The challenge to Baltimore City's leadership is to provide Baltimore City children with the same or better quality public education as their counterparts in the surrounding suburbs. The Abell Foundation supports efforts to provide quality instruction and leadership, develop effective curricula (pre-school through 12) through pilot projects, improve the transition to college and work, increase community involvement, enhance basic skills, and further literacy enrichment. After-school and summer activities and intramural sports with academic components have received ongoing support to help fill gaps in out-of-school programming.
In recognition of the pivotal role of quality teaching and leadership, the Foundation also supports teacher and principal recruitment and retention efforts as well leadership development strategies.
Areas of interest include:

• public school reform/"new" schools and charter schools
• high school and middle school reform
• early childhood education
• K-12 curriculum development
• literacy enrichment
• teacher recruitment and training
• technology education
• career and technology education programs/work-based learning
• advanced academic/gifted and talented programming
• college readiness/access to higher education institutions
• alternative schools/programs, particularly serving high school-aged students
• principal recruitment, development and retention
• college retention efforts
• after-school, weekend, and summer programs

Learn more about the educational initiatives funded by The Abell Foundation by visiting Publications/Research. More information is also available in our Highlights below.

Education Highlights

Baltimore Kids Chess League
Teaming with the Baltimore Kids Chess League and Baltimore City Schools in 2004, The Abell Foundation re-established an extracurricular chess program in Baltimore's elementary schools. Enthusiastically embraced by schools from the start, the Chess League identifies a coach for each school, provides educational materials and training, sponsors bi-monthly chess tournaments and encourages children to quality for competitive regional and national chess tournaments. After-school chess is now offered in over 50 City elementary, middle and high schools in a season that culminates with a Citywide Chess Tournament each spring. Baltimore City chess teams swept the Elementary Division of the 2008 Maryland Girls Chess Tournament and sent three City school teams for the first time to the 2008 National Chess Tournament in Pittsburgh.

The Core Knowledge Pre-School Initiative
Based on a successful five-year pre-school program among Baltimore County Head Start, its operator, the YMCA of Central Maryland, and the Core Knowledge Foundation. this initiative expanded to Baltimore City Head Start in 2006. In 2001, only 22 percent of Baltimore County's Head Start pre-schoolers entering kindergarten were assessed as "fully ready" for school by Maryland's Model For School Readiness assessment; by 2007, that percentage was 69.
Funded by The Abell Foundation, the Core Knowledge Pre-School Initiative is helping St. Vincent’s Southeast Head Start administrators, teachers, children and parents focus on providing the resources, curriculum and training needed to increase the readiness of poor and largely non-English speaking children for kindergarten. Using the Core Knowledge Pre-School Curriculum and the support of a pre-school team doing teacher training and classroom mentoring, performance of children has grown at a significant rate versus national norms.

CollegeBound Foundation College Retention Program
Data from the National Student Clearinghouse indicates that less than 10% of Baltimore City Public School graduates have completed a two- or four-year college degree six within six years of high school graduation. Partnering with the CollegeBound Foundation, The Abell Foundation is sponsoring a four-year college retention pilot that combines a “last dollar” scholarship with on-campus retention support services for students who attend one of 8 Maryland public (and one private) universities. In its first cohort, 94% of participants re-enrolled in college for the second year as compared with a previous one-year retention rate of 83% for last dollar students.

High School Reform Initiative
Joined by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other local funders, the Abell Foundation was a key partner in the five-year effort to reform Baltimore City's neighborhood high schools beginning in 2002. This initiative resulted in the creation of 6 "innovative" high schools and the break-up of the large zoned high schools into smaller organizations with rigorous academics, small support structures, and quality teaching and leadership. As a result of this work, Baltimore City’s graduation rate has risen from 54% in 2003 to 62.6% in 2008. In 2008/09, The Abell Foundation supported the opening of five new Transformation schools in Baltimore City serving 6th through 12th grade students.

