We support educators looking to launch their first and/or second charter schools. We also support educators in district schools with the autonomy to use innovative instructional design.
Since our portfolio’s inception, we’ve committed to and appreciated learning alongside our venture organizations. Thanks to 28 of organizations we’ve worked with, we now know more about trends we tend to see in both their origins and journeys and the challenges and advantages of each. While of course no model provider is the same, we do see four primary pathways to becoming a model provider and four major stages each passes through on their road to developing a sustainable, high-impact model that works with schools at significant scale.
We invest in new innovative schools that embrace an expanded definition of student success meaning schools focus on academic results, social-emotional competencies and school culture/climate factors. A 2018 brief, authored Jason Atwood and Stacey Childress, includes design and implementation lessons we learned from working closely with school leadership teams and our research partner, Transforming Education. This brief also includes observations based on the data collected from more than 3,000 students at 23 schools.
Our team is headed by Scott Benson, formerly of DC Public Schools, where he evaluated numerous new academic initiatives being implemented (or so he thought) across the city’s schools. Some schools did indeed take a mandate from the district, run with it, and transform the way their students learned, just as he had hoped. Yet others left their new materials untouched. After scouring countless classrooms to understand why two differentiators surfaced; forming the eventual philosophy guiding our model provider strategy today. (5 min read)
