Renaissance Education Foundation: A History of Empowering Students

The Renaissance Education Foundation, encompassing various educational initiatives, shares a common thread: a commitment to fostering growth, opportunity, and academic excellence. From its roots in addressing educational disparities to its modern focus on personalized learning and scholarship programs, the Renaissance movement in education strives to empower individuals and communities.

Origins and Core Values

The intent of The Renaissance Foundation is to make a significant difference in the lives of people in need, especially in the areas of education, human services and environment. Since its inception in 2000, The Renaissance Foundation has primarily invested in educational access and services for those with financial need. The Foundation awards grants to organizations that share the same core values of education, social justice, equity and inclusion, environmental justice, and human service. In the past, Renaissance has supported organizations that include College Possible, Earthjustice, Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), and many others. The Foundation generally funds programs in the Portland area but has funded some national/international programs as well.

Renaissance Youth Center

Renaissance was co-founded by Bervin Harris and Darren Quinlan to serve the Bronx's Morrisania neighborhood. Harris was a former recording artist with Capitol Records, while Quinlan was a former NCAA Division 1 college basketball player at St. Bonaventure.

In 2017, Rite Aid awarded Mr. Harris the Inaugural KIDCHAMP Award. In 2017, Congressman Jose Serrano and New York State Senator Jose Serrano honored Mr. Harris.

The Renaissance Youth Center has been involved in various community projects. In 2014, Renaissance's Youth Council spent eight hours painting Unity Park a pink salmon color.

Read also: Accessing Renaissance Platform

Renaissance Learning: From Basement to Global Impact

Renaissance (also known simply as Renaissance) is a software as a service and learning analytics company that makes Pre-K-12 educational software and adaptive assessments. The company was founded in 1986 by Judith and Terrance Paul after Judith developed Accelerated Reader, originally named Read Up!, in the basement of her home in Port Edwards, Wisconsin. Judith designed Accelerated Reader to encourage her children to read more books.

In June 2016, the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences in What Works Clearinghouse found Accelerated Reader to have mixed effects on comprehension for beginning readers. The company's programs have been criticized for potentially limiting a student's recreational reading to a list of books that fall in their book level, in order to accrue "points", and trivializing books and undermining reading by reducing it to a competitive game. Susan Straight in The New York Times says, "the passion and serendipity of choosing a book at the library based on the subject or the cover of the first page is nearly gone, as well as the excitement of reading a book simply for pleasure.

Advantage Learning Systems was renamed to Renaissance Learning in 2001, and over time we’ve added new solutions to our offering, including assessment and maths programmes.

Renaissance Scholars Program: Investing in Future Leaders

The Renaissance Foundation also initiated a business skills training program at Mercy Corps called the Entrepreneurial Leaders Program that is now a key staff development tool for their employees in countries around the world. The Foundation’s signature program, the Renaissance Scholars Program (RSP) was created in 2005. RSP focuses on providing renewable college scholarships to talented students with significant financial need who will be the first in their family to earn a bachelor’s degree. Since the beginning of the program, our scholars have achieved great success. Eighty-seven percent of Renaissance Scholars earn their bachelor’s degree within six years, and 89% have graduated overall since RSP’s inception. In comparison, the national college graduation rate for first-generation, low-income students is less than 22%.

The Renaissance Scholars Program is managed by a dedicated team, including:

Read also: Accelerating Student Growth

Diana: Director of Operations + Administration, has served in this role since the Foundation's inception in 2000.
Callie: Renaissance Scholars Program Manager, hired in February 2020, focuses on growing the number of scholars and building partnerships.
Charlotte: Special Projects Coordinator, joined RSP in early 2022, working on programs to support scholars and alumni.
Marissa: Scholarship Program Coordinator, started in the spring of 2025, serving as the primary point of contact for scholars.

Success Stories

Graduation season is wrapping up! We are so proud to see our current scholars earn their degrees and our new cohort beginning their college journeys! Pictured here is incoming scholar and graduate of POIC + Rosemary Anderson High School, Ajah Smith. She will major in Social Work at Portland State University. We look forward to seeing what you will accomplish! Welcome to our amazing new scholars! Congratulations Arian!

Meet Lexi Geampa, a 2025 College of Health HDFS graduate and this year’s undergraduate student speaker for the School of Human Development and Family Sciences graduation celebration! We are so proud to support first-gen graduates like Tanya!

Vanessa, a first-generation, low-income student, shared that college was a dream that she knew would only be obtainable if she had the means to cover her higher education fees. As a senior in high school, she focused more of her energy on applying to scholarships than colleges. She thanks Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, iMentor’s Amplify Scholarship Program, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and The Renaissance Foundation.

Ginelle is excited to announce that she has officially graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in Film & Television with a minor in the Business of Entertainment, Media and Technology.

Renaissance Academies: Nurturing Gifted Minds

Renaissance Highly Gifted Academies are designed to provide highly gifted, elementary and middle school students unique educational opportunities. Deer Valley is proud to provide Renaissance at four of our campuses: Canyon Springs (2-8), Highland Lakes (1-8), Las Brisas (2-6), and Hillcrest Middle School (7-8). Renaissance Academies provide rigorous learning experiences that address the individual needs of gifted students. All Renaissance students acquire a solid foundation in the content areas of mathematics, language and communication arts, social studies, science, and technology literacy. The Renaissance program is founded on enriched interdisciplinary studies, academic depth and complexity, and critical and creative thinking. Use technology as productivity, creativity, communication, and collaboration tool.

