Reading Partners
Since 2012, Reading Partners has provided high quality literacy tutoring by recruiting, training and supervising comunity volunteers to serve children in Baltimore City elementatary schools. With the support of 650 volunteers and 29 Americorps members, Reading Partners will serve up to 600 K-4th grade studentsin 16 Title I schools in the 2020/21 school year. While that instruction may be virutal, in person, or a hybrid, Reading Partners expects that 81% of tutored students will meet their primary individualized end of year literacy growth goals.
The Ingenuity Project
The Abell Foundation launched The Ingenuity Project for advanced math and science in 1994. Today, Ingenuity prepares and launches the next diverse generation of nationally competitive STEM leaders in Baltimore City Schools, serving 830 students in grades 6-12. This grant will enable Ingenuity to expand and improve access to students of color and students living in concentrated poverty by establishing a community-driven vision and systems to produce equitable outcomes for all students, supporting its new middle school program at James McHenry School in West Baltimore, and refining individualized support and STEM enrichment, including the high school practicum experience for all participants. Ingenuity will continue to serve as the exemplary accelerated math and science program that prepares Baltimore City students for selective colleges and STEM careers, demonstrating both excellence and equity.
Improving Education
The Abell Foundation has supported the work of Jarrod Bolte and his non-profit, Improving Education, over the last four years as they use improvement science to change the way schools work to improve reading outcomes for children. In 2020/21, City Schools has contracted with Improving Education to launch and faciliate a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of 19 schools to assist teachers, administrators, and community providers in redesigning instructional and support mechanisms to improve early literacy outcomes for students from K through fifth grade. Working with 40 Literacy Coaches, 200 teachers and 6,000 students, Improving Education will share its literacy protocols in school innovation and early literacy instructional design. Abell Foundation funds will enable Improving Education to continue some deep coaching work in the 19 schools to inform future practice. Improving Education expects to increase the number of participating students in grades K-5 meeting grade level reading proficiency by 15 percentage points from the beginning to end of year.
Carnegie Institution for Science
BioEYES is a week-long, hands-on biology unit delivered by Carnegie Institution science outreach educators and co-teaching by City Schools science teachers using live fish as subjects. The program meets the Common Core science standards, and it demonstrates—and prepares teachers for—a student-centered lab approach to science instruction. BioEYES allows Baltimore City 8th grade students and teachers access to the world of high caliber, Nobel Prize-level science. In a recent study (Shuda, Butler, Farber, and Vary, 2015), the authors found significant gains in students’ knowledge and attitudes towards science as a result of BioEYES.
It is expected that up to 2,500 8th grade students and 45 science teachers will experience BioEYES in the 2020/2021 school year via online or in person instruction with a goal to produce 8 new Master Teachers.
Baltimore’s Promise, Fiscally Sponsored by Fund for Educational Excellence
Launched by a diverse group of civic leaders in 2014, Baltimore’s Promise is a collaboration to create a cradle to career pipeline to success for youth in Baltimore City by coordinating strategy, identifying quality programs, establishing shared outcomes, building public will, and advancing good policy. In Year 6, the work will focus on the expanded implementation of the Grads2Careers occupational training scholarships for graduates from Baltimore City Public Schools, a demonstration of the new Youth Data System, a planning and implementation effort around Young Adult Literacy, a landscape analysis of out-of school programming and a continuation of the Summer Funding Collaborative. Baltimore’s Promise also is serving as the backbone for a $4.3 million fund to support food and other needs in Baltimore as a result of the COVID pandemic.