The Challenge
Every year, 2 million of California’s 6 million students are not qualified for college upon graduating high school. For decades, the gap between white students and our most vulnerable student populations has persisted. As a result of the pandemic, the gap has increased.
Equity Gap >> Achievement Gap
The root cause of the achievement gap is the disparity in academic performance between different student populations. It is not simply that the same groups of students happen to perform better or worse every year. When we peel back the layers of the systems and practices of districts and schools, we see that some student populations are better set up to succeed while failure is normalized for other student populations, which points to an equity gap.
The Orenda Difference >> Educational Equity For All Students
For over 25 years, Orenda Education has transformed educational systems in the most vulnerable districts in California. Our mission is to ensure that all students receive a premium education that is TRUE, RIGHT, and JUST! We achieve this by partnering with district and school teams to build and refine systems and practices that are grounded in equity, driven by data, and sustained through collaborative learning. Our nested system is designed to support all levels of district staff from the board room to the classroom. With our guidance and when the systems work is implemented with full fidelity, Orenda partners have experienced systemic change for all students.
Orenda Education provides both breadth and depth in professional development related to leadership development.
Orenda is an experienced provider in partnering with school and district leaders to provide professional development programs customized to meet the unique needs of schools, clusters of schools or districts. Orenda is the school improvement division of Think Together, a 501 c3 nonprofit corporation, the largest afterschool provider in the state.
Orenda’s systems approach is Teach Lead Counsel (TLC). TLC provides equity-based systemic changes to schools, so improvement is continuous and sustainable.
- TEACH builds a powerful teaching and learning system by designing grade-level curriculum, common assessments and instructional strategies while enabling educators to reflect and reassess their methods.
- LEAD builds the capacity of site and district leaders through a scholarly and technical approach to support the school conditions for staff and students to reach achievement targets.
- COUNSEL builds the student support services division of the school community where staff use actionable college readiness indicator data via Orenda’s monitoring software to measure student progress towards college and career readiness.
The TLC model currently serves schools with a high-impact, in-person, or virtual, systems-driven approach to improve academic achievement for underserved students. The methodologies use data to guide teachers, administrators, and school counselors to ensure that students are mastering grade-level curriculum and are on-track to graduating high school, prepared for college and career ready.
The TLC approach uniquely targets interventions to all levels and professions within an educational community, and not only to teachers, which is more common in the field. This “nested” approach is one of the keys to success towards sustainable, systemic improvement for the entire district.
