Susan Dawson, President of E3 Alliance, on Business and Educational Reform

Susan Dawson, President of E3 Alliance, is a Texas entrepreneur, business and civic leader.  She founded and leads E3 Alliance (Education Equals Economics), a regional non-profit collaborative to increase economic outcomes by aligning our education systems to fulfill the potential of every student.  E3 Alliance has been recognized across the country, including by the White House and the US Department of Education, as a unique model of objective and ground-breaking work in building systemic change for education.

Ms. Dawson is former president of Athens Group, an employee-owned consulting firm integrating technology strategy and software solutions. Before co-founding Athens Group, Ms. Dawson was president of multiple successful technology ventures and was Computer Integrated Manufacturing Manager for Motorola’s Semiconductor Product Sector.

After being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in the spring of 2016 and metastatic cancer in 2019, Ms. Dawson became very involved in working to improve the cancer research, prevention, and clinical care infrastructure in Austin and Texas. She is founder and co-Chair of Central Texas Addressing Cancer Together (CTX-ACT), a broad coalition created to redesign the ecosystem for indigent cancer care in the Central Texas region, and has has worked closely with the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to enhance research grantmaking in Texas.

Ms. Dawson has a BS in Civil Engineering Cum Laude from Princeton and an MBA with highest honors from The University of Texas McCombs School of Business.

Business Today (Emily Cheston): From undergrad at Princeton, can you paint a picture of your path leading up to your professional career?

Susan Dawson (SD): I graduated from Princeton in 1981 and, other than summer camp and visits to the Mexico border (when we used to routinely be able to do that!) going to college in New Jersey was just about the only time I had ventured beyond the San Antonio area. It was an incredible and eye-opening experience for me for sure. I was an engineering major and when I got out of Princeton I moved out to the west coast with a few other Princeton buddies. I was working as a civil engineer, writing software to investigate complex structural engineering problems and predict failures before they happened. I loved it and had a really great time, but decided I wanted more than that. After spending time on the west coast, I returned to Texas to get my MBA at UT Austin with a specialty in Information Systems Management. Graduating in the midst of a major financial bust, I was lucky to receive a job offer at Motorola that allowed me to be one of the very few who was able to stay in Austin after business school.

BT: What was your experience like at Motorola and, more broadly, in the Austin area?

SD: At Motorola, I was in charge of the teams who wrote the software that ran our semiconductor factories everywhere from Austin to Arizona to Japan to the Philippines. I had a wonderful experience, but after the company grew to about 130,000 people, I realized that I wanted to work on a scale where decisions and impact could be made more quickly. I left and joined a small tech consulting firm and spent most of my career in the tech start-up space in the Austin area. I was also very engaged in community leadership through a variety of non-profit boards. In 2001, I was asked to be the Chair of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. It was apparent that a significant amount of money being made in the Austin area was coming from the tech space which made me unusually well-qualified for the leadership position at the intersection of tech and business. I like to describe the experience as “going to college to on your community”. You’re looking at transportation, you’re looking at workforce development, you’re looking at education, air quality, race relations —anything you can imagine that affects companies and individuals across the community. It was very important to be a mile deep on just about any issue that would impact business because I was the “go to” spokesperson on behalf of the business community for media, government officials, foreign visitors, and the community as a whole. Through that learning experience, I realized that my deep passion is centered around education and the ability that education has to change people’s lives.

BT: What led you to become involved in an active role in education?

SD: Fast forward to around 2005, many business leaders were beginning to get frustrated by the disconnect between educational outcomes and economic impact. The Austin area was competitive in educational outcomes by just about any metric, but our ability to develop the workforce needed for a 21st century global economy was stagnating.  We realized that we needed to alter the way our entire education system—not just a few schools—functioned in relation to how well-prepared students were for the economy they were entering. As good business leaders, we scanned the country to find the successful model of regional educational change that we could steal, but there was no perfect model that we could find. Eventually, I decided to leave the private sector and start the non-profit that became E3 Alliance (Education Equals Economics) in order to create a regional platform for the systemic change in education that we wanted to see. That’s what I’ve been working towards since May, 2006! It was always about aligning business, education and community leaders who are able to facilitate opportunities for a prepared workforce that could engage in the economic landscape that these businesses provided.

BT: Do you think the nimbleness that afforded you the opportunity to succeed in engineering then business then education is still conducive to today’s workplace?

SD: The short answer is yes. The longer answer is reinforced by a few things. I think that the skills that I learned in engineering and problem-solving at Princeton are completely transferable to the complex systems change tasks that I take on today. That background was helpful when I was starting up businesses as well as when I launched E3 Alliance. I will say that the Princeton educational experience, having been very intentionally broad and intentionally theoretical, was extremely important in helping me to navigate the evolutions and challenges in my business and nonprofit career. I think that in the future of an ever faster-changing world, the ability to be nimble will be not only be embraced, it will be critical. The Princeton experience lends itself to that.

