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See below for the latest news articles about NewSchools Venture Fund's work.

  • Opinion: Graduation Madness
    Original Article

    By Ted Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer of NewSchools Venture Fund and and Jonathan Schorr, Partner at NewSchools Venture Fund. As seen in the Washington Post, April 6, 2008. Odds are, your bracket for the NCAA men's final didn't match up Butler and Western Kentucky. But that's the way it would go in an alternate universe where graduation rates, rather than baskets scored, decided the game. As it stands today, only one of the schools in this year's Final Four, North Carolina, manages to graduate a majority of its players -- or more than a third of its black players.

  • Opinion: The schools that Katrina built
    How New Orleans could end up saving public education in AmericaOriginal Article

    By James A. Peyser, Partner, NewSchools Venture Fund. As seen in the Boston Globe, October 14, 2007 The flood waters that submerged New Orleans two years ago also sank the local school district. What had been a system comparable in size to Boston's, with more than 60,000 students and 125 schools, resurfaced in the spring of 2006 at just a fraction of the size, with only 11,000 students and 26 schools.

  • The Greatest Education Lab
    by Walter Isaacson for TIME MagazineOriginal Article

    Paul Vallas, the man who took over the troubled school systems of Chicago and then Philadelphia and upended them, stood before a crowd of New Orleans parents in a French Quarter courtyard earlier this summer and offered a promise. "This will be the greatest opportunity for educational entrepreneurs, charter schools, competition and parental choice in America," he said. Call it the silver lining: Hurricane Katrina washed away what was one of the nation's worst school systems and opened the path for energetic reformers who want to make New Orleans a laboratory of new ideas for urban schools .

  • Inner City Education Foundation Receives Over $4 million To Open Four New Schools
    Grants Will Create New Opportunities for Thousands of Students, Alleviate Demand for High-Quality Options in South Los AngelesOriginal Article

    Los Angeles, CA -- August 16, 2007 -- The Inner City Education Foundation (ICEF) announced today that it has received three grants totaling close to $4.2 million, which will enable it to open four much-needed charter schools in South Los Angeles this fall. The contributions include up to $1.8 million from NewSchools Venture Fund, $1.45 million from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and $920,000 from the Walton Family Foundation.

  • New Leadership Vows to Make New Orleans Schools a Model
    Original Article

    NEW ORLEANS, LA - May 9, 2007 - Days after being tapped to head this city’s state-run schools, Paul G. Vallas pledged here at an elite national gathering of education leaders, funders, and entrepreneurs to help spearhead an effort to make the hurricane-ravaged system a model of both choice and accountability.

  • Data-Wise Schools Systems Seen as Sharing Key Traits
    February 14, 2007 — By Lynn Olson — Education Week

    Schools and districts nationwide are being exhorted to use data to improve instruction. But what does that advice look like in practice? That’s the question addressed by a new study that examined two midsize urban districts and two nonprofit charter-management organizations with records of improving student achievement over time and of grounding their decisionmaking in data.

  • Venture Fund Fueling Push for New Schools
    January 17, 2007— By Erik W. Robelen — Education WeekOriginal Article

    A nonprofit group in California is plowing millions of donated dollars into new charter schools around the country, with uneven but largely promising results. The NewSchools Venture Fund, launched nine years ago to support educational entrepreneurs, recently hit a milestone: It has raised $100 million, helped along by a big gift last summer that propelled it to the top of the heap among the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s education grantees. So, what’s it doing with all that money?

  • Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
    September 2006 — By Chris Warren — Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine

    Entrepreneurs Looking For a Real Challenge Find It — At School

  • Venture Capitalists Are Investing in Educational Reform
    February 16, 2006 — By James Flanigan — New York TimesOriginal Article

    Venture capitalists of Silicon Valley, who have backed hundreds of high-technology entrepreneurs, are eagerly financing a new group these days: schoolmasters. "We give education entrepreneurs money to start or to speed up building their companies," said L. John Doerr, who over 26 years has helped start dozens of ventures, including Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com and Google. He helped found NewSchools Venture Fund in San Francisco six years ago for a new breed of entrepreneur — the kind who doesn't have to produce a profit.

  • Education Entrepreneurs Seen as Facing Uphill Climb in U.S. Schools
    November 30, 2005 — By Erik W. Robelen — Education Week

    WASHINGTON, D.C. — Experts who gathered here recently to discuss educational entrepreneurship pointed to what they see as barriers to expanding its influence in the K-12 arena: federal and state policies, district bureaucracies, a climate that resists change, and outright political opposition.