INNOVATIVE SCHOOLS
History shows it’s hard to build excellent school districts in large, poor cities. But there’s an alternative: Build excellent schools a few at a time to incrementally overhaul a failing district.
We and our education-reform partners have been founding and funding opportunity schools for the last five years. The results so far are impressive. The 11 demonstration schools the Cleveland Foundation has supported so far are significantly outperforming peer schools by every measure: parent and teacher satisfaction, test scores, attendance, student and teacher retention, and more.
Those results show the power of innovation and highlight why we renewed our commitment to innovative schools in 2009 and 2010, as demonstrated by:
- Committing more than $4 million to support the district’s student-centered Academic Transformation Plan. That plan is closing failing schools, overhauling others, restructuring the central office, instituting teacher performance reviews, and holding every employee accountable for reaching goals.
- Supporting Cleveland’s four high-performing, district- sanctioned charter schools. Our $180,000 grant helped launch the fourth, called Village Preparatory School, in August 2009. A $350,000 grant helped consolidate back-office support functions of all four schools, so cost savings can be used to improve education.
- Granting $115,000 to WIRE-Net – the Westside Industrial Retention and Expansion Network – to plan, design, and create a next-generation career and technical learning center for high-school and adult students.
STEM BRANCHES OUT
Five years ago, Ohio’s business leaders and the Cleveland Foundation looked at the state’s poor performance in science, technology, engineering, and math education and saw an opportunity.
The STEM educational disciplines are widely accepted as a key to success in our knowledge-based, technology-driven world. STEM and innovation go hand in hand. Yet Ohio ranks 32nd in the nation in the rate of STEM bachelor’s degrees awarded.
So, together with leaders in Ohio business and government, we committed to double the number of STEM degrees from Ohio’s colleges and universities by 2015. We provided $400,000 to the nonprofit Ohio Business Alliance for Higher Education and the Economy. Its advocacy and policy work helped make STEM a state priority and resulted in $200 million in state funding to establish STEM-themed schools and programs of excellence. Two of those schools are regional academies in Cleveland: MC2STEM and Design Lab Early College High School.
We’ve also invested $700,000 to date, including $200,000 in 2009, into a partnership with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and John Carroll University. This partnership is designed to create new training methods for STEM teachers and groom a new generation of them for Ohio’s school children.
Learn more at www.ClevelandFoundation.org/Education
Continue to Neighborhoods