We established partnerships between Lavinia Group and a number of charter schools. Lavinia is an organization that helps its partner schools and networks revitalize their literacy and math instruction through leader and teacher training. Lavinia’s leadership designed the highly successful literacy curriculum for Success Academies, a large charter network of schools in New York City.
We funded Ascend Charter Schools, using a catalytic payment model – paying for successful outcomes. Ascend is a network of K-12 public charter schools serving 6,000 students in 17 schools across Brooklyn. As part of the Ascend grant, Lavinia worked with the Ascend leadership team to revise Ascend’s mathematics instruction, audit current data systems, plan instructional design, and develop various instructional strategies. It also implemented professional development and other trainings at Ascend. Much of the funding that Heckscher provided is based on successful implementation of the Lavinia guidance and the students’ underlying success on interim assessments and state exams. Ascend also committed a substantial percentage of Lavinia’s cost. The students of the participating teachers increased their state exam scores by more than 10%.
We also funded a partnership between Lavinia and Brooklyn Charter School, Cultural Arts Academy Charter School, and Bronx Community Charter School to build upon the literacy work that Bloomberg Philanthropies initiated with charter schools this past summer called Summer Boost. We required that the schools pay 50% of the cost for the school year.
As part of this grant, for these three schools for grades 3-5, Lavinia put its reading instruction in place, auditing current data and systems, developing systems for effective instructional management, developing an assessment strategy, and providing direct school coaching and other professional development. Students of the participating teachers increased their state exam scores by at least 10%.
In 2023, we sought to further expand upon Lavinia’s Summer Boost work via a new set of partnerships to address the pressing need for additional math instruction. Lavinia layered initiatives with our support by combining its quality summer school programing with high-impact tutoring. On average, 72% of students met their individual growth goals for the year as measured by the end-of-year I-Ready and MAP Growth assessments, with two schools achieving 80-90% growth goal This is significant given that the majority of students selected for this program started the year 2+ years behind grade-level. Using the school-level data from RISE Summer School 2024, students who participated in the Middle School Acceleration Model achieved 5-6 percentage points more growth from the pre- to post-assessment than their peers who only participated in the summer school program.