaker(s) is kept apprised of your progress and your company knows what an important investment it is making to the future of education and the workforce.