Afton Partners

By NewSchools Venture Fund – Our proposal is to channel $4B of philanthropy into this type of innovative schools over the next 10 years. That might sound like a pretty large amount of money, and I guess it is. But, it doesn’t seem so big if you think about it like this: it’s only 20 percent of the total philanthropy that will flow to K-12 education in the coming decade, and it’s less than 1 percent of the $600B in public spending on K-12 education every year.

Now the two states with the most rapid school age population growth, Nevada and Arizona, have joined Florida in trying out Education Savings Accounts. ESAs give parents the option of taking a chunk of the money the state would otherwise spend on their children and using it as they see fit.

This new paper takes the first systematic look at costs associated with implementing personalized learning schools, how leaders of these schools choose to allocate their funds, and what it might take to make personalized learning financially sustainable on public dollars. Researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, in partnership with Afton Partners, studied 16 charter elementary and secondary schools with a wide range of personalized learning models from across the country.

Just as venture capitalists have financial incentives for backing education technology ventures—to the tune of $1.85 billion in the U.S. last year alone—and relevant expertise to bring to bear on their efforts, foundations have financial as well as social motivations, and their knowledge and expertise can come in handy, too.

Districts that think through the longer term cost trade-offs up front have a much greater chance of implementing a sustainable and scalable model to serve all students in their district. The Learning Accelerator created this guide to help encourage educators to approach financial planning for blended learning with a focus on developing a multi-year plan.

Few education initiatives in Florida are expanding faster than the Legislature’s efforts to cover education costs for families who want to send their children to private schools. Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program for low-income families continues to grow rapidly, aided by 2014 legislation that allowed more families to enroll. And the state’s Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts program is entering its second year, with individual scholarships that allow families to tailor education services for special needs children and young adults.