David Adams offers Urban Assembly as innovation and scaling partner
David Adams, CEO of Urban Assembly, says Portrait aligns with Urban Assembly's work in social-emotional learning and post-secondary readiness. His network's class of 2024 had a 90.3% graduation rate, and he offers to test, codify, and scale practices.
Good afternoon, evening, Chair Denowitz.
I want to, first of all, thank you for all your support for the Finney Network and Urban Assembly, as well as being a champion for social emotional development of our young people.
I am David Adams, Chief Executive Officer at the Urban Assembly.
For 30 years, the Urban Assembly has partnered with New York City Public Schools to design, test, and scale solutions for students historically underserved by our education system.
Today, our network includes 23 unscreened career-connected middle and high schools, and we support the approach of the graduate because it recognizes that readiness requires more than just credits and exams, that students must learn to think critically, communicate effectively, build relationships,
navigate decisions, and apply their real-world learning to real-world challenges.
This vision closely reflects Urban Assembly's work in social and emotional learning, post-secondary readiness, and instructional quality, and our students demonstrate what is possible.
Our class of 24 achieved a 90.3% graduation rate, seven points above the city rate, and particularly strong outcomes from black and Latin students, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.
The Urban Assembly has demonstrated a strong record of helping New York City public schools moving promising ideas to scale.
Through Strong Resilient NYC, we helped make social and emotional learning support available across 1,600 schools.
We trained more than 50,000 educators and supported assessment for more than 720,000 students.
We helped develop post-secondary bridge model that ultimately expanded citywide.
And we now support Future Ready NYC in connecting academic learning.
to college and career pathways.
These experiences have taught us that a strong vision is only the beginning.
Schools need practical tools, professional learning, implementation support, meaningful measures of student growth, and systems for learning what works.
Urban Assembly is ready to bring that experience to the portrait of a graduate as an innovation and scaling partner
that can test approaches in real schools, examine the evidence, codify effective practices, and help New York City public schools bring them to students across the country.
City.
Thank you.
I was watching that the other day.
Across the country, wow.
You have big goals.