Overview / History

Housed within the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation, the Diamond Educational Excellence Partnership (DEEP) is a collaborative undertaking of multiple partner organizations and community leaders who are committed to improving educational outcomes for students attending public schools in the Diamond Community, a cluster of neighborhoods in southeastern San Diego that is home to many of the city’s struggling schools.

DEEP began its work by convening potential partners to reflect upon primary data on student performance and focus group findings about the state of local schools as reported in “The State of Education in the Diamond Community,” (Gianzero, 2010).

In addition to this report, DEEP partners considered secondary research on the factors that contribute to high-performance in urban schools, as well as research on the critical junctures in the cradle-to-career education pipeline. DEEP partners also learned from multiple efforts across the country and locally to support students from low-income communities in moving successfully through the pipeline. Finally, DEEP invited various local change agents to share how their work might support efforts to improve outcomes.

1. All children can succeed when held to high and provided appropriate supports;
2. Schools cannot do – and have never done – the work of educating children well on their own;
3. Working collaboratively not only enables partner organizations to produce the greatest change, but it also improves the capacity of the individual organizations to make change; and
4. Partner organizations must be willing to work collaboratively, use research to guide practice, support resource mobilization, and monitor and evaluate their work.