BT: When you spoke about looking at opportunities for systemic change in education, it struck me that you mentioned a national search for a model that you could base your work on. Do you think that the systems you have now put in place could be adopted on the state or national level?

SD: Many aspects of what we’ve done are applicable on a larger scale. When we were deciding where to dial in, we knew that the platform had to be small enough to make sure everyone we had at the table was truly committed to change, but large enough that we could be successful at scale. We chose the 5-county, 2 million-person Austin Metro area. Within this Central Texas region, there were similar economic drivers, common commuting paths, and a regional identity. It was important to us to build a model that could create change at scale and be adaptable to the many diverse regions of Texas. This model – now coined as “collective impact” has been hugely successful.  For instance, we have increased the number of students preparing for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers in high schools by over 900% in the last eight years, and our improvements in the drop-out rate over the last decade will return over $4B to our region in lifetime earnings of students. We are now taking our work throughout the state of Texas and have consulted with others across the country. 

BT: Given the discussion about how effective federal efforts to reform education can really be, and given specific system’s needs on-the-ground, how much do you think we should be asking of lawmakers on a national level?

SD: I definitely think that there’s a role for the federal government in providing certain support for strategic efforts within the education space. For instance, the Obama administration made great gains in supporting the rapidly-growing Hispanic-learner community as well as addressing the issue of chronic absences. But most funding and accountability policy is managed at the state level. Expertise and resource allocation are extremely important at the state level, but larger states like Texas struggle with how to adapt to the wide-range of differences that affect their different regions. Not having a level between the state and individual colleges and school districts can make sharing models and best practices very difficult. Creating a common understanding based on objective data, common objectives, and a collaborative platform to reach higher results is the role that we’ve tried to fill as an independent regional backbone organization.

BT: One E3 Alliance initiative was the Kick the Flu Campaign. Looking at how social determinants of health go on to shape educational outcomes, what work do you think can be done at the intersection of health and education?

SD: Health and education are indelibly intertwined. That intersection creates complexity as well as opportunity. Back in 2011, in Texas and around the country, the economic recession was in full force and states were cutting huge amounts of money from their budgets. Texas, in particular, was planning to cut over $5B from its public education budget. We knew that there would be many thousands of job losses and important programs cut, but there also was an opportunity to investigate new approaches. We gathered our superintendent partners, business and philanthropic leaders to prioritize what could be done collectively in the face of a massive loss of resources. Attendance was identified as a hugely important focus because—in Texas as in many other states—attendance is the basis of how schools get revenues from the state. Every day a student is absent, a school loses funding, and it adds up very quickly. In fact, the average Central Texas high school loses about $20,000 in state funding every week due to absences. Anything that we could do to improve student attendance would both help improve learning as well as help make sure that schools could keep their doors open. E3 Alliance led a regional awareness campaign – Missing School Matters – to address unnecessary absences. But we also needed to address root causes, so undertook a ground-breaking Absence Reasons Study that showed a strong correlation between student absences and flu incidence. Based on this data, we found a partner in the private sector that could provide in-school vaccinations at no cost to districts or families. We now oversee the largest free flu immunization effort in the country because of how it directly impacts education systems and outcomes.  And it’s working: since 2012, overall attendance has improved and over $37M has been saved for Central Texas schools due to decreases in student absenteeism. 

BT: Circling back to the importance of the involvement of business leaders in the community within the space of educational reform, would you say that these leaders have been receptive to the importance of initiatives such as yours?

SD: Yes, I think that huge strides have been made in engaging business leaders in educational change, but there is definitely still a long way to go. Some leaders will immediately be receptive to the data you show them, but there are also people who need much more specific information and more of an explanation of how change can happen and what the role of business is. Whether it be hiring practices or student internships, policy advocacy or individual employee engagement, I think involving the business community in education is critical to making sure students will be prepared and successful after they graduate. A huge part of our work is creating a culture that is receptive to data use: building a data-informed region, and business leaders naturally resonate with that mission. No matter who you are, we can all benefit from objective data: making well-informed and contextualized decisions can be empowered exponentially by diving deeply into objective data in the space of education. 

BT: As a mother yourself, how do you think your personal experience has impacted your work in the educational reform world? What fulfills you the most about your work?

SD: Being a mother certainly helps. I have always had a passion for education but having the experience of raising my own children and being immersed in the decisions of the education system as a parent has certainly informed many of my decisions on the job. But it’s important to never base decisions on a single situation. It’s not just about my kids or one school or one district: our goal is to make an impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of students for decades to come. The joy of seeing that change – at scale - that is what motivates me to keep working toward our goal. It’s incredible to wake up every day and know that you’re helping to change the world.