Professional Learning Partnerships

Overview

<p><span>This request seeks to support partnerships that advance high-quality professional learning (PL) services that support implementation of high-quality, core instructional materials (HQIM) in ways that are efficacious for student learning and efficient for providers to sustain beyond the grant term. Awards will be made to teams of organizations that can include curriculum authors, PL providers, and/or districts, intermediate units, and schools, represented by a point organization that will receive the grant and distribute funds across the partnership. </span></p> <p><span>This initiative is a part of the larger portfolio of investments that comprise the K-12 Curriculum and Instructional Tools portfolio. This investment specifically relates to the following strategic goal for this portfolio:</span></p> <p><strong>Delivery Capacity</strong>: Validate the theory that professional learning service providers can a) demonstrate impact on student outcomes that exceeds that yielded by adoption and use of a high-quality curriculum alone, and b) offer diverse services that fit broader market demand and have the potential for scale.</p> <p>This investment is part of the “Solutions” portfolio, which in part aims to increase availability of quality solutions for curriculum and instructional tools, awareness of those solutions, and support for efficacious curriculum implementation models that have the potential for scale, with the notion that those three goals will increase usage. However, it does not directly fund scaling usage of products or services. This RFP intends to provide flexible capital to support the development of curriculum-connected professional learning services with promise to yield meaningful student outcomes and offer significant value to districts, schools, and other stakeholders and satisfaction to educators, thus providing attractive solutions that can be sustained independent of philanthropic support. Successful partnerships will support high-quality implementation of core (tier one) instructional materials in one of the following five disciplinary segments: middle school mathematics; high school mathematics; middle school English language arts (ELA); high school ELA; or middle school science.</p> <p>This RFP is particularly interested in supporting service development and refinement in middle and high schools serving student populations that are at least 50 percent Black, Latino, emerging multilingual or English Learner (EL)-designated, and/or low-income, in California, Florida, Georgia, New York, and North Carolina. Successful applicants proposing projects outside those geographies must submit proposals together with a local education agency serving at least 50,000 students (for more information, see Potential Partnerships and Eligibility, below). However, the Curriculum portfolio is not a place-based strategy and is interested in solutions that can be diffused more broadly.</p> <p>We believe this investment and others that support this strategic goal will eventually help us significantly increase the number of Black, Latino, EL-designated, and low-income secondary students who earn a high school diploma, enroll in a postsecondary institution, and are on track in their first year to obtain a high-quality credential.</p> <p>While the foundation will accept applications proposing work outside of the five listed states of priority, the RFP stresses that “projects outside those geographies must submit proposals together with a local education agency serving at least 50,000 students.” Additionally, the competition Rules & Guidelines are very specific and lengthy (see below for the full summary). The foundation specifically notes that “existing curriculum-aligned products and services that have been tested and used in schools for at least two school years with a track record of success achieving learning gains for Black, Latino, EL-designated, and low-income students, and which can be modified and built upon in the partnership.”</p>