Centerbridge Foundation

Organization Overview: The Urban Assembly (UA) advances students’ economic and social mobility by improving public education through its 22 New York City schools and by offering solutions to school districts nationwide.

Investment Focus: The Centerbridge Foundation and Bain will support UA to scale an AI-powered instructional coaching tool to solve the problem of lack of teacher coaching capacity, making coaching more accessible and affordable for schools. The goal of this work is to increase teacher retention and the professional skills of educators, leading to improved student outcomes.

Organization Overview: Literacy Academy Collective (LAC) is building a network of NYC Public Schools focused on helping struggling readers achieve academic success. LAC plans to establish schools in high-needs districts across the five boroughs, making specialized instruction accessible to low-income students who have diagnosed and undiagnosed reading disabilities, leading to stronger academic and career outcomes.

Investment Focus: The Centerbridge Foundation and Bain will support LAC to create a blueprint for its district school model through identifying and testing operations systems, financial models, and outcomes.

Organization Overview: Jumpstart is a national early education organization working toward the day every child in America enters kindergarten prepared to succeed. Since 1993, they have trained more than 58,000 college students and community volunteers to provide language, literacy, and social-emotional programming for 133,000 preschool children in under-resourced communities nationwide.

Investment Focus: Centerbridge Foundation and Bain support focused on the development of an Accelerated Workforce Program to address the national early childhood education (ECE) workforce shortage. Jumpstart’s AWP aims to increase the number of certified ECE educators nationwide ensuring more children start their education on track and with access to high-quality early learning.

Organization Overview: Since 1989, New Visions has played a leading role in reducing educational inequity and expanding opportunities for students in New York City public schools. New Visions focuses on providing educators with the tools, resources, and support to build and continuously improve strong and responsive schools. These include the New Visions student planning and school management software tool, full-course high school curricula in science and social studies, curriculum-based professional learning, and innovative career exposure programs that connect students with NYC employers.

Investment Focus: In 2021, support from the Centerbridge Foundation and Bain focused on growth and expansion of the Portal’s user base, along with development of the New Visions Career Academies, which provide students with work-based learning experiences in partnership with “best in class” firms to ensure students gain career-readiness skills and exposure to high-growth sectors such as finance, health, and tech.

Organization Overview: Khan Academy’s mission is to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Khan offers a range of learning resources across multiple disciplines—including math, science, history, economics and more—to more than 130+ million users in 190 countries.

Investment Focus: The Centerbridge Foundation and Bain supported the creation of a strategic plan for Khan Academy’s District offerings focused on codifying Khan’s approach to scale its district partnership implementation, along with deepening the use of Khan Academy in classrooms serving under-resourced students.

Organization Overview: The City University of New York (CUNY) is the nation’s largest urban public education system with a mission to provide a pathway to the middle class. CUNY has more than 220,000 degree students across 25 colleges with over a million graduates living in the NYC metro area; more than 75% of enrollees are students of color and 61% of students do not have a parent that graduated from college.

Investment Focus: Support from the Centerbridge Foundation and Bain focused on a planning effort with the Career Success team, now the Office of Careers and Industry Partnerships. to dramatically improve the career outcomes of CUNY alumni, with a focus on key factors for employee engagement, along with a plan for capacity building and scaling of employer driven pilots.

Organization Overview: The Postsecondary Success Collaborative was incubated at KIPP in 2020 to support the alumni of leading Charter Management Organizations - currently KIPP, Achievement First, and Prospect Schools* - to persist in and complete their post-secondary education programs. With a combination of 1:1 advising, career programs and partnerships, data insights and wraparound support services, the Collaborative currently serves 6,500 alumni in their postsecondary years and will grow to reach 10,000 alumni by 2028.

Investment Focus: The Centerbridge Foundation and Bain supported the launch of a coalition to develop strategies focused on college completion, career transitions, and alternative pathways for alumni across all three organizations.

*Original participants in the research phase of the collaborative included Uncommon Schools and not Prospect Schools.

Organization Overview: Children’s Aid helps children in poverty to succeed and thrive by providing comprehensive supports to children, youth, and their families in targeted high-needs New York City neighborhoods through a range of programs focusing on academic and social emotional learning, family and community, and health and nutrition. Currently, over 50,000 children and their families are served through 100+ programs across all five boroughs.

Investment Focus: Support from the Centerbridge Foundation and Bain focused on refining strategy and codifying a model for Children’s Aid’s network of community schools and developing an organizational change management plan.

