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Want evidence of something working in urban education?

Try this: The kindergartners at Milwaukee Academy of Science ended the year with an average reading score three points above the national norm, thanks to help from a 3-year-old, communitywide initiative aimed at improving outcomes for students in all city schools.

A well-designed tutoring effort at the charter school, launched with assistance from the all-partners-on-deck initiative known as Milwaukee Succeeds, was an important contributor to the progress, leaders say.

"Milwaukee Succeeds really opened up doors for us," said Tresca Meiling, achievement director for the youngest grades at the school at 2000 W. Kilbourn Ave. "It provided us with a network of people that we wouldn't otherwise have had access to. (The effort) completely snowballed because of those connections."

A new report released Sunday highlights the latest progress of Milwaukee Succeeds, the broad-based initiative spearheaded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation in 2011 to break down walls between players in the city's education scene, including Milwaukee Public Schools, independent charter schools, private voucher schools, nonprofits and other philanthropic organizations. There are also key partners with corporate connections, such as Northwestern Mutual.

The collaboration is seen as necessary by civic leaders to achieve important long-term goals for the city's children — no matter what school they attend — such as getting more kids to read on grade level in third grade, and making sure more children are taking the right kinds of high school courses to be ready for college.

In short, Milwaukee Succeeds is the slow road to improving education for the long term, akin to adopting healthier eating habits for life, rather than chasing a fad diet.

The second annual report released Sunday highlights the work that has to be done to reach certain educational goals by the year 2020.

Those include:

■Enrolling at least 1,200 more children in high-quality child care centers.

■Immunizing 2,500 more toddlers.

■Helping 2,000 more children reach proficiency in reading by third grade.

■Getting 1,500 more students to meet ACT college entrance exam benchmarks.

The new report also highlights experiments undertaken in some traditional public, public charter and private voucher schools this past school year in an effort to reach some of those goals — like the tutoring program aimed at the highest-need students at Milwaukee Academy of Science.

Through connections at Milwaukee Succeeds, leaders at the charter school were connected with a University of Wisconsin-Whitewater education professor who looked at the school's data and pinpointed the exact area of need for the school's kindergarten and first-grade students struggling the most with reading.

She designed a program that any tutor could be trained to teach to students, in 15- or 30-minute sessions. Then she brought a bus full of about 25 UW-Whitewater students to the school to launch it.

Milwaukee Succeeds then helped school officials connect with tutors closer to the school: students at Marquette University.

College students from various majors came between one and three times a week. Meiling estimated that at least 50 adults from Marquette regularly came to the building. The program was designed to allow new tutors to easily pick up where the previous ones left off.

"We definitely wanted to get away from the, 'Let's just have people read to kids,' style of tutoring," Meiling said.

She added that tutoring wasn't the only different tactic the school pursued this year, but that the result at the end of the year — more than 90% of children in the early grades meeting literacy benchmarks — was a major achievement.

Milwaukee Succeeds Executive Director Mike Soika said the goal is to expand the intensive tutoring program to more schools in the 2014-'15 school year, and to eventually reach at least 2,000 more children.

"We know it works, so now it's, 'How do we take it to scale, and how do we get other groups to do this kind of focused work with students who need it the most?'" he said.

There's other good news, too. Soika said that after three years, all the partners are still part of Milwaukee Succeeds.

That's actually an important point. The leader of Milwaukee Public Schools and the head of the city's chamber of commerce, for example, have not always seen eye to eye. And some nonprofits can be territorial about whom they serve.

But there's evidence of collaboration happening.

One network of Milwaukee Succeeds partners is focused on developing a social and emotional learning program for young children across the community, skills that Soika said are just as important as reading and math achievement.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently reported about schools doubling down on efforts to teach similar skills, which are sometimes referred to broadly as "character education."

If you can get that kind of message in place consistently across the community, from schools to after-school programs and to parents, it can result in far fewer behavioral problems in school, which means more productive learning time, according to Soika.

"What we hope to do is build the infrastructure for success," he said.

Robert Gebelhoff of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.