Increasing the Impact of High-Impact Tutoring with Accelerate
In April 2022, the team at Pearl was excited to hear about the launch of Accelerate, a new nonprofit organization on a mission to embed high-impact tutoring programs in public schools across the US.
With schools still struggling with widespread learning loss stemming from the pandemic, and districts still figuring out how to best apply their ARP ESSER funds to tackle it, Accelerate couldn’t have launched at a more critical time. Incubated and launched by the nonprofit organization America Achieves, and helmed by Kevin Huffman, the former Tennessee Commissioner of Education, Accelerate was launched with three principal goals in mind: 1) to fund and support innovation in schools, 2) to launch high quality research, and 3) to build a federal and state policy agenda to support this work.
To date, America Achieves has raised $65 million for Accelerate and aims to raise a total of $100 million by 2023. Initial funding was generously provided by Arnold Ventures, Kenneth C. Griffin, the chief executive officer of Citadel, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Overdeck Family Foundation.
Dr. Miguel Cardona, the current U.S. Secretary of Education serving under President Joe Biden, has praised the efficacy of high-impact tutoring and the launch of Accelerate, saying: “The evidence is clear: high-impact tutoring works, and I’ve urged our nation’s schools to provide every student who is struggling with extended access to an effective tutor (…) The effort announced today—Accelerate—is a rallying cry to schools, districts, states, and others (…) We must seize this moment to use federal relief funds to help students, including those most impacted by the pandemic, to close gaps in opportunity and achievement that grew even wider over the last two years. Together, we can ensure our elementary and secondary school students receive the support they need to learn and grow.”
Fund Your Use of the Pearl Tutoring Platform with Accelerate
Accelerate has issued a Call to Effective Action (CEA) to support educators, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and education organizations in their efforts to design and implement evidence-based, scalable models of high impact tutoring, and other interventions to support individualized learning.
Awards vary in size from $50,000 to $1,000,0000 with an emphasis on being ready to leverage the funds immediately. One of the most important things to understand about the Accelerate opportunity is that it does not pay for tutoring. The program was established to speed the deployment of evidence-based high impact tutoring, increase the impact through innovation, and take the friction out of reporting data about programs to researchers. There is also a huge emphasis placed on bringing quick solutions to traditionally underserved populations.
Interested participants must submit a Letter of Interest (LOI) by August 1, 2022. It is critically important to ensure that you qualify, can make an immediate impact on students’ lives, can build on-the-ground proof points for more effective and equitable tutoring and individualized learning, and can generate additional evidence of these proof points.
Click here for more information on submitting a Letter of Interest to Accelerate as a way to fund your use of the Pearl tutoring platform or get in touch with Pearl’s Chief Strategy Officer Nate Casey directly at nate@tutorwithpearl.com.