Educator and Instructional Supports

Our Work

Our team of experts understands what it takes to create the conditions for learning and influence the everyday work in schools and classrooms through high-quality instructional materials, assessments, and talent supports. We work with a broad range of partners throughout the education ecosystem — including curriculum publishers, assessment developers, talent system partners, and professional learning providers — to help educators and schools drive toward the best outcomes for students.

Our focus areas include:

Strategic Planning and Advising: We help partners develop a coherent strategy from vision through implementation. We also help organizations think about shifting market context and leverage our strategy, policy, and evaluation expertise to build thoughtful, flexible, and tailored plans with the measures of success that help organizations understand if they’re on track to meet their goals.

Growth Planning: Our team helps organizations think through their vision for impact and how to bridge the gap from where they are today to where they seek to go in the future.

Financial Sustainability: As partners to schools, districts, and state agencies, the organizations we support face similar public funding trends, in addition to frequently navigating philanthropic support. We help organizations think through their current financial model, what’s on the horizon internally and externally, and how their model will change over time.

Landscape Assessment: We help our partners build a nuanced understanding of market and ecosystem context; how they can address unmet needs for students, schools, and districts; and where their unique value proposition may have the greatest impact. Our lens covers both market dynamics today and policy context for the future.

Program Design: Given the needs of students, families, and school systems, we help partners design and pilot programs to effectively address opportunities. We consider how individual programs contribute to overall organizational theory of action and the systems and structures needed to support new offerings.

Measurement and Continuous Improvement: We support our partners in measuring their impact over multiple time horizons, setting meaningful goals, and using their measurement work to improve program design and effectiveness. We bring a lens of program evaluation and logic model coherence to all our measurement and continuous improvement work.

Our Impact

Growth strategy for a leading curriculum provider: We helped a leading publisher of science of reading-aligned, high-quality instructional materials develop its five-year growth and scaling strategy, with the goals of being present in five times the number of classrooms that they are in today and of supporting teachers in implementing their curricula through their aligned professional learning and educator support tools.

New product offering viability: We conducted an assessment of potential outcomes for a new product offering for a leading professional learning partner. We analyzed many factors, including the market landscape, broader policy trends, competitive dynamics, buying behavior, and the client’s unique value proposition to support them in thinking through whether to make the investments needed for launch, and how to make the launch successful and mitigate risk upon moving forward.

Strategic planning, financial sustainability planning, and program evaluation: We partnered with a city-based teacher residency and teacher development organization to develop its five-year plan, facilitate a deep dive on its financial model amid a changing financial context, and evaluate the impact of its residency and fellowship model for teachers.

Our Team

Nithya Rajan
Partner

Shirley Appleman
Senior Adviser

Amy Chen Kulesa
Senior Associate Partner

Rebecca Gifford Goldberg
Managing Partner

Molly Jamieson
Senior Associate Partner

Anson Jackson
Senior Partner

Melissa Steel King
Senior Partner