Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $16.5 Million in Grants in Q3 2024

In Q3 2024, our foundation awarded 69 grants totaling over $16.5 million.

Our third quarter grantmaking focused on identifying and fueling the scale of cost-effective programs and solutions that accelerate improvement in key academic and socioemotional outcomes for all children. As always, we placed an emphasis on grantmaking and strategic support that unlock innovation, evidence, and growth for our grantees.

Below, we highlighted just some of the direct impact and ecosystem organizations we’re proud to support this quarter.

Unlocking Innovation and Growth (Direct Impact Grantees)

NEW GRANTEES

New to the Innovative Schools portfolio are two organizations:

Ampact, a national provider of high-impact tutoring for kindergarten through eighth grade in both math and ELA, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. Ampact will use the funding to expand its kindergarten through third grade Math Corps program to an additional 1,500 students, accelerating the development of foundational math skills by at least two months. The organization will also explore a new technology strategy plan to identify opportunities to further enhance its impact on students and reduce costs.

Fishtank Learning, a provider of high-quality instructional materials for both math and ELA, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. The organization will use the funding to build its evidence-generating capacity as it scales to reach 130,000 students, helping begin to address the question of whether schools that use the same provider for both math and ELA curricula increase their overall usage of high-quality instructional materials.

New to the Inspired Minds portfolio are two organizations:

BioBus, which helps K-12 students discover, explore, and pursue science through introductory science labs aboard mobile labs, afterschool programs, and internships, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. The organization will use the funding to increase evidence of impact for its mobile lab program, Discover, as well as improve its systems and processes for the next stage of growth.

Click2Science, a project of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which received a one-year pilot grant of $150,000. Click2Science offers out-of-school-time STEM educators a suite of professional development products designed to meet their needs and constraints. The organization currently reaches 23,000 STEM educators and will use the grant funding to assess viability for further scale.

RENEWALS AND COMMITMENTS

$3,250,000 over three years to Saga Education, a national leader in high-impact tutoring for middle and high school math. Saga, which Overdeck Family Foundation has funded since 2017, will use the funding to develop tools that leverage generative AI to increase the cost-effectiveness of its tutor training and coaching, allowing it to support 5,000 tutors annually, serving 3,400 students directly and 25,000 students indirectly. Saga has been evaluated in three rigorous randomized controlled trials, with researchers finding impacts of tutoring ranging from one to 1.5 years of learning.

$3,000,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to Springboard Collaborative to reach a cumulative 113,000 students, as well as reduce the cost per beneficiary and continue strengthening the program’s evidence base. Springboard’s family engagement program coaches educators and families to work together to help students read on grade level, both during the school year and summer break. Research on the program shows gains of one to three months of additional learning in language and literacy skills for students attending Springboard Summer, compared to those who did not.

$2,000,000 (year two of a three-year grant) to Khan Academy to continue increasing student usage of its math content to the recommended dosage of more than 30 minutes per week, as well as generate evidence into the efficacy of Khanmigo, its generative AI tutor and teaching aide.

$1,200,000 over two years to the Public Media Group of Southern California (PBS SoCal) for the Family Math initiative, which develops workshops and digital assets to support families in increasing early math knowledge, skill, and confidence with their children. PBS SoCal, which reaches 2.7 million caregivers and 4.1 million children with its Family Math content, will use the funding to experiment with new content distribution channels and build more robust evidence.

$1,000,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture Initiative, which restructures Pre-K–12 schools to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within existing budgets. The organization will use the funding to reach over 10,000 teachers and 265,000 students through a strategic staffing approach that shows emerging benefits for educators and students. Additionally, Public Impact will launch two lower-cost models of delivery and measure the impact of those models.

$1,000,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to Reach Out and Read to support the organization’s continued growth. Reach Out and Read, which integrates early relational health and literacy best practices into standard pediatric visits, expects to reach 13.5 million children over the three years of the grant.

$900,000 over two years to DiscoverE to help scale its engineering-based competition, Future City, to 168,000 middle school students. In addition to supporting scaling goals, the organization will use the funding to introduce two new regions, increase earned revenue, and launch a validation study to study the impact of Future City on students’ engineering design skills, motivation, and STEM career interest.

$850,000 over two years to Raising a Reader, a book lending program that supports families in developing and using shared reading routines. Raising a Reader will use the funding to reach a cumulative 344,000 children, while increasing its affiliates’ family engagement efforts and working to reduce per-family costs.

$350,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Teach Plus to help the organization build public understanding of and support for strategic staffing policies, which can accelerate the expansion of differentiated educator roles across the country.

