Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $17.2 Million in Grants in Q4 2025

In Q4 2025, our foundation awarded 49 grants totaling over $17 million.

Our fourth quarter grantmaking focuses 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 place 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 as we conclude our 2025 grantmaking.

Unlocking Innovation and Growth (Direct Impact Grantees)

NEW GRANTEES

New to the Exceptional Educators portfolio:

• Jounce Partners, which provides professional development for school leaders designed to help them deliver high-quality, content-specific coaching to teachers. Jounce received a one-year pilot grant of $250,000 to enhance its data systems, codify coaching frameworks, and pilot post-engagement services to sustain academic gains.

New to the Inspired Minds portfolio:

• National Math Stars, which helps mathematically extraordinary students access the mentorship, guidance, and enrichment experiences needed to fulfill their potential. National Math Stars received a one-year pilot grant of $150,000 to support the expansion of its awards-based talent identification program, which aims to reach 16,000 mathematically exceptional elementary school students in 2026.

RENEWALS AND COMMITMENTS

$4,000,000 over two and a half years to Springboard Collaborative to support family-centered literacy programming for over 50,000 students, while helping the organization innovate to meet district and learner needs, including expanding into math.

$1,500,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Leading Educators to continue implementation and refinement of its AI-supported professional learning offerings designed to increase educator efficacy and strengthen core programmatic impact.

$1,500,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Teaching Lab to support continued growth and AI innovation, which strengthens teacher learning, improves student outcomes, and has the potential to enhance the cost-effectiveness of professional learning programs.

After a successful pilot grant, $1,000,000 over two years to Fishtank Learning to support the growth of its digital-first ELA and Math curriculum. The organization will use the funding to expand its reach to 300,000 students and complete and pilot its redesigned math product.

$1,000,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Magpie Literacy to increase the usage and impact of its K-8 foundational literacy platform. Magpie, which found ESSA Tier 2-aligned validation of its impact on literacy outcomes, will use the funding to reach 70,000 students and expand its push into grades three through eight.

$1,000,000 over two years to Public Impact to support the Opportunity Culture initiative in scaling the impact of its strategic staffing model, strengthening its data insights, and preparing for long-term organizational growth.

Following an impactful pilot grant, $550,000 over one year to BioBus to increase mobile lab programming, reaching 45,000 students across New England, as well as to enhance evaluation.

$450,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to DiscoverE to expand its Future City engineering competition to 88,000 middle school students in SY 2025-26. In addition to growth, DiscoverE will use the funding to improve educator retention, expand high school programming, and strengthen its evidence base.

$400,000 over one year to the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, Inc. to support its high-impact tutoring program in reaching more than 2,500 students.

$400,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to PERTS to strengthen implementation fidelity and deepen classroom impact across Elevate, its evidence-based professional learning platform that helps educators improve classroom learning conditions.

$350,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Raising a Reader to support 160,000 children in engaging in home literacy practices with their families while reducing costs and sustaining earned revenue.

$300,000 over one year to Students 2 Science to reach over 66,000 students in New Jersey through its virtual lab and in-person hands-on learning experiences.

$250,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to FIRST to support its hands-on robotics programs, which reached 361,000 U.S. youth in 2025, as well as improvements to the organization’s digital infrastructure.

$250,000 over one year to the National Museum of Mathematics to support the museum in continuing program delivery in its temporary space.

$150,000 over one year to Science Buddies to pilot AI-powered features that deliver value for educators and students searching for independent science projects.

Unlocking Evidence: RESEARCH and FIELD BUILDING

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

$1,500,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to Opportunity Insights to advance research and data promoting economic mobility, as well as launch a new data platform making mobility data accessible to broad audiences.

$975,000 over two years to the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) at Harvard University to conduct three large-scale studies under the States Leading States initiative: one evaluating Alabama’s statewide summer reading and math camps and another assessing Ohio’s implementation of school cell phone bans, complemented by a multi-state comparative study analyzing the impact of cell phone policies on student attendance, engagement, and achievement.

$450,000 over 18 months to Renaissance Philanthropy to support the AI Talent Accelerator, a multi-funder initiative to provide technical and strategic expertise to at least 10 nonprofit education organizations, helping them access talent at below-market costs through a fractional support model and advising them on developing internal AI capabilities.

$440,000 over two years to support the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in working with the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) to develop a framework, benchmarks, and tools that help districts assess and optimize the return on investment (ROI) of teacher professional learning options, enabling more effective, evidence-based resource allocation.

$399,434 over two years to the Connected Learning Lab at UC Irvine to support a longitudinal study examining how cumulative exposure to high-quality out-of-school-time (OST) STEM programs in grades four through 12 shapes students’ STEM identity, motivation, advanced course taking, and career aspirations.

$350,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to Transcend to strengthen its measurement infrastructure and build a more rigorous external research base for its models.

$300,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Attendance Works to reduce chronic absenteeism by building field awareness of evidence-based interventions and implementing solutions in partnership with states and districts.

$300,000 over one and a half years to MDRC to complete the Achievement in Mathematics (AIM) study, a large-scale, multi-district randomized controlled trial (RCT) testing the impact of math edtech products that focus on acceleration of student learning relative to remediation.

$300,000 over one year to SRI International to conduct an RCT evaluating the impact of Lyla in the Loop—a PBS KIDS multimedia series for children ages four through eight—on computational thinking skills, task persistence, and STEM identity.

$250,000 over one year to Digital Promise to support the first year of a four-year, multi-funder initiative to build and drive adoption of open datasets, benchmarks, and models that enable the development of AI tools in K-12 education.

$250,000 over one year to The Educational Opportunity Project (EOP) at Stanford University to fund the foundational phase of a three-year effort to build the first national Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA) database, bringing together data from at least 15 states and enabling cross-state analysis of readiness trends and disparities.

$250,0000 over one year to support the New Jersey STEM Pathways Network to provide technical assistance to the NJ STEM ecosystems and increase the statewide network to nine, strengthening private-public STEM partnerships across the state.

$200,000 over one year to Child Trends to complete analysis and dissemination of the Healthy and Ready to Learn (HRTL) national measure of well-being for children ages three through five. The HRTL measure—embedded in the National Survey of Children’s Health—is the first population-level indicator of developmental well-being for preschool-aged children across all 50 states.

$157,500 over one year to FutureEd at Georgetown University, in partnership with Attendance Works and Mathematica, to update and expand the Attendance Playbook—a research-based guide to strategies for reducing chronic absenteeism.

$150,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to the Edunomics Lab to promote evidence- and ROI-based decision-making around teacher professional learning and solutions to address chronic absenteeism.

$135,000 to RAND to support the second year of an RCT evaluating the impact of Challenger Center’s simulated space missions on students’ STEM self-efficacy, identity, and interest.

$100,000 over one year to Child Trends to complete and disseminate research validating the Adapted Measure of Math Engagement (AM-ME), which measures middle and high school student engagement with math.

$100,000 to CommonLit to support a scaled quasi-experimental design (QED) study in partnership with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Columbia University estimating the impact of CommonLit360 on middle school students’ ELA achievement, as measured with standardized test scores.

$90,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Urban Institute to support the Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI), which identifies drivers and measures of academic, noncognitive, and social capital skills and competencies for Pre-K-12 students that influence economic mobility.

$75,000 over one year to Click2Science to support a descriptive evaluation of its STEM professional learning resources for out-of-school-time educators, in partnership with the Nebraska statewide afterschool network.