Our Mission
ARCHES is a voluntary confederation of regional collaboratives. The shared goal of the ARCHES collaboratives is to close the achievement gap and increase college readiness, enrollment, and completion rates for students from socio-economic and racial-ethnic communities with historically low college-going rate.
About Collaboration
Collaboration is a process where two or more entities work together to realize shared goals by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus. To resolve the state’s key education problem—California’s achievement gap—coordination and collaboration among various entities within society is necessary.
History
In 2005, Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell announced his intention to establish “a new statewide council to better coordinate and integrate education in California from preschool through college.” Responding to this call for action, ARCHES was launched in 2005 as an initiative of the California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP) — a collaborative program involving all of the state’s educational sectors that is administered by the California State University — and the California Education Round Table. The Round Table serves as a voluntary association of the chief executive officers of all of California’s educational sectors along with its programmatic arm, the Intersegmental Coordinating Committee (ICC). These founding members, and others, have built ARCHES into a substantial component of California’s educational reform effort.
Today, ARCHES is a voluntary confederation of regional collaboratives with a shared goal of closing achievement and opportunity gaps and increasing college readiness, enrollment, and completion rates for students from socio-economic and racial-ethnic communities with historically low college-going rates. Each collaborative is composed of school districts, community colleges, baccalaureate-granting colleges and universities, businesses, community organizations, and parental alliances. Through a tiered system of support services, which includes services such as participation in the ARCHES ACCESS equity-based professional development, ARCHES is focused on helping these collaboratives leverage multi-sector collaboration for student equity.
Please find our publication: Enhancing Student Achievement through Regional Collaboratives: ARCHES First Five Years here.
What We Do
ARCHES provides grants and technical assistance to increase the success of regional collaborative work to close opportunity gaps and increase college readiness, enrollment, and completion rates for students from socio-economic and racial-ethnic communities with historically low college-going rates.
ARCHES also serves as a professional community in which members engaged in collaborative efforts to improve student achievement can learn from each other; identify and promote effective practices; provide professional development and technical assistance; mentor new collaboratives; share strategies to optimize efficiency and effectiveness; and advocate for public policies that lead to educational attainment and elimination of the achievement gap.