$300,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to support Science Buddies, a provider of free online guides and resources to support hands-on science projects for students in K-12, as well as educator supports including video lessons, activities, and lesson plans. Science Buddies, which is on track to reach 8 million students in 2024, will use the funding to maintain its scale while deepening evidence of impact.

$250,000 (year two of a three-year grant) to FIRST® Robotics to support improvements to its digital infrastructure and continued growth post-pandemic. FIRST reaches over 350,000 students with three robotics programs that build critical thinking, coding, and design skills.

$250,000 over one year to support the National Museum of Mathematics in continuing programming in its temporary pop-up location, as well as a $125,000 restricted grant to support Dr. Chaim Goodman-Strauss’ continued residency.

$200,000 to Imagine Science, a collaboration between local chapters of the YMCA, Boys & Girls Club, 4-H, and Girls Inc. that aims to increase STEM engagement for 10,000 students in grades four through eight. The organization will use the funding to support program evaluation and finalize a strategic plan.

Unlocking Evidence: RESEARCH and FIELD BUILDING

Ecosystem grants are designed to clear the path to scale for our direct impact grantees and strategies.

$2,000,000 over two years to the Afterschool Alliance, which expands support for and availability of quality afterschool programs through research, advocacy, communications, and field-building. Afterschool Alliance will use the funding to provide technical assistance for 10 state afterschool networks (also supported through a two-year grant of $230,000 to the STEM Education Coalition Policy Forum), update the field’s understanding of key trends in the field through the 2025 “America After 3PM” STEM special report, and provide issue education for policymakers.

$1 million over two years to fund five studies focused on identifying the drivers of and potential solutions to post-pandemic chronic absenteeism in preschool through ninth grade. Studies will be part of a broader learning network that will identify clear recommendations for districts and states focused on addressing the absenteeism crisis. They include:

• A two-year grant of $250,000 to the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research to identify the student, school, family, and neighborhood factors associated with absenteeism in grades six through nine.
• A two-year grant of $246,376 to the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education to pinpoint the specific drivers of absenteeism most strongly linked to student achievement in the unstudied state of West Virginia and build more robust data systems for ensuring that students who should be in school are present and accounted for.
• A two-year grant of $250,000 to The Los Angeles Trust for Children’s Health and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA to examine the extent to which investments in school-based health centers and behavioral health services are associated with reductions in chronic absenteeism in Los Angeles County post-pandemic.
• A two-year grant of $186,037 to Texas Tech University to estimate the impact of Texas teacher merit-based pay on student attendance and identify any specific teacher engagement and communication strategies that appear most effective for reducing student absenteeism.
• A two-year grant of $150,000 to The University of Chicago Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab to prototype and test how a new messaging intervention can impact preschool attendance, producing transferable insights about messaging that preschool providers can use to strengthen family relationships and attendance rates.

$750,000 over three years to Reach Out and Read, with subgrants to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Institute for Child Success, to conduct a quasi-experimental study estimating the impact of Reach Out and Read on healthcare-relevant outcomes, including patient satisfaction, caregiver-clinician relationship quality, and attendance at well-child visits.

$568,344 over two and a half years to WestEd to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the FutureCity engineering competition program. The research team will use a delayed treatment design to assign middle school science classrooms to participate in FutureCity in the fall/winter or spring, allowing them to estimate the impact of FutureCity on students’ engineering design skills, motivation, and STEM career interest, as well as explore whether and how impacts vary for subgroups.

$550,000 over two years to RAND to conduct a randomized controlled trial of Challenger Center. The research team will randomly assign sixth-grade science classrooms to either experience Challenger Center missions or engage in another type of off-site field trip. The team will then estimate causal impacts of Challenger Center missions on: self-efficacy in science, interest in science, and STEM identity and interest in STEM careers immediately after the mission and six months later; student elective course-taking in seventh grade; and STEM out-of-school time participation six months after the mission.

$285,775 over two years to the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at Wellesley College to conduct a mixed-methods study identifying strategies for recruiting, training, and retaining a high-quality out-of-school time STEM workforce.

$200,000 over one year to the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA), which works to improve the quality of summer programming and expand awareness of and access to summer learning for children and families. NSLA will use the funding to support a public messaging campaign, expand the DiscoverSummer.org program repository, and provide capacity-building for 3,000 practitioners.

$100,000 over 15 months to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to host a convening focused on synthesizing evidence from the informal science and engineering education field. The event will lead to the development and dissemination of a culminating report on the state of the out-of-school STEM field and the highest priority steps for research and practice moving forward.

$100,000 over one year through an expenditure responsibility grant to Edtech Insiders to build a map of generative AI usage in education that fosters learning and supports the growth of impactful AI in education.