About Reach

Pioneering innovation and preparing the next generation of teachers and leaders

Mission

Our mission is to help schools grow their own highly effective teachers and leaders, pursuing equity in underserved urban and rural communities. We also seek to advance the efficacy and adoption in higher education of inquiry-based instructional methods and job-embedded degree pathways.

Vision

Imagine a world where effort and merit, not money or connections, determine who gets ahead.

We seek to bring about a more equitable reality where each student has the support of highly effective and dedicated teachers, and where each teacher has the support of highly effective and dedicated school leaders, and where everyone has access to deeper learning and meaningful opportunities in their chosen local community.

950+

Educators trained

8

Degree & Certificate Programs

148

School & District

Partners

Reach began in 2006 with a simple but profound charge: reinvent teacher education. Within a year the Bay Area School of Enterprise (BASE) affiliated with Reach to launch its first teacher credential programs with 25 candidates. As a next step, BASE/Reach launched in 2009 its Instructional Leadership Academy for experienced teachers wishing to move into school administration. In 2011, Reach deepened its academic offerings with master’s degrees in teaching and leadership. In 2020, Reach incubated Oxford Teachers Academy, an innovative job-embedded bachelor’s degree program for full-time school staff and paraprofessionals seeking to become teachers. Reach in 2021 officially became Reach University, offering undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, and graduate degree programs for educators and leaders seeking a more equitable world.

Great teaching is the central obsession of every great school and university, and it’s the key to shifting student trajectories.

Inquiry-based methods in education, such as the Oxford tutorial, cultivate critical thinking, deeper learning, and higher quality teaching.

Job-embedded learning

generates exceptional outcomes by integrating theory & practice, and by expanding equity & access.

Technology must make education more student centered, affordable, accessible, convenient, and effective.

Innovation in education will arise from the needs of the workplace, where soon a job will lead to a credential or degree, instead of the other way around.

BELIEFS

Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

Reach graduates combine research and practice to take effective action in the service of educational equity. Towards this end, they are able to:

O1. Inquiry: Identify problems of practice, gather information, develop and execute an action plan, analyze results, reflect on implications for future practice.
O2. Equity Orientation: Take action to address situational and systemic inequity in education
O3. Integration into Practice: Apply that which they have learned and integrate it into their practice
O4. Collaboration: Interact around research problems and increase each other's knowledge of the research related to their projects.