Considering School Turnarounds: Market Research and Analysis
An increasing number of states and districts are taking action to turn around chronically underperforming schools—resulting in a rapidly emerging market for school providers willing to help school systems tackle this challenge.
Conditions for Student Success: The Cycle of Continuous Instructional Improvement
How can school finance better support student performance? This paper details a vision of performance-oriented school finance crafted by the National Working Group on Funding Student Success.
Data-Wise Schools Systems Seen as Sharing Key Traits
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.
Achieving with Data: How High-Performing School Systems Use Data to Improve Instruction for Elementary Students
This report is the second in a three-part research effort to investigate the prevalence of performance-driven practices in urban school districts across the country. The first study, “Anatomy of School System Improvement: Performance-Driven Practices in Urban School Districts,” analyzed the state of performance-driven practices within 28 leading school districts.
Venture Fund Fueling Push for New Schools
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?
Charter Schools and the Capital Markets
Charter schools’ growth is hamstrung by a lack of sustaining capital, which is required to fill the gap between per-pupil funding and the amount charter schools need to provide both consistent, high-quality education services and back office support for their schools.
Charter Management Organizations: Toward Scale with Quality
For more than a decade, charter schools have been an important means for improving public education. However, the charter school movement must find new ways to increase the quality and supply of these public schools in order to meet the scale of parent and community demand.
Learning Facts: The brave new world of data-informed instruction
In just the last ten years, goaded by broad and still unsettled cultural shifts, education practices have changed dramatically. Schools are no longer just recording and analyzing inputs – dollars spent, number of days of instruction, numbers of students per teacher – but pushing their data-gathering and analysis efforts into the brave new world of outcomes. Who is dropping out and why? Which students are reading at grade level, and which are not? How are 4th graders doing on fractions and decimals?
Second Annual Gathering of Education Entrepreneurs
Every summer, NewSchools Venture Fund and the Aspen Institute bring together a group of leaders in educational entrepreneurship, philanthropy, policy making and research for the Annual Gathering of Education Entrepreneurs.
Major New Investment Supports NewSchools Venture Fund’s Efforts to Provide 200 High-Quality Charter Schools
San Francisco, Ca. – October 9, 2006 – A new $30 million investment in NewSchools Venture Fund will expand access to high-performing schools for thousands of students nationwide. The grant, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will allow NewSchools to boost the number of charter schools that focus on preparing students in historically underserved areas for success in college and careers by developing high-quality charter school management organizations.