GreatSchools
Project Title
For project support to integrate public library data onto their platform, allowing users to better understand the broader educational ecosystem within their community
Date
Jun. 05, 2025
Duration
24 months
Description
GreatSchools is the nation’s largest education-focused parenting website serving 45 million American families annually with a track record of over nineteen years. They have effectively engaged with parents, providing profiles of 150,000 K-12 schools that encompass performance metrics, detailed descriptions, and valuable feedback from over a million parents and students. Through this proposed project, the Corporation will support GreatSchools to launch a pilot that will integrate public library data into a platform to help parents access educational resources and programs in their communities. It involves three key efforts: showcasing library programs in school searches, creating updatable library profiles, and developing content to educate parents about library resources and their role in the learning ecosystem. The initiative seeks to empower parents to make informed decisions about their children’s education and raise awareness of the value libraries offer to communities.
Website
Project Title
For project support of the College Success Awards
Date
Mar. 07, 2024
Duration
12 months
Description
GreatSchools is the nation’s largest education-focused parenting website serving 45 million American families annually with a track record of over eighteen years. They have effectively engaged with parents, providing profiles of 200,000 K-12 schools that encompass performance metrics, detailed descriptions, and valuable feedback from over a million parents and students. The Corporation will continue to support the annual College Success Award presented by GreatSchools, which recognizes and celebrates public high schools that excel in preparing students for success in postsecondary education. The award’s primary aim is to acknowledge and honor public high schools that effectively equip students to enroll and thrive in college. This information serves as a valuable tool for families in identifying schools that are best equipped to support their children in their journey toward postsecondary success, ultimately fostering enhanced economic and social mobility. Through this upcoming grant, GreatSchools will further enhance its services by offering college guidance to families utilizing their website.
Website
Project Title
For general support
Date
Mar. 09, 2023
Duration
12 months
Description
GreatSchools’ trusted ratings and school information help parents find the right school for their families and improve the schools in theircommunities. Through this renewal grant, GreatSchools plans to engage parents from historically marginalized backgrounds and low-income families to give them information that helps them take actions for their child that will help inform systemic change. This year they will focus on increasing the audience of users who come from low-income communities and gaining a deeper understanding of their needs – what they value for their children, how they make decisions about schools, what decisions they make, and how to better support their decision making with new information and improved user engagement. GreatSchools also plans to build a cycle of learning that not only informs the GreatSchools website but also offers education researchers and the broader field much-needed insights about parents.
Website
Project Title
For general support
Date
Dec. 02, 2021
Duration
15 months
Description
GreatSchools’ trusted ratings and school information help parents find the right school for their families and improve their communities’ schools. Through this renewal grant,GreatSchoolsplans to engage parents from historically marginalized backgrounds and low-income families to give them information that helps them take actions for their child that will help inform systemic change. They will continue to widen their aperture on school quality with data acquired from partners and state agencies based on their School Quality Framework to help parents assess quality for their children. They will also create a more personalized, journey-based approach for their users to improve their understanding of a broader picture of school quality. Finally, they will help parents connect data and stories to their own lives and their potential impact on their children and education.
Website
Project Title
For general support
Date
Jun. 03, 2021
Duration
6 months
Description
For more than twenty years, GreatSchools has been the leading national nonprofit empowering parents to unlock educational opportunities for their children. Families, community leaders, and policymakers have turned to GreatSchools for the school information they need to guide children to great futures. GreatSchools’ trusted ratings and school information help parents find the right school for their family and improve schools in their communities. They have built a robust library of tools to support parents beyond those initial choices. With continued general support from the Corporation, GreatSchools will leverage information gathering at scale directly from school leaders and build a database of user-generated content, thereby customizing school profiles to illuminate promising practices and new views of school quality. The information will be disseminated to parents to build awareness and promote parent action to support their child and their community.
Website
Project Title
For general support
Date
Dec. 05, 2019
Duration
18 months
Description
For more than twenty years, GreatSchools has been the leading national nonprofit empowering parents to unlock educational opportunities for their children. Families, community leaders, and policymakers have turned to GreatSchools for the school information they need to guide children to great futures. GreatSchools’ trusted ratings and school information help parents find the right school for their family and improve schools in their communities. They have built a robust library of tools to support parents beyond those initial choices. With continued general support from the Corporation, GreatSchools will design and run pilots to see which of emergent data sources might be able to be scaled to create a more nuanced look into school quality. GreatSchools will also work with parents to understand more about what information they want and enhance school profiles that respond directly to parents’ needs.
Website
Project Title
For strategic planning
Date
Sep. 12, 2019
Duration
5 months
Description
For more than twenty years, GreatSchools has been the leading national nonprofit empowering parents to unlock educational opportunities for their children. Families, community leaders, and policymakers have turned to GreatSchools for the school information they need to guide children to great futures. GreatSchools’ trusted ratings and school information help parents find the right school for their family and improve schools in their communities. They have built a robust library of tools to support parents beyond those initial choices. With new leadership, GreatSchools is seeking to set forth a vision for where GreatSchools needs to go in the future, to continue building on past work by exploring how GreatSchools can play a pivotal role in evolving how they think about school quality, based on an expanded definition of student success. With Corporation support, GreatSchools will engage in a strategic planning process to accelerate GreatSchools planning process, allowing them to most effectively maximize their impact by continuing to serve parents and to become a better resource for organizations across the field.
