Deborah T. Velazquez, the President of the Altman Foundation, briefly talks about our decade-long partnership.
Q&A
Q: How did the Altman Foundation first connect with ExpandED Schools, and what inspired your support for the literacy program Ready Readers program?
A: ExpandED and Altman share a commitment to providing more high-quality learning time for children and youth in New York City—in school, afterschool, and during the summer. NYC has the largest school system in the country as well as the nation’s largest publicly funded afterschool and summer programming system, administered by the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD). To create rich and diverse learning experiences for children and youth, we have worked with ExpandED over the years to try to foster better coordination and alignment between those systems.
In 2012, we engaged ExpandED to work with a Summer Learning Task Force convened by then Chancellor Dennis Walcott to pilot full-day summer programming through school/CBO partnerships that combined academic skill-building, project-based learning, sports, arts, and other enrichment. Through an engaging camp-like format, the purpose was to offer students rich experiences that would stem summer learning loss and help address the opportunity gap for low-income children. Summer Quest was the first time that NYC DOE and DYCD combined an application process and their summer funding streams to encourage deep partnership and truly integrated programming between CBOs and schools.
The Summer Learning Task Force, which ExpandED helped facilitate, included representatives from NYC DOE, DYCD, funders, national summer learning experts, district superintendents, and school leaders–all dedicated to a new vision of summer learning for NYC. For four years, ExpandED led the Task Force’s policy work, documenting best practices for program planning and delivery as well as the policy and regulatory changes needed to bring a program like Summer Quest to scale. Ultimately, much of that work was used by NYC DOE to inform the launch of Summer Rising in 2021. ExpandED became a key technical assistance partner to schools and CBOs delivering that program, which now serves over 100,000 students a year.
Again, with the aim of providing more high-quality learning time, we partnered with ExpandED in 2017 on a pilot program called Ready Readers. It helped to create more literacy-rich environments in afterschool and build the capacity of DYCD providers to advance the reading comprehension skills of 4th and 5th graders through guided book club experiences. With generous support from the Brooke Astor Fund, ExpandED had already developed a successful afterschool literacy program for 1st-3rd graders, Rising Readers, which had shown strong results and was rapidly expanding. The Ready Readers model was based on this work and there was strong demand from the field for a continuum of programming.,
Q: How do you view the current state of high-impact tutoring in New York City, and what challenges and opportunities do you see?
A: Over the last two years, ExpandED has been integral to brokering strong and productive relationships between schools and evidence-based High Impact Tutoring service providers, and to helping school teams think through critical issues: how to select students for this intervention, find the right program or approach for their target population, and integrate High Impact Tutoring into the school day. The evidence of sound implementation and significant student impact is promising.
The major challenges ahead are resources and scale. Now that federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds have been exhausted, schools will need to contribute more from their own budgets to keep the programming going. Scaling High Impact Tutoring across the system remains a big lift. We’re hopeful that the eleven districts and more than 100 schools currently participating in the HIT initiative have seen enough benefit for their students to continue to invest in the initiative, and that the evidence base ExpandED is developing about HIT’s impact will help ensure it remains a priority for New York City Public Schools in the future.
Q: What excites you the most about our partnership?
A: ExpandED’s leadership and staff have proven to be creative, flexible, and resilient champions of system building and system change. They take on all aspects of that work, including professional development of educators, capacity building for nonprofits and schools, and related research, policy, and advocacy. Over decades, ExpandED has managed to adapt to shifts in the political and operating environment, while always working to create a thriving ecosystem of school/nonprofit partnerships that advance educational equity. We value their willingness to embrace complexity, take on difficult challenges, and stay the course.
