City of Austin Mayor Steve Adler speaks at a Central Texas education summit focused on providing opportunities for all students Feb. 24 at Austin Community College Eastview Campus.[/caption]

Data-driven education nonprofit E3 Alliance hosted a summit at Austin Community College Eastview Campus Feb. 24, updating education leaders from across the Central Texas region on its strategic plan to address educational opportunities for all children.

The Blueprint for Educational Change strategic plan, which was launched in 2008, calls for kindergarten readiness, elimination of achievement gaps, high school and college readiness, and more community accountability, according to E3 Alliance. The group has launched initiatives in the past to address the goals, including its RAISEup Texas whole school transformation model for middle schools.

City of Austin Mayor Steve Adler spoke at the summit, saying the gap between the jobs available in Austin and people looking for jobs is the most fundamental challenge the community has.

“It is numbing that two-thirds of Central Texas kids who graduate high school and go on to higher education don’t get a degree or a certificate,” Adler said.

E3 Alliance Executive Director Susan Dawson said the nonprofit's strategic plan aims to build the strongest educational pipeline in the nation, helping every student prepare for the future.

“It’s not just about 10 students, or 100 or 10,000 or the 63,000 that were directly impacted by blueprint initiatives last year, it’s about the systems that support all 470,000 students in the Central Texas region,” Dawson said.

Also at the summit was Marco Davis, associate deputy director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. He said, given the growth rate of the Latino population in the U.S., their performance impacts and influences how education is provided and what kind of education is achieved by the student body in America. He added that Latinos are 1 out of every 4 students in American public schools.

"Today's students are tomorrow's workers," Davis said. "How well they get educated will have a direct correlation on how globally competitive we are in terms of our workforce."