Overdeck Family Foundation Awards $14 Million in Grants in Q2 2024

In Q2 2024, our foundation awarded 34 grants totaling over $14 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 highlight 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 Early Impact portfolio are four organizations:

FIND-PD, which has developed an online, self-paced evidence-based professional development training series for early childhood educators, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. Based out of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, FIND-PD expects to support 2,600 early childhood educators in increasing responsive serve-and-return interactions that facilitate young children’s language development and kindergarten readiness.

Jumpstart, which partners with AmeriCorps to train college students to deliver supplemental instruction in Pre-K classrooms, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. This grant will support the organization in reaching 8,800 preschoolers through direct, in-classroom work, and 225 Corps Members through a pilot of a new workforce development program for early childhood educators.

KABOOM!, which builds playgrounds in historically disinvested communities to ensure all children have high-quality spaces to play and grow, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. The organization will use the funding to strengthen its capacity for measurement and evaluation.

Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network (PLLAN), which develops play installations in everyday spaces to promote caregiver-guided playful learning opportunities, received a one-year pilot grant of $150,000. PLLAN will utilize the funds to expand the reach of Playful Learning spaces to 40,000 children through both direct installations and technical assistance.

New to the Exceptional Educators portfolio are four organizations:

Blue Engine, which provides professional learning designed to help educators ensure all students can access and engage in grade-level learning, received a one-year pilot grant of $250,000. The organization will use the funding to scale its coaching model focused on learner variability while building toward financial sustainability, reaching an estimated 40,000 students while ensuring at least 80 percent of partnerships improve teachers’ use of high-leverage practices.

Modern Classrooms Project, which teaches educators how to create a blended classroom model where students watch self-paced video lessons and class time is spent on small group and 1:1 instruction. Modern Classrooms received a one-year pilot grant of $250,000 which it will use to build and pilot a product aligned with two high-quality math curricula, making it easier for teachers to implement high-quality instructional materials with fidelity while reserving classroom time for individualized support.

Learning Heroes, which improves partnerships between families and schools in service of better student outcomes, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000 to pilot an expanded version of its Family Engagement Leadership Institute. The Institute will equip 40-60 school leaders to train teachers on how to engage in family engagement practices that increase student success.

Teaching Matters, which works with schools to provide curriculum-based professional learning, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000 to leverage AI to improve coaching efficacy. The organization will use the funding to expand its partnership with TeachFX, which has developed a generative AI-enabled coaching tool that provides educators real-time feedback to strengthen their instructional practices. In SY 2024-25, the pilot is expected to reach over 35 teachers in five schools.

New to the Innovative Schools portfolio are three organizations:

The Achievement Network (ANet), which focuses on boosting student learning by improving data usage, state standards, and teaching practices, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. ANet will use the funding to develop three new student-centered assessment prototypes that will help educators provide more individualized instruction to over 200,000 students.

ASSISTments Foundation (ASSISTments), a formative math assessment platform that provides students with real-time feedback and teachers with actionable insight into learning needs, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. The organization, which has rigorous evidence of impact on middle school math achievement, will use the funding to develop a strategic plan for scaling its product to more districts.

PLUS, which connects human tutors with AI-driven software to boost learning for middle school students from historically underserved communities, received a one-year pilot grant of $200,000. PLUS, which is based out of Carnegie Mellon University, will use the funding to extend its compatibility to five math curriculum tools and enhance its tutor training platform to better support the quality and timeliness of tutor-student interactions, increasing learning for up to 3,000 students.

RENEWALS AND COMMITMENTS

$5,000,000 over three years to the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund to build supply and demand for effective, tech-enabled blended literacy models in New York City, reaching an additional 300,000 kindergarten through eighth grade students locally and 2.5 million nationally by 2027. To date, the Fund has directly and indirectly enabled almost 4,000 schools to implement blended literacy programs, with the goal of increasing ELA proficiency and outcomes.

$2,500,000 over two years to Tools of the Mind to support the organization in scaling its research-based early childhood professional development and curriculum program to 139,000 Pre-K and kindergarten students. Tools of the Mind, which has some evidence suggesting positive impacts on children’s executive functioning and self-regulation skills, will use the funding to support product innovation and increase sales, marketing, and evaluation capacities.

$1,500,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to LENA to support the continued growth of its professional development coaching programs for early childhood educators, which show evidence of improving children’s early language development through the use of “talk pedometer” technology. LENA, which expects to reach 85,000 children by 2025, will also use the funding to support product innovation, continued evidence-building, and advocacy on behalf of quality early childhood education.

