Launching Distance Learning for 10,000 Students: Lessons to Support School Educators Part 1 of 5

The start of this school year will pose unique challenges that may not have existed when school was disrupted mid-year, including students having new classmates who they may be unfamiliar with, teachers having new students whom they have no established relationships with, and students attending new schools. This poses a challenge for learning through meaningful discourse and participation.

In late May, with the support of the Heckscher Foundation for Children, The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and The Lab of Economic Opportunity, we undertook an ambitious effort to launch a virtual summer learning program for 10,000 students – the equivalent of a small school district in the United States. We had two goals:

1.    Thoughtfully engage NYC public school children to continue their learning to reverse some of the potential learning loss – data released by McKinsey & Co. found that some students might be as many as 14 months behind with little to no remote instruction; and

2.    Learn as much as possible to better support schools as they continue to engage in some form of distance learning.

This program provided valuable insights about benefits, challenges, and best practices for online learning. To make this easier to digest, we have broken the learnings up into five different parts.

Part 1: Program Design & Key Partners

About the Program Design

To prevent the COVID19 losses from compounding, Practice Makes Perfect (PMP) designed an engaging online summer experience to help students combat the feeling of isolation and build on their knowledge in math and reading while having fun. The 18-day, 6-week summer program consisted of 1.5 hours of live instruction with a PMP Teaching Fellow and one hour of independent learning work 3x per week (capping screen time to 7.5 hours per week) for 5,646 children and asynchronous instruction for 4,536 students during summer 2020.

About Practice Makes Perfect

Practice Makes Perfect (PMP) is a Benefit Corporation that partners K-12 schools to operate high-impact programs before, during, and after school hours. Since 2010, PMP has served over 10,000 low-income children, created over 2,000 seasonal jobs, and trained over 500 aspiring educators. PMP has been recognized by former president Bill Clinton, Echoing Green, TED, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses. Additionally, PMP’s work has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, NPR, Forbes, ABC 7, NY1, Entrepreneur, and dozens of other media. In 2017, PMP was honored as Best for The World by B Lab for its impact on its customers and its governance practices.

About the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation

The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation (Schusterman) is a global organization that seeks to improve lives, strengthen communities, and advance equity. Our philanthropic vision is grounded in a commitment to pursue justice, repair the world, and treat all people with dignity and civility. We invest in efforts to improve public education in the United States, strengthen the Jewish people and Israel, and address the needs of marginalized individuals and communities.

About the Heckscher Foundation for Children

For nearly 100 years, the Heckscher Foundation for Children has worked to level the playing field for underserved youth, principally in New York. We support innovative, results-driven programs and partnerships, and focus our giving on education, including college access and persistence, workforce training and jobs access, and arts education that improves achievement in the classroom. Our venture philanthropy approach uses three principal funding strategies—catalytic giving, strategic partnerships, and targeted problem-solving—that look for inflection points where our funding has the potential to change the course of a young person’s life at a key juncture. Learn more at heckscherfoundation.org.

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