Dailies, Inc.

Vision: Our vision is that students will all begin their lives on an even educational playing field and are further provided with learning opportunities tailored to their specific needs and interests.  Because of our work with students around the country, students will be able to fill in the educational gaps that work to cripple students from fulfilling their amazing potential.

Mission: Dailies provides high-impact data-based virtual tutoring with certified educators to support equitable access to quality education and support for all learners.

Jessica Shelley- Co-founder & CEO. She holds the highest level of decision-making authority as she will be directly responsible for overseeing internal team members and external district and school stakeholders about the effective implementation and execution of the required and necessary elements for grant compliance. Jessica currently oversees the marketing, sales, and curriculum teams, in addition to supporting the teacher contractors as well. 

Jessica Shelley- Her multiple graduate degrees in Curriculum and Instruction, Special Education, and Business Management and Leadership (in addition to being an actively certified educator with ESL and SpEd endorsements) informs the understanding that there are significant gaps in access to quality education. Add to that her background as a public school educator, Jessica has seen firsthand students who have historically been underrepresented and who may be from parts of society that have been marginalized and need additional support the most when it comes to being able to leverage education to get ahead. With this intense focus, Jessixa is well-positioned to support the LEAP project implementation to ultimately help Dailies support students that are struggling and may not have the resources to get ahead on their own. 

Supporting Team Members- Within alignment to the overall vision and mission of Dailies, the supporting team members will prioritize programmatic elements and updates as requested by the LEAP Project sprint timelines. Within the organization, there is alignment to the focus sprints as a whole, in which case compliance and support of LEAP initiatives will take priority when/if awarded.

Dailies supports PK-8 schools by providing high impact virtual tutoring in the areas of ELA and Math with certified teachers.

Our organization primarily seeks to address inequities to access to quality education for students. With rising teacher shortages, there are even less quality educators in school buildings and students are receiving subpar instruction on topics. Additionally, students who are in desperate need of additional intervention or who are classified from special populations, like special education and english language learners, have historically been underserved and are continuing to fall further behind. As a starting place, we want to address the specific need of students declining math and reading performance since those are the typical focuses of districts and schools to measure student learning progress and engagement. We believe that we will be able to support students in making significant educational gains through our unique personalized and scalable approach to teaching and learning. We want to bring this new educational model to fruition because we care about the success of our future generation and know that schools desperately need technological tools, powered by real educators, to help them scale effective solutions for their students.

Dailies will partner with schools nationwide to provide high impact virtual tutoring services to their students in the areas of ELA and Math.  Our teachers are all certified, committed teachers with classroom and virtual experience.  We will provide high quality, high-dosage tutoring to small groups based on the CCSS and/or relevant learning data shared by specific school sites. Students will meet with their virtual tutor (a certified teacher)  at least three times per week, for a minimum of 25 minutes each session.  Teachers will then share the data from each tutoring session with the students’ teachers and families, providing evidence of success and areas for continued improvement and focus for future sessions.  This data will drive the teachers’ planning and interventions with their students, while providing parents with actionable steps to further support their child’s learning from home. This idea will resolve several issues. First, it helps students who have holes in their education to have tailored tutoring on that subject to help them fill in the gaps from real certified teachers. Next, Dailies teachers will work with small groups which will allow them to tailor their lessons to each student instead of teaching to the middle. Additionally, parents will be looped into discussions about their child’s progress, further creating a support system around each child and creating a foundation of full transparency with all relevant stakeholders in the child’s educational journey. Finally, the data from the Dailies tutoring sessions can be used to track  the students’ progress, and will provide valuable information for the school, parents, and district over time and will be further used by stakeholders to improve the quality of interventions, access to additional supports, and external engagement to support student progress outside of the school day.

