Investment Strategy
America faces an educational achievement gap that inflicts an unacceptable cost on this country. The system by which we educate students was designed for another era, but today, we know that all students need and deserve a high-quality K-12 education that prepares them for success in college and in life. The need for new approaches could not be clearer, and in the context of new federal leadership in education, the opportunity for entrepreneurs to make a difference could not be greater.
For more than a decade, NewSchools’ name has been synonymous with innovation. Thanks to NewSchools’ support, education entrepreneurs are demonstrating every day that it is possible to dramatically improve the opportunities available to the most underserved students; in so doing, they are changing the conditions in which low-income children are educated throughout the country.
In recognition of this moment, NewSchools Venture Fund has introduced its fourth fund, the NewSchools Innovation Fund. Over the next three years, NewSchools will be raising this fund from individual and institutional donors, and investing it in promising entrepreneurs. The NewSchools Innovation Fund builds on our first three funds and focuses on what we believe are critical leverage points where entrepreneurial solutions can have a meaningful impact on student achievement. The goal of the NewSchools Innovation Fund is to build entrepreneurial organizations that together can close the achievement gap for underserved students through innovative and aligned work in people, tools and schools.
Specifically, the Innovation Fund will make investments in several areas:
The NewSchools Innovation Fund will invest in:
- People: entrepreneurial performance-based teacher preparation providers that reliably produce effective early career teachers, and innovations in talent development that foster the development and retention of effective teachers and leaders
- Tools: technology-enabled products, services, and platforms that help enhance teacher productivity and improve instruction, meet individual student needs through mass customization of instruction and new delivery models, or improve teacher effectiveness and student learning through social networking
- Schools, including
— School Turnarounds: organizations that manage and turn around chronically failing schools; and
— Charter Management Organizations (CMOs): scalable, sustainable systems of schools that are achieving breakthrough results for underserved students, including emerging hybrid school models that integrate technology and the best of bricks and mortar schooling to create environments that support students as individual learners
As we have done in our previous funds, the NewSchools Innovation Fund will also identify “around the corner” solutions outside of these specific areas to help seed the next wave of innovation in education reform and to extend the promise of educational excellence to all children.
To complement our investing work, we will also conduct a variety of venture-building activities, in order to ensure that we support the development and growth of strong organizations and propel broader systems change. NewSchools believes that organizations capable of delivering breakthrough results not only directly benefit the students and families they serve, but also provide “proof points” of excellence that accelerate positive change in larger systems.