Website
Project Title
For core support of the Family Engagement Lab
Date
Mar. 08, 2018
Duration
4 months
Description
Teachers are a critical element in enabling families to support the learning process of their children. Research shows however that teachers, particularly in high-poverty areas, need better tools to effectively cultivate and sustain parent engagement. The Family Engagement Lab, started in 2016 as a subsidiary of GreatSchools, is an emerging organization led by an experienced team of nonprofit leaders with a mission to use technology-based solutions to improve the practice of family engagement. As a way to connect parents by way of technology, Family Engagement Lab has piloted FASTalk, a program that builds teacher-family partnerships by providing parents with at-home activities coordinated with the curriculum through text messaging. Programs piloted by Family Engagement Lab have already been rolled out to support literacy programs in Oakland, CA and the organization aims to expand its reach. With support from the Corporation, the Family Engagement Lab will expand on its suite of technological activities that provide pragmatic pathways for relationship-building between schools and families, create improvements in student learning, and offer models of effective engagement.
Website
Project Title
For core support of the Family Engagement Lab
Date
Dec. 06, 2018
Duration
12 months
Description
Research shows that parents who are engaged in at-home learning serve to improve student test scores regardless of their education levels or socioeconomic status. But for many low-income and immigrant parents, knowing how or where to begin at-home learning activities can be difficult. Founded in 2016, Family Engagement Lab, a subsidiary organization of GreatSchools, seeks to cultivate the home-to-school connection through technology, creating communication channels between teachers and parents with a focus on families who do not share a common language with their children’s teacher. Through FASTalk, their text messaging program which launched in fourteen high-need schools in the Bay Area, parents receive simple at-home learning activities in their preferred language, while teachers receive tools on messaging with diverse families. To date, Family Engagement Lab has improved student grades and increased literacy through FASTalk. With support from the Corporation, Family Engagement Lab will deepen its FASTalk engagement in schools, expand its literacy content, increase parents’ access to FASTalk by testing alternative communication channels, and plan for a randomized control trial to further study FASTalk’s impact.
Website
Project Title
For general support
Date
Dec. 07, 2017
Duration
15 months
Description
With the expansion of school choice, data proliferation on assessments and achievement, and dynamic changes in our national K-12 system, parents are asking for access to concise and accurate information on schools to help inform their choices. GreatSchools, a national nonprofit providing parents with information on K-12 schools for nearly nineteen years, reaches forty-six million users, an audience that includes half of U.S. parents with school-aged children, 40 percent of whom identify as low-income. With the Corporation’s support, GreatSchools will enhance and expand its school quality and equity information, disseminate parenting guidance content, provide actionable information for stakeholders to improve and advocate for educational opportunities, and measure the impact of their work through surveys on parents’ attitudes and behaviors. In the long-term, the general support to GreatSchools aims to cultivate a national conversation about school quality and inspire low-income parents to take actions that improve their local schools.
Website
Project Title
For the College Success Award to drive demand within K-12 education for increased postsecondary success
Date
Jun. 01, 2017
Duration
12 months
Description
By 2020, 65 percent of all jobs will require a postsecondary education, but less than 25 percent of high school graduates today go on to receive a college degree, and rates are even lower for low-income and minority students. Efforts to improve the K-to-college pipeline must start with an understanding of what practices are most successful in driving postsecondary success. A new provision in the Every Student Succeeds Act takes the first step by requiring states to report postsecondary enrollment by high school and subgroup, but that is not sufficient. Stakeholders need data on remediation and persistence and the ability to track students through multiple pathways in order to generate meaningful insights. In addition, data alone will not change outcomes; the data must be used to identify and study areas of success, engage communities in celebrating that success, and cultivate parental demand for improvement. GreatSchools, a national nonprofit organization that provides school information and parenting resources for families, aims to build demand for better data on postsecondary outcomes by launching, in partnership with the Data Quality Campaign, a national awards program that recognizes and celebrates high schools that beat the odds in preparing students for success in college.
Website
Project Title
For building parent understanding and support for postsecondary pathways and new ways of learning
Date
Jun. 09, 2016
Duration
18 months
Description
GreatSchools is one of the country’s leading sources of school performance information for parents, reaching forty-four million unique visitors and 50 percent of American families with children. Along with profiles of more than 200,000 PreK-12 schools and more than 1,000,000 parent and community ratings and reviews of schools, their new program, GreatKids, provides information, tips, activities, and tools that help parents get the best possible education for their children. With the support of this grant, they will conduct research and develop content and services that help high school parents, especially low-income parents, better understand postsecondary education pathways that lead to economic opportunity; rally around a “knowledge, skills, character, and purpose” vision of education success; and understand innovations in teaching, schooling and the emerging science of learning.
Website
Project Title
For informational videos to help parents and students understand the Common Core State Standards
Date
Jun. 04, 2015
Duration
12 months
Website
Project Title
For informational videos to help parents and students understand the Common Core State Standards
Date
Mar. 06, 2014
Duration
19 months