$1,500,000 over one year to Zearn, the creator of Zearn Math, a top-rated math platform used by one in four elementary school students nationwide. Zearn will use the funding to support R&D efforts to accelerate impact by improving implementation and usage, which studies link to greater math proficiency.

$1,200,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to the Next Education Workforce initiative at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, which aims to increase teacher satisfaction and ultimately student outcomes by redesigning the classroom staffing model through teams of educators with distributed expertise. The Next Education Workforce will use the funding to scale its model to over 1,000 teachers and 25,000 students, while working on growing its earned revenue to ensure sustainability.

$1,000,000 (year three of a five-year grant) to the Robin Hood Fund For Early Learning (FUEL) to support programs that improve early language and social-emotional development for zero to three-year-olds living in poverty in New York City. FUEL grantees served 113,000 children in 2023-24, and continue to expand to meet growing needs.

$937,500 over two years to MIND Research to improve usage and fidelity of implementation of ST Math, its kindergarten through eighth grade supplemental math curriculum program used by 2.5 million students, and to continue to develop InsightMath, its new core math curriculum offering. Empirical research using a matching approach has found links between moderate-level usage of ST Math and students’ math performance, with larger benefits for children starting the year performing below grade-level.

$500,000 (year two of a two-year grant) to Collaborative Classroom (formerly FluentSeeds) to support the organization in reaching 110,000 children over two years with SEEDS, an evidence-based professional development approach that combines materials, coaching, and parent education. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental studies conducted between 2017-21 revealed that children participating in SEEDS acquired gains of up to eight months of additional learning.

Unlocking Evidence: RESEARCH and FIELD BUILDING

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

$900,000 over two years to the Research Partnership for Professional Learning (RPPL) to fund three separate studies that build evidence on how to leverage generative AI coaching tools to make K-12 professional learning more accurate, impactful, and cost-effective. RPPL will subgrant funds to:

• University of Maryland College of Education: To conduct an RCT to compare the impact of reflective versus directive coaching, delivered via a generative AI coaching tool, in improving instructional quality and student outcomes.
• Teaching Lab: To develop a gen-AI tool to improve coaches’ ability to center student learning and use an RCT to test the impact of that tool on coach practices, teacher satisfaction with coaching, teaching efficacy, and quality of teaching.
• Center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia University and Teaching Matters: To test how coaching with TeachFX may improve teachers’ perceptions of their own practice, instructional quality, and the quality of actionable feedback that teachers receive.

$600,000 over two years to the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) to conduct a quasi-experimental impact study of the Next Education Workforce (NEW) initiative at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. The study will estimate causal impacts of ASU NEW’s strategic staffing model on student and teacher outcomes in K-12 settings, identify key mechanisms explaining positive effects, and explore variation in impacts across school-level contextual factors. By the end of the grant, the field will have stronger evidence on whether strategic staffing can boost student learning.

$500,000 over two years to support the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC to complete enrollment, data acquisition, data analysis, and dissemination activities for the Personalized Learning Initiative study, a large-scale RCT that aims to identify the most effective combination of tutoring features for each student. By the end of the grant, the research team will publish results reporting average treatment impacts for different types of tutoring programs and estimate personalized treatment impacts to help the field better understand which types of tutoring programs are most effective for each type of learner. The study will also report on implementation findings and the cost-effectiveness of different tutoring models/features.

$300,000 over one year to the Southern Education Foundation, which advances the use of outcomes-based contracting with the goal of guiding cost-effective district spending and increasing student outcomes. The organization will use the funding to expand the number of outcomes-based contracts for high-impact tutoring (ultimately reaching 20,000 students) and support the development of six new tools and resources that reduce the amount of time necessary to execute an outcomes-based contract for at least 10 districts.

$250,000 (year three of a three-year grant) to RPPL to support RCTs of five curriculum-based professional learning organizations operating in over 150 schools and representing 75,000 students. This grant will result in a deeper understanding of how leading curriculum-based professional learning providers deliver instructional support across a range of settings and contexts, and how the variation in program features correlates with measured impact.

$217,500 over 25 weeks to the Ad Council Research Institute to develop a messaging toolkit for states, school districts, and principals based on new research aimed at understanding parents’ and families’ knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions around school attendance. This free messaging toolkit will be available in time for back-to-school to help educators more effectively reach parents and reduce chronic absenteeism during SY 2024-25.