Organization Overview: College Advising Corps (CAC) is a college access and advising program that strives to increase the number of low-income and first-generation students that participate in higher education. CAC partners with 31 universities across 15 states to place well-trained, recent college graduates as “near-peer” college advisers in under-served high schools.

Investment Focus: The Centerbridge Foundation and Bain supported the development of a strategy for scaling the program in New York City through partnerships with the College Board and New York City Public Schools who share the goal of improving college access and enrollment outcomes.

Organization Overview: New Classrooms is an education technology and personalized learning organization founded in 2009 within the NYC DOE as “School of One.” In 2011, it launched as an independent entity with the program “Teach to One 360” to scale its approach outside the NYC DOE. The vision is to create a personalized instructional model that re-imagines the use of time, talent, tech and physical space to provide tailored and targeted math instruction based on students’ individual learning styles and needs. Since 2011, Teach to One 360 has served over 60,000 students in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Students have achieved learning gains equivalent to 1.5 years of growth.

Investment Focus: Support from the Centerbridge Foundation and Bain focused on researching the landscape of complementary and competing programs and understanding decision-making processes across the system. This research has informed the organization’s pricing and outreach strategy which were critical in advance of scaling operations in NYC and across the country.

Organization Overview: In 2011, Relay Graduate School of Education became the first stand-alone graduate school of education to form in New York in over 80 years. Relay offers an innovative master’s degree program designed specifically to respond to the urgent demand for effective teachers, particularly in urban communities. Currently, Relay trains 3,400 current and aspiring teachers and 1,100 school leaders across 19 cities. Its programs have expanded to include master’s degrees for teachers and teaching residents, fellowships for experienced principals, and a partnership with Coursera, that has allowed the program to reach thousands of educators.

Investment Focus: The Centerbridge Foundation and Bain supported the development of a framework to evaluate a range of expansion opportunities that have the potential to broaden Relay’s presence and impact over time. Bain helped Relay develop a strategic road map to include prioritization of new opportunities and resource allocation and focused on a strategy to guide the organization’s growth through 2020.

Organization Overview: The Achievement Network (ANet) helps school leadership teams support great teaching. The organization provides its school partners with an integrated set of trainings and tools to ensure that students receive instruction that is tailored to their needs. An ANet coach works alongside school leaders to build the skills, routines and structures needed to support a strong, standards-based instructional cycle. ANet works across 29 schools in New York and over 820 schools across 31 states creating a unique ability to learn from and share learnings from educators across the country.

Investment Focus: Support from the Centerbridge Foundation and Bain resulted in a review of the organization’s expansion plans, product portfolio, customer segmentation strategy, and ways to deepen impact in existing markets. This review helped ANet scale its presence nationally, as well as in NYC in response to growing demand for its services. Since the start of our partnership, the organization has gone from serving 525 schools to over 800 schools.

Organization Overview: Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit organization that operates 54 outstanding urban public charter schools in five cities serving over 19,000 students. Uncommon aims to close the achievement gap and prepare low-income students to graduate from college. The organization’s reach, coupled with its outstanding academic results, makes Uncommon one of the largest and highest-performing charter management organizations in the country.

Investment Focus: With support from the Centerbridge Foundation and Bain, Uncommon launched Uncommon Impact—a newer arm of the organization that is committed to sharing the techniques, skills and practices of high-performing teachers and leaders with educators around the world. The primary goal of Uncommon Impact is to share Uncommon’s work in ways that most effectively contribute to the academic success of students outside of Uncommon’s own network of schools. After being awarded a $1 million grant through the NYS DOE, the Uncommon Impact team trained more than 150 NYC DOE educators across 17 district schools in 2014, providing in-depth reading and math training, behavior and social-emotional coaching, and general professional development. In 2015, a partnership was formalized with the NYC DOE for Uncommon Impact to train educators from schools in Districts 19 and 23 in Brooklyn. This partnership expanded in 2016 and 2017 to train over 500 educators across four Districts (16,18, 19 and 23).

Organization Overview: Since 1989, New Visions has played a leading role in reducing educational inequity and expanding opportunities for students in New York City public schools. New Visions focuses on providing educators with the tools, resources, and support to build and continuously improve strong and responsive schools. These include the New Visions student planning and school management software tool, full-course high school curricula in science and social studies, curriculum-based professional learning, and innovative career exposure programs that connect students with NYC employers.

Investment Focus: Support from the Centerbridge Foundation and Bain focused on developing a turnaround model for struggling urban schools and implementing a team-based training approach to transform school culture.