Urban Teachers
With Abell Foundation start-up funding, Urban Teachers launched a new model of teacher preparation in 2009, recruiting outstanding college graduates, training them in a year-long clinical preparation, and linking their certification to demonstration of effective teaching practices and student learning gains. Urban Teachers is currently training 100 new incoming Resident Teachers who co-teach with mentor teachers for the first year of a four-year commitment. With this grant, Urban Teachers will implement a new digital recruiting and marketing initiative that will more efficiently target talented and diverse candidates, with a focus on men, STEM majors, people of color, and speakers of multiple languages, for its teacher prep program.The goal of the project is to increase the number of highly effective, culturally competent teachers of color hired with no decline in the quality of candidates. As importantly, the new marketing approach is projected to cut the cost of recruitment by 40%, from a current baseline of $7,000 per hired candidate.
Next One Up Foundation
Next One Up provides long-term mentoring relationships and coaching, on the field and in the classroom, to meet the needs of over 115 high-risk young men in Baltimore from age 13 to 24. These students receive 300 hours of out of school programming on Sundays, school visits during the week, and a summer program providing academic support, study skills, community service, college advising, athletic training, and community service. The Abell Foundation will support the third, and final, phase of a new digital infrastructure for tracking student progress from jiiWA, a technology firm with a successful track record working with youth sports development programs.
Commodore John Rodgers, fiscally sponsored by Strong City Baltimore
Developed by child psychologists, the Tools of the Mind curriculum integrates cognitive, social, and emotional domains and creates child-centered, play-based, and language-rich classrooms. This grant will support the third year of implementation of Tools in 10 pre-kindergarten classes in the 100% Project network of turnaround schools.
Strong Schools Maryland, fiscally sponsored by Fund for Educational Excellence
Strong Schools Maryland, founded in Spring 2017, is a time-bounded advocacy initiative with a goal for an adequately-funded education system in which virtually all Maryland students graduate on time from high school. At stake are the education funding and policy recommendations put forward by the mandated Kirwan Commission in 2019. Strong Schools will continue its grassroots statewide advocacy through the 2020 Legislative Session to educate the public and state decision-makers using its successful organizing strategy of Teams of Ten; a monthly education and action meeting of over 188 community-based teams engaging 2,000 individuals in all of Maryland’s 24 jurisdictions. The outcome of the advocacy is to pass the Kirwan Commission educational funding and policy recommendations in the 2020 session.
Baltimore Education Research Consortium
Launched by the Abell Foundation and Open Society Foundation in 2007, the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC) at Johns Hopkins University pursues long- and short-term educational data analysis and research, and subsequently interprets and shares the findings with Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools), community, and stakeholder leaders. Over the next two and one-half years, BERC will expand its work and support for youth in Baltimore by building a sustainable research and practice community that is open to any university or college in Maryland interested in working with Baltimore City Public Schools.
The new governance structure, with several Councils and Research Boards, will increase opportunities to partner, disseminate findings, and translate research findings into action steps in Baltimore City. By December 2021, BERC will transition to a new revenue model that relies primarily on research grant awards to fund BERC’s ongoing operation.