Pivot Learning Partners – Turn to Us
www.pivotlearningpartners.org
A Network Committed to Achievement, Equity & Inquiry
The Vision
Pivot Learning Partners aim to create a future in which race, class, language, gender, and culture no longer predict educational outcomes for students.
The Mission
Pivot Learning Partners is to revitalize public education by developing the leaders and building the education organizations of the future.
History
Pivot Learning Partners was founded in 1995 as the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC) with a $50 million grant provided jointly by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Walter Annenberg Foundation. Under the leadership of founding Executive Director Merrill Vargo, BASRC used these grant funds to develop the Cycle of Inquiry model, a data-based decision-making process whose effectiveness in improving student outcomes was documented through a five-year independent study conducted by researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Research on the Context of Teaching (CRC).
On this basis, Hewlett and Annenberg provided BASRC with a second round of funding in the amount of $40 million. BASRC was the only one of the Annenberg Challenge sites to demonstrate statistically significant improvement in test scores, and the only site to be granted a second round of funding on this basis. With these funds, BASRC embarked on a new imperative to strengthen the focus on district-level change, and to build a sustainable business model to scale up the program.
In responding to these new challenges, BASRC has always been an organization that responds to new challenges and has reinvented itself several times, changing its name first to Springboard Schools to reflect a wider presence in California when it established regional centers in the Central Valley and Southern California in 2004 and 2005 respectively, and then to Pivot Learning Partners in 2009 with the launch of major district redesign projects.
Cost Model: Fixed cost
Management tool: Jira tracking system
Project management method: Agile-based method to work out for versions.
Duration: Since August, 2011
