Impact
Since its founding in 1998, NewSchools Venture Fund has made a dramatic impact on public education, particularly in underserved urban communities in which we invest, where low-income and minority students have been deprived of basic educational opportunities for generations.
NewSchools seeks to close the significant achievement gaps that exist between these students and their peers in more affluent communities. In the 2005-2006 school year, more than 70% of the students served by our charter school organizations were low-income (as measured by the number receiving free or reduced-price lunch) and over 90% were students of color.
Our ventures are having a significant impact on the lives of these underserved children – both as individual organizations that directly touch the lives of students, teachers and parents, and together as a critical mass of entrepreneurial organizations that are effecting system-wide change in public education. These organizations have demonstrated to parents and policymakers alike that there is another approach to public schooling that can serve these students well; by making progress toward closing the achievement gap, they have also begun to inform the national conversation about how public schooling might operate more effectively.
We measure our portfolio’s impact on two dimensions that we believe are critical to demonstrating the power of entrepreneurs:
- Scale: Our ventures seek to touch the lives of many students, such that the scale of their operations begins to approach the scale of the demand from parents and communities. Together, NewSchools' portfolio serves as many students as some urban districts, giving our entrepreneurs a real voice in education reform and the ability to influence systemic change.
- Quality: Educational excellence is a precursor to effective educational scale. As such, while it is important that our entrepreneurs address the sizable need in urban education, they all focus first and foremost on providing a high-quality education to the students they serve. By doing so, they create powerful proof points for new academic models and entrepreneurial approaches.
Click on the links below to learn about how our different ventures are doing, quantitatively and qualitatively, on each of these dimensions.