Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $32.7 Million in Grants in Q2 2025

In Q2 2025, our foundation awarded 52 grants totaling over $32 million.

Our second 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.

Unlocking Innovation and Growth (Direct Impact Grantees)

NEW GRANTEES

New to the Inspired Minds portfolio are:

• OpenSciEd, which received a $300,000 one-year pilot grant to support the development of a measurement and evaluation strategy to assess its Next Generation Science Standard-aligned science curriculum, currently used by 15 percent of U.S. middle school science teachers.
• Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA), which received a $250,000 one-year pilot grant to launch a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) program quality improvement cohort across 30 club sites. BGCA will use the funding to support the adoption of high-quality STEM curricula, professional development for out-of-school time educators, and operational toolkits to improve local implementation.

New to the Early Impact portfolio is:

• AppleTree Institute, which received a $200,000 one-year pilot grant to launch and evaluate a lower-cost model for Every Child Ready, a comprehensive, evidence-based early learning model that combines high-quality curriculum, professional learning, and assessment tools to prepare three- and four-year-olds for kindergarten success.

New to the Exceptional Educators portfolio is:

• Ensemble Learning, which received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000 to study and enhance the effectiveness of its professional learning services for educators, with the goal of enabling all students, particularly multilingual learners, to access grade-level content.

RENEWALS AND COMMITMENTS

$6,000,000 over two years to Zearn to increase the number of students using Zearn Math at the recommended dosage. Zearn, which has created a math learning platform used by one in four elementary school students nationwide, will use the funding to improve implementation of Zearn Math, as well as enhance product development and usability.

$5,000,000 over two and a half years to LENA to support the organization in reaching 115,000 children with LENA Grow, its professional development program, while reducing implementation
costs through product and program innovations. LENA’s educator coaching programs, powered by “talk pedometer” technology, have been shown to improve early language outcomes in at-school and at-home settings.

$4,000,000 over three years to the Next Education Workforce initiative at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, which uses strategic team-based staffing models to improve educator satisfaction and student outcomes. The organization will use the funding to develop scaling infrastructure that allows for cost-effective, impactful growth, reaching more than 2,000 teachers serving more than 45,000 students by SY 2027-28, while demonstrating evidence of impact on teacher and student outcomes.

$2,250,000 over two years to Collaborative Classroom to continue scaling SEEDS of Learning to approximately 114,000 children. SEEDS is a professional learning program that addresses early literacy disparities by supporting preschool educators in engaging with effective and research-based instruction, ensuring all children enter kindergarten ready to learn.

$1,666,667 (year two of a three-year grant) to the Robin Hood Learning + Tech Fund, which builds supply and demand for effective, tech-enabled blended literacy models in New York City. Our funding will support the Fund to scale blended literacy models to 495,000 students, while advancing efforts to identify and increase the adoption of effective use of generative AI to improve literacy outcomes.

$1,500,000 over two years to The ASSISTments Foundation (ASSISTments), a daily formative math assessment platform that provides students real-time feedback and teachers actionable insight into learning needs. ASSISTments will use the funding to scale its evidence-based platform (a Tier 1 rating in What Works Clearinghouse) to more than 150,000 students annually, as well as improve product development and sales capacity.

$1,500,000 over two years to OnYourMark, an early literacy virtual tutoring provider. OnYourMark, which has early evidence of impact on kindergarten to second grade students’ literacy skills after participating in the 1:1 model, will use the funding to continue to iterate on the impact and cost of its tutoring program while scaling to 6,200 elementary school students.

$1,250,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Tools of the Mind to support the organization in scaling its Pre-K curriculum and professional learning program, reaching 139,000 students over two years.

$1,200,000 over three years to the Museum of Science, Boston to support the development of four new Youth Engineering Solutions (YES) Enrichment units and aligned professional learning tools designed for out-of-school time STEM programs. YES’s full product suite, which spans in- and out-of-school settings, will reach one million students by 2028.

$1,000,000 over one year to Achievement Network (ANet), which provides leadership coaching, professional learning, and assessment tools to support teacher practice and student outcomes. ANet will use the funding to develop, evaluate, and scale Compass, its student-centered math assessment product.

$1,000,000 (year four of a five-year grant) to Robin Hood’s Fund for Early Learning (FUEL) to support programs that improve early language and social-emotional development for children ages zero to three years old living in poverty in New York City.

$1,000,000 over two years to Modern Classrooms Project to support the optimization and growth of its curriculum-embedded math solution, projected to reach 8,000 educators across 110 districts by FY 2028. Our funding will enable Modern Classrooms, which trains teachers to use a flipped classroom model that emphasizes self-paced, mastery-based instruction, to develop AI-embedded tools, strengthen implementation supports, and operationalize a go-to-market strategy.

$1,000,000 over two years to the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting at the Southern Education Foundation to support the scale of outcomes based contracting for tutoring, edtech, and curriculum-based professional learning providers, resulting in 250,000 outcomes achieved for 200,000 students.

