Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $18.4 Million in Grants in Q4 2024

In Q4 2024, our foundation awarded 28 grants totaling over $18.4 million.

Our fourth 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 as we conclude our 2024 grantmaking.

Unlocking Innovation and Growth (Direct Impact Grantees)

NEW GRANTEES

New to the Inspired Minds portfolio is InPlay, which received a one-year pilot grant of $250,000. InPlay works with school districts and out-of-school time activity providers to connect families with summer and afterschool programs, lightening the administrative burden for families and districts and streamlining access to programs for children who would most benefit. The organization will use its pilot year funding to develop a more comprehensive data and measurement system, as well as scale its SMS-enabled registration tool, OSCAR, to nine districts, enrolling 67,500 students in district-approved afterschool and summer programs.

RENEWALS AND COMMITMENTS

$7,500,000 over one year to the National Museum of Mathematics’ capital campaign, which will support the museum in moving to a new location, doubling classroom space and increasing the number of hands-on exhibits.

$3,000,000 over two years to Teaching Lab, a research-based professional learning organization focused on high-quality instructional materials (HQIM)-aligned content and learning cycle sequences. Teaching Lab will use the funding to support its artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and continued growth, piloting six AI-based tools or services that are designed to improve student learning and teacher positive practice indicators and reaching 22,000 teachers and 1.8 million students in SY 2025-26 across its district and state partnerships.

$3,000,000 over two years to Leading Educators, which offers school systems evidence-based, curriculum-aligned cycles of professional learning. Leading Educators will use the funding to test and pilot AI-focused offerings that maintain or increase its track record of improving student growth, while scaling to reach 17,688 teachers and 266,000 students experiencing its programming at dosage in SY 2026-27.

After a successful pilot year, $2,000,000 over two years to Magpie Literacy, which offers supplementary digital literacy tools to help students master foundational reading skills. Magpie will use the funding to expand its product offering to kindergarten through eighth grade, scale to 200,000 students, continue to study and strengthen its impact on literacy scores, and achieve greater product-market fit.

$800,000 over two years to PERTS, a research center that helps educators apply evidence-based strategies to improve classroom learning conditions that enhance student engagement and success. PERTS will use the funding to launch a teacher certification pilot designed to increase the implementation fidelity of Elevate, its low-cost coaching product that supports teachers in measuring and improving learning conditions in their classrooms.

$400,000 over one year to the New Jersey Tutoring Corps, which provides tutoring services to students in Pre-K through eighth grade with school-day, afterschool, and summer programming. New Jersey Tutoring Corps will use the funding to support its scaling efforts across the state and its continued commitment to impact evaluation through a partnership with Mathematica.

$300,000 over one year to Students 2 Science, which provides hands-on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning experiences through its in-person and virtual lab programs. The organization will use the funding to scale its programs to 50,000 students in New Jersey, including expanding its reach to third and fourth graders.

Unlocking Evidence: RESEARCH and FIELD BUILDING

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

$1,250,000 (year two of a three-year grant) to Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University research center that studies economic opportunity and identifies policies that promote upward mobility. The organization will use the funding to support five studies and launch two new data platforms that build upon its work to date, including the Opportunity Atlas, economic mobility research, and college admissions studies.

$1,050,000 over three years to Transcend, which works with schools to implement student-centered learning models. Transcend will use the funding to improve its measurement, evaluation, and learning capabilities to understand its impact on student academic and social-emotional outcomes at 270 school partners.

$1,042,820 over three years to support a high-quality, scaled quasi-experimental study of CommonLit360, a comprehensive literacy curriculum for students in grades three through 12, developed by CommonLit. The validation, primarily funded by a federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant, will estimate the impact of CommonLit360 on middle school students’ English language arts achievement, as measured with standardized test scores. Done in partnership with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and Mathematica Policy Research, it will also examine effects on CommonLit’s own measures of achievement and provide robust implementation data to help understand fidelity and use at scale.

$750,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to EdReports, which provides reviews of K-12 instructional materials, supporting districts and states in selecting HQIM for their classrooms. EdReports will use the funding to expand to 4.7 million users and build infrastructure to start reviewing Pre-K curricula.

$600,000 over two years to Attendance Works, which collaborates with schools, districts, states, communities, and organizations to design strategies that address and reduce chronic absenteeism. Attendance Works will use the funding to enhance its field-building and research efforts, while scaling its technical assistance to at least 90 schools and districts. The organization recently announced a partnership with 14 states and the District of Columbia to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50 percent in five years.

$400,000 over two years to the Edunomics Lab, a Georgetown University research center dedicated to exploring and modeling complex education finance decisions to inform policy and practice. Edunomics will analyze spending on teacher professional learning and produce resources that support 10,000 education leaders to make decisions based on ROI.

$350,000 over 18 months to Mathematica to support a quasi-experimental study of the New Jersey Tutoring Corps. The validation will estimate causal impacts of the tutoring model on third through eighth graders’ academic achievement through a difference-in-difference methodology that leverages statewide data to compare outcomes for students exposed to New Jersey Tutoring Corps versus those in a comparison group.

$340,000 over two years to Urban Institute to support the Student Upward Mobility Initiative (SUMI), a collaborative to identify drivers and measures of academic, non-cognitive, and social capital skills and competencies that influence the economic mobility of Pre-K through 12th grade students.

$333,000 over three years to the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools to support a quasi-experimental design study of Parent Teacher Home Visits. The validation will estimate causal impacts of home visiting on elementary and middle school students’ chronic absenteeism and attendance using a matching design to compare students and families exposed to Parent Teacher Home Visits to a similar comparison group that did not receive the core home visit model.

$300,000 over 18 months to RAND to conduct a rigorous quasi-experimental study of Elevate, PERTS’ coaching product, which will estimate Elevate’s impact on student academic performance as well as teachers’ and students’ perception of school learning conditions.

$250,000 over one year to the Research & Development Council of New Jersey to support the New Jersey STEM Pathways Network in increasing the number of STEM Learning Ecosystems across the state to nine and building stronger data infrastructure to assess the impact on student learning objectives.

$200,000 over one year to support the National Student Support Accelerator’s annual high-impact tutoring conference for researchers, educators, and tutoring providers.