The Ingenuity Project
The Ingenuity Project is an ambitious effort to provide an accelerated math and science curriculum to eligible Baltimore City middle-and high-school students. The goal of the Ingenuity Project is to nurture and develop city public school students early enough and intensely enough so that they can achieve the project's symbolic goal of competing in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition, now known as the Intel. Through 2008, Ingenuity has proudly sponsored four Intel finalists, including three students who placed in the top ten nationwide. Today there are nearly 500 Baltimore City public students in grades 6-12 benefiting from advanced instruction in math, science, and research thanks for Ingenuity.

National Academic League
The National Academic League is a competitive scholastic extracurricular program designed to increase middle school achievement. Nearly 600 students in 26 Baltimore City public school teams compete bi-weekly in an October through March season, answering a battery of questions in a variety of subjects. The Baltimore City champion goes on to compete at the national level in a final tournament. Since the program began in 1993, nearly 6,000 middle school students have participated in NAL.

New Leaders for New Schools
In partnership with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Abell Foundation was instrumental in attracting the national principal development program, New Leaders for New Schools, to Baltimore City. The goal of New Leaders is to attract, prepare and mentor the next generation of urban school leaders using an intensive and innovative one-year residency model. With an aggressive recruitment and selection process, a Summer Foundations institute, and five-day seminars throughout the year, New Leaders fellows are trained by a mentor principal within a school as well as by consulting principals. In its first three years in Baltimore, the program has promoted 32 New Leaders graduates to principal positions; another 14 Residents are in training to run schools in the next year.

New Schools/Charter Schools Initiative
As early as 1996, the Abell Foundation was supporting the creation of new schools with greater autonomy through the Baltimore City Public School System’s “New Schools Initiative.” Maryland’s 2002 Charter School law has enabled the opening of 25 charter schools in Baltimore City as of Fall 2008. In addition to helping schools with facilities and programming needs, The Abell Foundation has been instrumental in the launch of an advocacy and technical support organization for City charter and new schools: Supporting Public Schools of Choice.

The New Teacher Project
The Abell Foundation has partnered locally with the national New Teacher Project on several educational initiatives designed to increase the quality and impact of City teachers. The Baltimore Teaching Residency is an alternative teacher certification program that recruits and prepares high quality individuals to teach in hard-to-staff city schools. Since 2001, over 1,000 new teachers have been placed in Baltimore City classrooms through this pipeline. Similarly the Baltimore Model School Initiative works with school principals and the school system's Human Resources department to recruit and effectively place teachers in the lowest-performing 40 schools in the district with the goal of increasing teacher retention. Finally, given teacher shortages in math, The New Teacher Project is piloting a program to fast-track qualified candidates with non-traditional math backgrounds into middle and high school math teacher positions.

Piney Woods School/Abell Scholars Program
The Abell Foundation also provides full needs-based scholarships to young men in grades 9-12 from Baltimore City to attend The Piney Woods School, a historically black college preparatory boarding school outside Jackson Mississippi. The Abell Scholars receive the support of a mentor/counselor during the school year. Since 2003, 10 young men from Baltimore City have successfully graduated from Piney Woods and enrolled in college – most of these students were not expected to make it through high school.

The SEED School
The Abell Foundation funded the initial feasibility study to explore the replication of Washington D.C.'s college preparatory public residential school --The SEED School -- to serve disadvantaged Maryland students. As a result of the SEED Foundation's work, the Maryland legislature approved an appropriation for operational funding for public boarding schools. The SEED School of Maryland located in Southwest Baltimore City, opened its doors to its first class of 80 incoming 6th graders in Fall 2008 and will expand through 12th grade in the next six years.

Teach for America, Baltimore
The Abell Foundation has been an advocate for the highly selective national Teach for America (TFA) program since its inception in Baltimore in the early 1990's. Like the Baltimore Teaching Residency Program, TFA is an alternative teacher certification program that attracts a competitive corps of recent college graduates for a two-year commitment teaching in high-needs urban schools. To date, City schools have benefited from over 800 teachers through TFA. Nearly 100 TFA candidates begin as new teachers in Baltimore City each year, and 75% of TFA alumni remain active in the Baltimore educational community after completing their commitments. As of 2008, there are 12 TFA alumni are serving as principals or district leaders in the Baltimore City Public School System.

Visit the Grantmaking section to learn about the steps involved in making a grant application and to see other recently funded grants.