What defines "success" for a P-20 council?

Part II of the discussion started in the Dec. 10 post: An individual working with the state of North Carolina on strategic planning for their education coordinating entity recently asked me, "What makes a coordinating entity effective?" I wondered if this question might be interpreted as, "When will a council know when it has achieved "success"?

It's likely that the answer to this question varies depending upon the political climate in a given state, but common responses might be:

(A) Ability to:
(1) identify where the breaks the pipeline are for students (i.e., there may be several possible reasons for high remediation #s in college math, but not all reasons may be the real reason. Trying to address all possible reasons may result in an unnecessary overexpenditure with minimal effectiveness);
(2) achieve consensus on solutions to alignment issues among agencies with authority for early learning, K-12 and higher education;
(3) based on this consensus, develop actionable recommendations targeted to true root problems, that hold significant chances for improvement in alignment. Some would argue any recommendation worth the council’s time should be something an agency cannot do independently of the others;
(4) successfully get these recommendations into enactment into policy, programs or practice;
(5) set numeric goals benchmarking improvement in P-20 alignment, assign staff responsibility for working toward goals, and quantify progress toward achievement of those goals over time.

(B) Ability to:
(1) develop public demand for alignment efforts from their elected leaders and
(2) communicate to the public the actions taken to improve alignment, and progress toward achieving goals. Some councils’ efforts, fairly or unfairly, have been decried as “window-dressing”. Showing the importance of this work and demonstrating the entity’s efforts are improving outcomes for students can deflect this.
(3) make the entity’s progress such a pivotal and effective element of education reform that it will not be dismantled or put on hold every time there’s a change in the gov, chief, PS leadership, etc. I think this is one of the reasons some P-16 councils like Indiana’s have lasted for so long and been such a force for educational progress in their state.

(C) Ability to work effectively with other state-level groups that may be working on related issues. In at least a few states, there appear to be commissions, committees, etc. working on parallel tracks to the coordinating entity. If it’s not politically feasible for these groups to be combined (i.e., if legislature has appointed one and gov. has appointed the other), then at least for the efforts to be seen as bipartisan and gain traction, entity needs to seek any and all possible means to work with rather than against other group.

(D) If a council is from a geographically or demographically diverse state, a coordinating council’s success may partially hinge on including members from these diverse populations—so that there is a vision of statewide ownership, rather than “people from the state capitol” who may or may not represent concerns and interests statewide.