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 5,800 students in 15 schools across Brooklyn. As part of the Ascend grant, Lavinia is working 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 has 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 for 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. After evaluating the role of many different interventions over the last few years, research has demonstrated that individual programs (such as tutoring, summer school and acceleration days) alone are not powerful enough to mitigate the effects of learning loss from the 2020 global pandemic. So, Lavinia is now layering initiatives with our support by combining its quality summer school programing with high-impact tutoring. Its goal is to achieve accelerated growth for a cohort of middle school students in New York City. Participating charter schools (South Bronx Early Academy Charter School, School in the Square Charter School, Rochdale Early Advantage Charter School, Challenge Charter School, Children’s Aid College Prep Charter School, and Equality Charter School) are again paying 50% of the costs.