FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Funding Available for Education Innovators 

October 29, 2024 – NewSchools announces $10M in funding for visionary educators and innovators to transform public education. With a focus on reimagining what’s possible, NewSchools is committed to supporting leaders dedicated to creating new opportunities for students to thrive.

Applications for this opportunity are open October 29, 2024, and close on January 8, 2025. This is a chance for innovative educators and organizations to bring their bold ideas to life with financial and technical support from NewSchools.

NewSchools supports visionary leaders with innovative solutions in four key areas:

• Innovative Schools: New innovative, public schools that support students to develop a strong academic foundation and skills needed for success in life
• Learning Solutions: K-8 reading and math solutions that build foundational skills and personalize learning to support student success
• Teaching Reimagined: Solutions that evolve how educators work, engage caregivers and community experts, and leverage genAI to make the role more sustainable and effective
• Learning Differences: Enhance teaching and learning for students with diagnosed and undiagnosed learning disabilities within and beyond our three main focus areas.

Selected recipients will receive direct financial support in the form a one-year, unrestricted grant ranging from $150,000 to $250,000, personalized coaching and access to national experts, and connections with peer organizations across the country. 

How to Apply

Interested applicants should submit their applications by January 8, 2025 at newschools.org. Submit an eligibility form by December 10, 2024 for full application support.

Selected recipients will receive direct financial support in the form a one-year, unrestricted grant ranging from $150,000 to $250,000, personalized coaching and access to national experts, and connections with peer organizations across the country. 

Most of us remember the teachers who made a powerful difference in our lives. I remember the ones who felt like family.

For me, Ms. Heyward was one of those teachers. She was my seventh grade social studies teacher who kept a small Puerto Rican flag on her desk, gave instructions in Spanglish and  often said, “but you need to know that’s not the full story,” while teaching U.S. history. (In case you’re wondering, that’s me on the top row, first from the left, on Picture Day.)

Being Latina and the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, I felt connected to Ms. Heyward because she too was Latina. She spoke Spanish, like me and mami, who until then had relied on me to be her interpreter at parent-teacher conferences. I still remember the smile of relief that came over mami’s face when Ms. Heyward said, “No te preocupes. Hablo español tambien” “Don’t worry, I speak Spanish too.”

A few months later, Ms. Heyward was gone. I don’t know if she took a job at a different school or if she left teaching. All I know is that mami never came back for a parent-teacher conference and my connections to teachers from then on were few and far between. She was the first, and only, Latina teacher I had throughout my K-12 public school experience. 

Teachers of color like Ms. Heyward are still few and far between these days. 

Only about one in five educators in public schools are teachers of color. Meanwhile, students of color account for more than half of the PreK-12 student population. In some communities, students go all 14 years of their schooling without having a single teacher who looks like them.

Now more than ever, as the education sector plans for recovery from an unprecedented year, we must prioritize teacher diversity in our public schools. Hiring and retaining effective teachers of color is one of the ways that we can reimagine education to work better for all children, especially those most affected by racial and economic inequities. 

Today, NewSchools, with lead funding from the Walton Family Foundation, is opening a $2.5 million funding opportunity focused on recruiting, developing, and retaining educators of color.

Today, NewSchools, with lead funding from the Walton Family Foundation, is opening a $2.5 million funding opportunity focused on recruiting, developing, and retaining educators of color. A significant body of research shows greater teacher diversity within a school yields higher expectations, fewer discipline referrals, richer curricula, less bias, and better academic results for all students, especially students of color and Black boys in particular. 

As the new Senior Partner leading the Diverse Leaders investment area, I am excited to work in partnership with innovators to launch bold ideas to diversify our nation’s public schools. I am also looking forward to supporting our existing ventures as they move from early stage planning to sustaining and scaling their ideas for increasing teacher diversity.

In 2019, our funding and customized support helped 14 organizations develop, pilot and scale their ideas. Our ventures are currently cultivating and sustaining teachers through a variety of efforts, including through teacher residency programs, fellowships, and experiences focused on providing affinity spaces, mentorship, resources, and support. 

Aside from grooming and sustaining teachers of color, these organizations are preparing teachers to lead in a different way. And in doing so they are causing schools to rethink how they engage and support students. Robert Hendricks III, one of our grantees, is the founder and executive director of He Is Me Institute, an organization working to grow the number of Black male educators. For him, teacher diversity is a means to a larger goal. “It is not just about the face of education being different but also about bringing in a difference of perspective and different impact, so that kids can grow up with a different relationship with school,” he tells us. 

“It is not just about the face of education being different but also about bringing in a difference of perspective and different impact, so that kids can grow up with a different relationship with school.” —Robert Hendricks III, NewSchools grantee and founder of He Is Me Institute. 

This brings me back to Ms. Heyward, the first teacher of color I had. Although she was my teacher for only a brief time, she connected with me and mami. I felt seen — we felt seen. It’s past time for all students, especially students of color to be seen and to see themselves reflected in the adults responsible for their learning. 

If you’re an innovator focused on recruiting and supporting teachers of color like Ms. Heyward, we want to partner with you and help you achieve your vision. Learn more here.

Little did they know that more than a decade later (two, in Kopp’s case) that they’d still be climbing the mountain to funding – or that they’d be the exception rather than the rule.

That’s in large part because the capital markets for education entrepreneurs – and indeed, for all social entrepreneurs – are still quite early in their evolution. NewSchools was founded more than a dozen years ago to fill the early-stage capital gap for entrepreneurs seeking to make a difference in public education, by providing them with funding and guidance as they created new nonprofit and for-profit organizations. We were inspired by technology entrepreneurs who marched down Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, armed with little more than a business idea sketched onto a cocktail napkin, and managed to turn their visions into monopoly-toppling corporations that changed. It’s not that these entrepreneurs are necessarily smarter or more committed (even one of the most selective VCs in the business, John Doerr, thinks education entrepreneurs have it harder), but rather that a sophisticated capital market had been proactively built over the course of decades to nurture risk-taking entrepreneurs. As Hess notes, investors in places like Silicon Valley “impose a certain flexible but hardnosed quality control even while creating an entire ecosystem and equipping promising new ventures to take root.”

While the entrepreneurial education movement has come a long way in the last decade, the social capital markets haven’t yet caught up. The Obama administration’s move to shift millions in federal dollars toward social innovation is a positive development, but it’s far from enough. As NewSchools co-founder Kim Smith and I implored several years ago in a chapter for one of Hess’ earlier books, other investors must step up to the plate, particularly with seed capital for promising for-profit ventures and growth capital for nonprofits that have demonstrated success.

Together with other measures like common metrics for success and more transparent and accessible performance data, beefing up the number and diversity of capital providers will go a long way toward ensuring we don’t miss out on the next TFA or KIPP.