Goal: Prepare all people to live rewarding, choice-filled lives by championing an excellent K-12 education.
All students deserve an education that helps them build the knowledge, skills, and mindsets required to pursue their personal interests and ambitions. Schools should be teaching academic essentials while simultaneously cultivating intellectual curiosity and inspiring life-long learning. Schools must also help families instill essential social and emotional skills in students as a component of a rigorous academic environment. Ultimately, all students should graduate believing in their ability to succeed as capable, contributing members of society.
To achieve our goal of preparing all people to live rewarding and choice filled lives, we support and partner with organizations engaged in Charter Schools, People Quality, and Advocacy work.
Charter Schools: An extensive body of research has shown that, over the last 20 years, charter schools have been the single most effective education intervention in low-income, urban communities – the very communities who least often have access to excellent schools. Charter schools provide high-quality educational opportunities to the students they enroll and illustrate what is possible in other school systems. PCLB, therefore, works to build and sustain the highest performing and largest charter sectors possible.
More specifically, PCLB currently supports organizations working in Connecticut and New York City to achieve:
- Charter Excellence – Sustain and improve the overall quality of the charter school sector, such that an increasing portion of charter schools achieve academic outcomes that outperform their host district, the state, and ultimately non-low-income students.
- Charter Growth – Grow the charter sector and increase the percentage of students who attend charter schools – especially in communities lacking charter school options – by opening new, high-quality charter schools or expanding existing excellent charter schools.
People Quality: Research tells us that teachers are the number one in-school factor that drives student success. Yet not all schools and communities have the effective teachers they need because of declining interest in the teaching profession, mismatched supply and demand, poor training, and insufficient retention. For these reasons, our grant-making focuses on recruiting, training, and retaining a workforce that can best teach students.
More specifically, PCLB currently supports organizations working in Connecticut and New York City to address and improve:
- Teacher Preparation – Cultivate highly effective teachers by increasing the number of teacher candidates who are trained through educator preparation programs that use a teacher residency model.
- Teacher Shortages – Ensure that students in every classroom have the math, science, and special education teachers they need, by entirely eliminating teacher vacancies in these areas.
- Teacher Diversity – Diversify the teaching workforce such that schools have a teaching workforce that is reflective of the demographics of their K-12 students.
Advocacy: What happens in schools is governed in critical ways by policy at the city, state, and federal levels. Well-designed and well-implemented policies can have important, positive impacts on students’ educational experiences and outcomes. We support and partner with organizations that help create and advocate for a policy environment in which great schools and students can thrive.
More specifically, PCLB currently supports organizations working in Connecticut and New York in the following critical policy areas:
- School Finance – Ensure public education funding is allocated in a way that is fair across all students and public school types and is most likely to maximize student achievement.
- Charter Schools – Ensure a policy environment that enables excellent charter schools to thrive.
- People Quality – Ensure a policy environment that creates the teacher workforce that students need and deserve.