Foundational Research- best practices in education related to inclusion, class sizes, reporting, data-tracking

Formative Research- anecdotal records of student performance, user interviews with families in each of the programs

At the beginning of our organization, there was a lot of time spent researching best practices for the educational components of our organization. With considerations as to class size, class duration, engagement techniques, and even content base, this research laid the foundation for what has become our Dailies class structure. 

As we continued to grow we spent numerous hours interviewing our families asking questions about what they liked about the program, what stood out as being different than other experiences, what was missing from their perspective, and ultimately if they noticed educational progress with their child and if so, to what extent. 

Now that we are expanding into schools, we have been doing research by interviewing teachers and school leaders about the challenges they are facing and solutions they have already tried. As we have been having discussions, we have also been asking about elements of our program and how and if that would make a difference for their respective school sites. 

We are a very nimble team and consistently seek to improve and validate our program. If/when there are areas that need to be adjusted, we quickly take action to ensure not only the best user experience, but also that the decisions are based on strong educational, parental, and institutional research findings.

Now that we have preliminary anecdotal data about the effectiveness of our program when we are able to serve students outside of the traditional school system, we are ready to further our evidence base to include data about our effectiveness when partnering with schools. Because schools and districts are data-based decision-makers, we need to ensure that our solution not only meets the needs of the students but also provides the appropriate metrics and data points that are most useful for districts and school leaders. By improving our evidence base, we will not only provide more personalized learning data to schools, who will then use that to further support learning, but it also provides evidence to parents about their child's learning progress. As we seek to make an impact in briding the educational gaps between parents, schools, and students, we see this data and evidence base of our platform as being the universal understanding of student performance and continued need. 

1. What average percentage of growth in reading did students (PreK-5) participating in high-impact tutoring with Dailies achieve compared to students not participating in the same amount of time?
2. What average percentage of growth in math (PreK-5) did students participating in high-impact tutoring with Dailies achieve compared to students not participating in the same amount of time? 

Desired outputs would include data analysis to determine the average growth for students in each of the grades (PreK-5) in both math and reading, with conclusions being drawn about the overall effectiveness of the program for these populations of students. 

Additional data analysis and reporting about students from special populations that were also served (ELLs, Sped, etc.) would also be helpful to note across grade levels. 

Conducting user interviews from partner teachers and students about their impressions of the program and attitudes towards learning throughout the time period would also be helpful. 

Creating case studies for each grade level would also be desired if time allows. Example: 5th-grade female who was struggling with math and received educational support with Dailies

These outputs would help in a variety of ways!

First, we see the case studies as being a way to reach out to target families that may be hesitant to seek outside support for their children because there are so many learning options available. When families can see the impact that we have made with children similar to theirs then they may be more likely to seek support for their child.

Secondarily, the user interviews about attitudes that may have shifted during the time period that they were receiving services would also be helpful for qualifying the non-number-driven results from partnering with Dailies. There are many data points that can be used as quantitative evidence, however, the user interviews will also provide qualitative information to further inform purchasing decisions and overall impact. 

The specific data analysis elements about percentage growth for reading, math, and within special populations will be helpful to provide to school districts/schools that are looking for evidence-based solutions to mend learning gaps for their students. With validated data it will be much easier to get the attention of school leaders, in addition to providing a potential case study as to how we can replicate success at their campus. 

Overall, the outputs will be very helpful to support our vision for providing transparent and actionable data to both parents and schools. 

Desired short-term outcomes would be that we can utilize the data gathered to make adjustments to the curriculum if grade levels are showing drastic differences in growth for either or both reading and math.

Additionally, data from this project would also enable us to in the short term prioritize which courses should be built out first based on student needs within our learning application. 

Desired long-term outcomes would be a foundation of data-based tracking and encouragement around data-based decision-making as we pursue making a greater impact with school districts. We have data to reference as we meet with decision-makers, and thus further promote gathering additional data as we continue to scale. 

Additionally, this data will also provide insights into other programmatic variables that may need to be considered as we build custom curriculums for students with learning differences or from special populations.