No Ceilings on Success, The National Urban League
Changing Educational Outcomes Across America
Public education in the United States has reached a critical turning point. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law by President Barack Obama, has shifted the way America’s public schools are funded and evaluated from the federal level to individual states. As a result, the National Urban League was charged with engaging its affiliate movement to hold lawmakers, on the state and local level, accountable for adhering to the law and creating fair educational opportunities for all students.
MTC & Co. began our partnership with the civil rights organization in 2017 by creating a campaign that prepared local Urban League leaders for compelling conversations with state education chiefs and politicians and engaged the public in the education reform conversation. The campaign is No Ceilings on Success.
Over the past two years, No Ceilings on Success has grown from a concept to a branded national multimedia campaign and partnership with UrbanOne. We developed copy and provided creative input for television, radio, digital, and print commercials that encouraged communities of color and families in rural America to raise the issues affecting their children with local lawmakers and their schools through the Urban League movement.
Since launching at the top of 2018, the campaign has garnered over 50 million media impressions from coverage of events like the panel discussion we helped curate on policy and urban education, which featured Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and John King, the former Secretary of Education under Barack Obama. In 2019, we helped the National Urban League analyze and evaluate 37 state ESSA plans, identifying the areas where states fell short in providing educational opportunities for all students and developing recommendations for adoption at the district planning level.
We also developed the campaign website naturbanleague.org, where we could house the findings of our analysis and the full report. In April 2019, the National Urban League hosted an ESSA Briefing in Washington, D.C., to discuss the report and the work moving forward. Coverage of the event reached audiences from EducationWeek and Politico to BET and the NYTimes.
To help individual Urban League affiliates across the country effectively advocate for equity, we created communications toolkits that:
defined equity
provided step-by-step guidance on how to develop communications strategies
write op-eds
and communicate the National Urban League’s education priorities (i.e., investing in early childhood education, reforming school discipline practices, engaging families, etc.) with state policymakers.
Our work led to affiliates across the country partnering with state lawmakers and education chiefs to hold local town halls with the families affected by the law and write into law protections for children in urban and rural communities. Like the Knoxville Area Urban League, Affiliates were even able to develop an equity playbook to help lawmakers meet the needs of students in underperforming schools and invest in areas that will level the playing field in education across Tennessee.
The National Urban League believes that every child has the right to an education that prepares them for college, work, and life - we are proud to be partners in their work.
