Hope Street Group Joins New Coalition to Track, Support ARRA-Funded Education Reform Efforts

Washington DC – April 16, 2009 – The bipartisan public policy organization Hope Street Group announced today it was joining the newly-formed Coalition for Student Achievement in its efforts to track and support education reforms called for in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The Coalition’s first action appears in the form of a letter sent today (.pdf) to Education Secretary Arne Duncan urging his department to provide "stronger, clearer direction to states and local education leaders about how to meet the assurances and demonstrate measurable outcomes."

"We must take advantage of this unique opportunity to change the landscape in public education by holding ourselves accountable for implementing reforms," said Jocelyn Pickford, Hope Street Group Education Director. "The ARRA funding is keeping education on the national radar screen, and groups like the Coalition are rising to the challenge of doing the difficult work to embed reform into funded initiatives."

Hope Street Group issued a press release today announcing the agreement of its health care working group on a set of key principles for policy reform that ensure progress toward an Opportunity Economy:

"We know in an Opportunity Economy, a thriving economic environment and fair access to health care, education and jobs go hand in hand," said Hope Street Group Executive Director Monique Nadeau. "America's prosperity and global competitiveness depend on it."

    An Opportunity Economy is one in which economic opportunity is possible for everyone who works hard and invests in themselves, and where our nation prospers as a result.

    The "Health Care Agenda for an Opportunity Economy" calls for a health care system that guarantees and enforces high quality health care for all Americans, realigns incentives, requires price transparency and is fiscally responsible and sustainable.

Hope Street Group has likened our pressing national challenges - particularly around the recovery legislation - to "fixing the car while driving it," an evocative metaphor underscoring the somewhat counterintuitive nature of such a feat.

Blogging at Huffington Post, Hope Street Group leader and contributor Hoyt Hilsman picks up on the thread of our recent statement and expounds on the imperative to see the long-term forest for the short-term trees.

The challenge of "fixing a car while we're driving it" is to make sure that we don't let the economy crash, while at the same time making the fundamental repairs necessary to keep it running well into the future. And while there is no good reason to delay passage of an economic stimulus package -- which would send the economy into a ditch -- we need to make room in the package has the kind of long-term reconstructive features that will lead to jobs and other kinds of economic opportunities for all Americans well into the future.

So where do we go from here? Nothing about this process is going to be easy - that's the bad news. The good news is that we appear to have leadership that isn't afraid to tackle something this tough and far-reaching, even in the face of a true crisis. That's the kind of foresight we'll need to achieve true and lasting economic opportunity.

Hope Street Group released a statement today on the reform elements of the recovery legislation in Congress:

    "We know how critical it is to address the short term crisis," said Executive Director Monique Nadeau. "But if we don't start at the same time to strengthen the true drivers of economic opportunity, we risk bouncing from crisis to crisis."

    "We're in the unfortunate position of having to fix the car while we're driving it."

    Hope Street Group's Economic Opportunity Index has identified education and health care as the two largest economic drivers; its American Dream Agenda lays out the policy solutions necessary for strengthening both.

E-mail sent to Hope Street Group members:

Dear members and supporters,

    Last night's historic election is the beginning of a new era for all of us. It is also the beginning of a lot of hard work. Both candidates ran on platforms acknowledging the tremendous challenges facing the nation's families and economy, and the need to come together to find solutions. Hope Street Group is forging a powerful nonpartisan movement to expand economic opportunity for all Americans and to rebuild our nation's prosperity, and we need you to be a part of it.

    Over the past few years, Hope Street Group has been building bi-partisan consensus for policies that support an Opportunity Economy, where people who work hard and invest in themselves can succeed, and where our nation prospers as a result. From our open source model of policy development to the American Dream Agenda developed at our 2008 Opportunity Economics Colloquium to our work with the Presidential policy advisers for both campaigns on education and health care reform, Hope Street Group has developed a reputation of being a new way of thinking and acting in the policy arena.

    This election demonstrated the power of social media to fundamentally transform the way campaigns are run, providing millions of Americans a new way to be engaged, and we need to make sure that the same opportunities exist post-election. Hope Street Group is hard at work on an exciting new technology platform that will provide our members a way to engage in the policy debate, connecting ideas with the people who can implement them.

    We are asking you to join us in Hope Street Group's next phase, which will provide a place where engaged citizens can work together with key policy makers to promote policies that build an Opportunity Economy. Over the next weeks and months, we will need volunteers to help us organize our 2009 Opportunity Economics Colloquium and to contribute to our policy work on K-12 education reform and health care reform. We need professionals with a background in economics to help us refine and promote our groundbreaking Economic Opportunity Index. We need volunteers who can help us communicate with a broader audience, and who can help us create the next generation of online policy collaboration skills.

    If you would like to be a part of this exciting movement to build an Opportunity Economy, please e-mail your resume to volunteer@hopestreetgroup.org, and put "Volunteer at Hope Street Group" in the subject line.

    Sincerely,

    Monique Nadeau
    Executive Director