About Us

About us Founded in 2004, Generation Schools Network is a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization dedicated to whole-school and systemic innovation in urban education. Our goal is to ensure that all students – regardless of life circumstances – have access to a great education.

We have focused our work on fundamentally restructuring a school’s critical resources, particularly human capital and time. The result is a highly efficient model that simultaneously reduces costs and substantially increases services.

Innovative yet practical solutions We develop and implement innovation strategies that are:

Comprehensive instead of piecemeal
Proactive instead of reactive
Nimble not rigid
Sustainable for people and budgets
Scalable in district and charter environments
Mission driven and mission accountable

Our annual calendar is a great example. It extends the school year by a month for all students without increasing the work year for any teacher. We do this by staggering teachers’ summer vacation throughout the year. All teachers still work the same number of days as in any public school, just not all at the same time.

Potential added value for urban districts is huge. In New York City, for instance, the district spends nearly one billion dollars for every month of school to pay its teachers. Staggered vacations allow us to add a month of instruction without adding staffing costs.

Early successes In 2007, Generation Schools secured a landmark agreement between the NYC Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers to implement the model. Years in the making, the agreement approved key adaptations to the teachers’ contract and enabled us to open the first public school in the nation to implement our model. It was a critical milestone for our organization.

Brooklyn Generation School opened that same year as one of the new small high schools working to transform one of the city’s most troubled campuses. The school has achieved strong results.

•Standardized Tests Performance: Brooklyn Generation outperformed all other schools in our peer group on statewide standardized math exams. We will take our first exams in other subject areas this year.

•Attendance: Our students maintained nearly 90% attendance for the entire 200-day school year.

•Credit Accumulation: Eight of ten students earned the required academic credits to be on pace for on-time graduation: second in our peer group.

Growing our network We have successfully demonstrated that the model works within the existing infrastructure of a large urban district. We now are developing training programs and building our technical support capacities so we can expand the number of schools utilizing the model in New York and beyond.