NewSchools Venture Fund

This proposed grant would help launch the Teaching Channel (a project of New Schools Venture Fund) as a nonprofit multimedia venture. Its mission is to elevate public perception of the teaching profession by showcasing exceptional educators; enhance classroom practice by giving teachers easy access to high-quality, practical techniques and tools; and encourage self-reflection and practice-sharing among teachers by capturing authentic classroom images of their peers improving their craft. Teaching Channel aims to reach the nation's 3 million K-12 educators, as well as the general public, through both popular television programming and a library of videos and related instructional resources to support new and seasoned teachers. Our funding would help ensure that the Teaching Channel showcases teaching that supports deeper learning outcomes. The Gates Foundation is contributing $3.5 million to this project.

NewSchools Venture Fund is a national nonprofit venture philanthropy firm that seeks to transform public education through powerful ideas and passionate entrepreneurs. During a decade of learning from school systems and high performing charter management organizations, NSVF observed that the best operators were struggling to use manually-built systems to keep up with their rapid growth and ambitious achievement goals. The Academic Systems Initiative (ASI) was launched in 2008 to increase the effectiveness of teachers and instructional leaders by developing a new generation of high-quality "academic systems"—technology, content, and service. These tools will enable teachers and schools to use student-level data in rigorous cycles of inquiry so they can provide targeted and highly-effective educational experiences for each child and enable effective management and development of this kind of instruction at scale. This grant is to support a planning and design phase for and Open Item Assessment Bank platform that will establish scalable Open formative assessments to evaluate and promote Deeper Learning.