$600,000 over one year to Quill.org to continue work aligning its AI-powered formative writing tool with high-quality instructional materials.

$500,000 over two years to Blue Engine to support the expansion of its teacher coaching model, which focuses on strategies to address learner variability, to 25 districts. Our funding will support Blue Engine to reach over 100,000 students and enable product refinements aligned to six high-quality curricula.

$375,000 over one year to FIND-PD to support the completion of short-form online professional learning courses for early childhood educators. FIND-PD, which expects to reach ~5,000 early childhood educators by 2026, will also use the funding to pilot an AI-enabled asynchronous coaching model to provide more personalized learning opportunities.

$312,500 (year two of a two-year grant) to MIND Research Institute to scale its ST Math supplemental math program to 1.6 million students and pilot its newly developed core math product, Insight Math, with 10,000 students.

Unlocking Evidence: RESEARCH and FIELD BUILDING

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

$4,000,000 over two years to Accelerate to support the organization in funding 10 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of tutoring models that address understudied domains and grades, including math and middle school. The funding will also support research, development, and dissemination of 14 genAI-enabled innovations in the tutoring space.

$800,000 over three years through an expenditure responsibility grant to Mathematica, which will conduct an external evaluation of Magpie Literacy’s literacy tool for kindergarten through second grade students. The research team will determine whether classroom-level implementation of Magpie can improve students’ literacy skills, test whether impacts vary for different subgroups, and identify the key barriers and facilitators to implementation.

$750,000 over three years to Mathematica to support a mixed-methods external evaluation of the Inspired Teaching Exceptional Learning (ITEL) initiative, which combines strategic staffing with high-quality instructional materials and aligned professional learning. This expenditure responsibility grant will support Mathematica to conduct a field-building multi-year study to describe the implementation of the ITEL approach across seven districts and use rigorous quantitative methodology to estimate ITEL’s impact on student achievement for students in grades three through eight.

$600,000 over one year to the National Student Support Accelerator (NSSA) at Stanford University to support an externally-conducted RCT of OnYourMark’s 2:1 tutoring model, estimating impacts on kindergarten through second grade students’ foundational literacy skills. The study will include implementation and cost components.

$600,000 over one year to the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to support the completion of an RCT studying the impact of Teaching Lab’s core professional learning program in Milwaukee Public Schools. The study will estimate Teaching Lab’s impact on both teacher practices and students’ academic achievement in grades three through eight.

$500,000 over two years to the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy to support a mixed-methods, randomized controlled trial of ANet’s Compass assessment product. This validation study will study how Compass is being used in the classroom and estimate its impact on teacher practices and students’ math achievement in elementary school.

$500,000 over two years to the Education Policy Initiative at the University of Michigan to create a reliable, valid, and scalable measure of Pre-K quality that predicts children’s school readiness. Using an existing dataset, the researchers will leverage advances in genAI to identify substantive differences between instructional practices in high- and low-gain classrooms and use those practices as the foundation for a more reliable measure of quality.

$500,000 over two years to the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy to support a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental evaluation of Modern Classrooms Project’s professional learning and aligned curriculum resources (PLCAR) in grades four and five across two school districts. The study will estimate the impact of the PLCAR on teacher practices and students’ math achievement when used in conjunction with high-quality math curricula.

$250,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) to support three studies evaluating the impact of generative AI coaching tools on teacher practice and student learning, with findings expected to directly inform professional learning providers and school districts.

$200,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to support the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) in conducting a quasi-experimental impact study of Next Education Workforce’s strategic staffing model as implemented in Mesa Public Schools (Arizona). The findings will generate causal evidence on whether strategic staffing can improve students’ math and reading achievement from third to eighth grade.

$200,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to support the Education Lab at the University of Chicago in completing the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), a national, large-scale study of high-dosage tutoring that aims to understand for whom tutoring is most impactful and under what conditions. Findings from the study are expected to be used to scale high-impact tutoring practices that maximize impact on student learning.

$200,000 over one year to GreatSchools to support the integration of chronic absenteeism data into school profiles on its platform. Our funding will support GreatSchools to acquire and integrate attendance and absenteeism data from 11 states, test the utility of this data with parents, and apply insights to replicating this work in additional states.

$150,000 over three years to the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab (BIP) at the University of Chicago to support a large-scale replication randomized controlled trial of Show Up to Grow Up, a behavioral messaging intervention. The study, replicating one conducted in Head Start centers in Chicago, will take place in the Oklahoma City Public Schools district and will determine both whether messages improve attendance for Pre-K and kindergarten students and whether changes in attendance translate into better behavioral and academic outcomes through the end of first grade.

$125,000 over nine months to Learning Collider to lead a consortium of partners working with Clever to add student performance data to its platform. The project will engage nonprofits and researchers to pilot access to attendance data through Clever as well as identify key use cases to provide nonprofits with timelier, higher-quality data about their impact.