Strong Schools Maryland, Fiscally Sponsored by Fund for Educational Excellence
Strong Schools Maryland, founded in spring 2017, is an educational advocacy organization with a goal for an adequately funded education system in which virtually all Maryland students graduate on time from high school. Strong Schools is committed to securing the legislative votes to override the gubernatorial veto of the 2020 Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. Now, working as a permanent organization, Strong Schools will continue its grassroots statewide advocacy to monitor the full implementation of the Kirwan Commission recommendations.
University of Baltimore Foundation
The University of Baltimore School of Law Truancy Court Program (TCP) identifies young people who are at risk for delinquency, substance use, gang involvement, and other behavioral problems linked to truancy and school disengagement. The primary goal of the TCP is to reduce truancy by reconnecting students and their families with their schools in order to break the school-to-prison pipeline. The holistic approach utilized by the TCP involves multiple components that include mentoring, continual and consistent follow-up and oversight, tutoring, social services referrals, legal guidance, and the powerful presence of a retired judge who leads the effort.
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.
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.
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.