Who we Are

Endorsements

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT SFA

We support programs that encourage higher student achievement through recruitment and development of teachers and principals, enhance curricula, create new character and innovative schools, increase parental involvement, and encourage the pursuit of higher education among the less affluent.

Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development provides a registry of evidence-based positive youth development programs designed to promote the health and well-being of children and teens. Blueprints programs are family, school, and community-based and target all levels of need — from broad prevention programs that promote positive behaviors while decreasing negative behaviors, to highly-targeted programs for at-risk children and troubled teens that get them back on track.

The benefits are clear, as numerous studies have shown that the program has increased reading achievement; cut the achievement gap between African American, Hispanic and white students; and helped teachers become more effective instructors.

Success for All meets the Top Tier Evidence Standard, defined by recent Congressional legislation to include: Interventions shown in well-designed and implemented randomized controlled trials, preferably conducted in typical community settings, to produce sizeable, sustained benefits to participants and/or society.

Child Trends is a trusted leader in research about children, youth, and families. Our work ranges from doing high-level analyses to helping organizations make their direct services more effective. Our clients are researchers, policymakers, funders, and practitioners. All of our work is aimed at improving children’s lives, now and in the future. We monitor and examine more than 120 indicators of children’s well-being. “Success for All is a reading program that can vary based on school needs and resources; however, there are basic components that are constant in the program. The program is based on reading teachers at every grade level, from kindergarten through 6, reading to the children and discussing the story to help students’ understanding, vocabulary, and knowledge of story structure. Students have daily 90-minute reading periods and 20-minute reading sessions outside of their reading or math periods. The main focus of Success for All that is present in all schools is a focus on student success, using evidence-based practices. Success for All is a coordinated, proactive plan across a school to convert positive expectations to positive results for every student.”

Success for All Foundation is a recipient of a Google Grants award. The Google Grants program supports registered nonprofit organizations that share Google’s philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy and the arts. Google Grants is an in-kind advertising program that awards free online advertising to nonprofits via Google AdWords.

We envision a nonprofit sector strong enough to tackle the great challenges of our time.
Success for All is a Silver-level GuideStar Company, highlighting our commitment to mission and transparency.

For more than a decade, the WWC has been a central and trusted source of scientific evidence on education programs, products, practices, and policies. Success for All received a rating of Positive: strong evidence that intervention had a positive effect on outcomes.

We are honored and privileged to recommend Success for All Foundation. Success for All Foundation (SFAF) delivered a high-quality program to around 1,000 schools and 500,000 children last year that increases literacy as much as one grade equivalent, and reaches additional children at an approximate marginal cost of $119.

Success for All Foundation provides a system that can be depended upon to create success in all sorts of schools from inner city Detroit to the Bering Straits of Alaska. The impacts are large, and the lives of the children and families are changed. We are proud that SFA got its start here at Johns Hopkins, and have selected Success for All as our partner in the schools in the Baltimore community that we support.

No topic worries American families more than the quality of our schools. MAKING SCHOOLS WORK with Hedrick Smith offers a rare and often surprising look at success in unexpected places, with enormous implications for public schools nationwide. In 1986, faced with failing schools in impoverished, inner-city neighborhoods, the Baltimore School Superintendent turned to Johns Hopkins researcher Bob Slavin for help. “[We] came to an agreement that we would try a model based on the idea that every single child was going to be successful – no matter what,” Slavin says. That model became research-driven Success for All, now used in 1,300 schools in 47 states* and rated one of the most effective reform models according to a meta-analysis of school improvement programs.

As the President said when he launched MBK, the initiative is about “building on what works – when it works, in those critical life-changing moments.” This means a commitment to use data to inform and improve service delivery, and working to develop and scale interventions with evidence of success to ensure all young people can reach their full potential. In a science-fair meets demo-day style event, the MBK What Works Showcase features 33 organizations and interventions from across the country showing potential to have a positive impact across MBK’s cradle-to-college-and-career-goals

MDRC is committed to finding solutions to some of the most difficult problems facing the nation — from reducing poverty and bolstering economic self-sufficiency to improving public education and college graduation rates. We design promising new interventions, evaluate existing programs using the highest research standards, and provide technical assistance to build better programs and deliver effective interventions at scale. Success for All was selected to receive a five-year scale-up grant under the U.S. Department of Education’s first Investing in Innovation (i3) competition. Kindergartners in the SFA schools scored significantly higher than their control group counterparts on one of two standardized measures of early reading. The impact on this measure seems to be robust across a range of demographic and socioeconomic subgroups, as well as across students with different levels of literacy skills at baseline.

Through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, programs are assessed by expert study reviewers from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP’s) Model Programs Guide (MPG), using www.CrimeSolutions.gov program review process, scoring instrument, and evidence standards. Success for All received a top ✓+ rating.

Our primary goal is to make the best possible ideas and resources available to Virginia public school educators so we can fulfill our mutual mission of ensuring that every child has the opportunity to succeed in school and beyond.

Every child deserves the chance to grow into a healthy, productive adult. Yet far too many children lack fundamental resources needed to progress academically, acquire critical skills and become successful in today’s economy. They have limited access to books or programs that have been proven to make a lifelong difference. We help combat this problem by partnering with outstanding nonprofits at the global, national and local levels. We focus our efforts on at-risk students served by school districts in communities where we have a presence.

The S&I 100 Index consists of high-impact nonprofits that have been carefully vetted through a comprehensive selection process. More than 150 experts have participated in a cross-sector collaborative effort to identify and assess the nonprofits that have been selected to be part of the Index.

The programs in this database clear a high bar. STEMworks reviewed each program against CTEq’s Design Principles for Effective STEM Philanthropy. Decades of research show that the Power Teaching model can have a big impact on student performance in math. For example, an analysis of decades of research on the model’s impact found that it is likely to close between 44% and 92% of the gap between African-American or Hispanic and White eighth grade math scores.

As a prior funder of research related to Success for All, the foundation has great regard for SFA’s commitment to high quality research as an essential ingredient in sorting out effective reforms in education. SFA is a model for what a learning organization should be. From the outset, SFA has wed strong values about helping the least advantaged young people in our society to a sophisticated R&D strategy that undergirds a culture of continuous improvement.