Trends Emerging From Our First 62 Investments in 2021
By Frances Messano Here at NewSchools, we kicked off 2021 with the launch of a new three-year strategy, focused on four investment areas: Innovative Public Schools, Learning Solutions, Diverse Leaders, and Racial Equity. Our team is energized by the tremendous response from education innovators and leaders across the country. As we analyzed data from the […]
Building a Thriving Community of Latinx Educators in a City with Fewer than 1% of Them
In Kansas City, Missouri, like in much of the country, the teaching profession is not as diverse as it should be. For every 200 Latinx students in the Kansas City area, there is only 1 Latinx teacher. Edgar Palacios founded Latinx Education Collaborative on the belief that representation matters. Teachers of color can enhance academic […]
Seeing the World Differently – A Summer Reading List
To build connections during our virtual Summit event in May, NewSchools asked a diverse group of innovators, policymakers, funders, and educators to share the books that helped them make sense of the world or simply inspired them this past year. Here are the 145 books that were recommended to us, covering a wide variety of […]
My First and Only Latina Teacher: Why Teacher Diversity Matters
Katiusca Moreno, Senior Partner Most of us remember the teachers who made a powerful difference in our lives. I remember the ones who felt like family. For me, Ms. Heyward was one of those teachers. She was my seventh grade social studies teacher who kept a small Puerto Rican […]
News Release – NewSchools Ignite Announces “Middle School & High School Math Challenge”
NewSchools Ignite, an initiative of NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm, is now accepting applications for its Middle and High School Math Learning Challenge, which will offer grant funding to edtech startups addressing market gaps in secondary mathematics. “Right now, one of the toughest math problems is figuring out how to get innovative […]
Saying good-bye to the scribe of our movement
By and large, we at NewSchools like to use this blog space to announce news, or to ruminate on ideas, trends, and policy matters that are core to the work of education entrepreneurs. It’s rarely for individual matters. This will be an exception. For the last eight years, Julie Landry Petersen has served as the […]
New investments… and a new video!
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/18677353 w=500&h=281] Back in September, we made a promise that if 150,000 people pledged to see the movie Waiting for “Superman”, we would invest $5 million in entrepreneurial organizations that improve public education for low-income kids. The movie gets viewers outraged—as they should be—at the fact that in some communities, a quality education is […]
Why Your Government Matters
It’s not a schoolhouse rock segment (the song would be pretty lame), nor even a Civics class topic—it’s the question that NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell will be addressing at tomorrow’s hearing of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Thursday. Ted will be among one of four witnesses testifying about the crucial things […]
Guest post: Going to NewSchools
This guest post comes from Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners, the voice behind the must-read education blog Eduwonk.com and a prolific writer whose columns and articles regularly appear in U.S. News & World Report and many other publications. I’ve been lucky enough to attend NewSchools Summits pretty much since they started. [Editor’s note: we checked, and as of […]
Guest post: Closing the Achievement Gap – The Edupreneur Way
This guest post was written by Ellen Winn of the Education Equality Project, a national, bipartisan advocacy organization dedicated to closing the achievement gap. The recent death of achievement-gap closing hero Jaime Escalante (whose story was brought to life via the film “Stand and Deliver”) has got me thinking anew about how we can close […]