Read also: Curriculum in the Renaissance

Renaissance Highly Gifted Academies are designed for high-achieving, highly gifted students. Interpersonal Communication - Communication between home and school is a key component of student success. Parents and students are encouraged to approach the teacher with concerns and/or questions as they arise. Each Renaissance teacher will utilize their preferred communication tool to promote a positive learning environment. Classroom assignments within a Renaissance environment are designed to promote higher levels of critical thinking and academic discourse. Renaissance students complete a multitude of projects each year they participate in the program. Assignments are expected to be completed in a timely manner. Submitted assignments should reflect evidence of student effort in producing quality work. Students are expected to demonstrate academic integrity in all classes. All assignments should reflect students’ personal level of knowledge and academic ability. Renaissance is an application-based program for students requiring rapid acceleration. Parents must provide their own transportation if they do not live within the individual school's boundary.

Renaissance Academy: A Culture of Continuous Improvement

The sense of vision and purpose that has enabled Renaissance Academy to nurture the kind of campus culture that it has is clearly a strength of the school. All stakeholders understand, support, and feel ownership of the school’s mission and vision because they all had a direct stake in defining and operationalizing the mission and vision statements as well as the school objectives and beliefs. The school’s mission and vision has brought about a culture of high expectations which promotes student learning while keeping students, staff, the administration, and board motivated, committed and hardworking.

Another of Renaissance Academy’s greatest strengths is the clear commitment that all stakeholders have toward continuous school improvement. At Renaissance, school improvement is a process that is embedded in everything that is done at the school. Students, staff, the administration, parents, and the board are always striving to find areas in which the school can improve and when those areas are identified, all stakeholders work together as a team to overcome any hurdles and face any challenges that are standing in the way of further progress and school improvement.

Renaissance Academy: Islamic Education

A strong foundation in Islamic Studies is at the heart of Renaissance Academy’s mission. Our approach to the teaching of Islamic Studies is based on the belief that students should come to love Islam, learn Islam and live Islam. As students learn what it means to fully live a practicing Islamic lifestyle, the manner of teaching is done in a way to ensure that they will want to live such a lifestyle. Students come to have an in depth understanding of the Seerah of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as well as the history of the other Prophets (peace be upon all of them) and the Companions and early generations of Muslims in a way that makes them see them as role models to emulate. In addition they are taught the basic rules of Hadith, Fiqh, and Aqeedah.

Qur’anic studies are an important element of our curriculum from the earliest grades. In Pre-Kindergarten, students begin memorizing many of the short chapters of the Qur’an and are taught to understand the wisdom, beauty, and magnificence of the Book. As they grow older, students continue memorizing chapters as they also study the meanings and learn extensive Qur’anic vocabulary. A strong focus is placed on helping the students understand the relevance of the Qur’an to their lives by helping them understand its meanings and the principles and values that it promotes. Focus is also placed from a very young age on the correct pronunciation and reading of the Qur’an. By the time students enter middle school, they should have mastered all the rules of Tajweed so that they read correctly.

In the Pre-Kindergarten program, students are spoken to in Arabic and are made to feel comfortable understanding and speaking simple everyday conversational Arabic. Stress is placed on correct pronunciation of the letters and words. In Kindergarten and 1st Grade, students are introduced to the alphabet and become accustomed to reading and writing in Arabic.

Renaissance Academy in Austin

Renaissance Academy is a Full time Islamic school serving the Austin area since 2007. We provide Pre-k through High School programs with a100% graduation rate and our graduates attend Tier 1 colleges such as UC Berkeley, UT Austin, and Texas A&M. The curriculum atRenaissance Academy supports Advanced Placement Program (AP) Courses. We use the latest technology for class instruction such as digitalsmartboards, projectors, HD cameras, and laptop instruction enabling onsite as well as virtual learning.

The Historical Context of Renaissance Education

Education in the Renaissance centered around a rediscovery of lost ideas leading to a rebirth of civilization. Prior to the age of exploration, exploding into life after Columbus’s westward journey across the Atlantic in 1492, a different exploration of an unknown world occurred after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. For well over a millennium, the Byzantine empire was the eastern stronghold of Christendom, paralleling the Roman church in the west. The Ottomans with superior military technology breached the walls of the famous imperial capital, simultaneously ending the Medieval assumption that Christendom was unassailable. Byzantine scholars seeking to protect the vast stores of manuscripts housed in Constantinople emigrated to Northern Italy, bringing with them Greek texts long forgotten in the west.

A new form of humanism was gaining traction in the north of Italy, reacting to the calamities of the late Middle Ages. The black plague decimated perhaps a third of Europe’s population, exacerbated by poverty and famine. The fracturing of Roman Catholic hegemony through internal warfare, such as the war of the Roses in England or the hundred years war between England and France, brought an end to an economically, politically and religiously unified Europe.

The Role of Universities

Yet a number of institutions carried over from the heights of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, chief among them the universities. Italian universities such as Bologna, Padua, Rome and Turin shared a history with the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. The scholasticism that flourished in the medieval universities instigated a tireless search for classic texts, as scholars sought to reconcile theology and philosophy through dialectical reasoning.

Humanism and Classical Texts

Humanism, the study of classical antiquity, offered a new vision by looking to the past. The texts brought to Northern Italy after the fall of Constantinople added fuel, in the form of Greek classical texts, to the fire of the emerging humanism. Works by Aristotle and Plato, long forgotten in the west, arrived in Venice and Florence in the hands of Byzantine scholars. Soon a concerted effort to translate Greek texts into Latin became a project of primary importance.

Renaissance education inherited a ready-made structure developed in the middle ages. The humanist ideal of rebirthing civilization by drawing upon classical antiquity was happily situated within this educational structure. Today, the classical Christian school movement has likewise drawn upon the very same structure. The liberal arts were comprised of the trivium and quadrivium.

The Trivium: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric

Grammar was the initial art of the trivium. Not only were the parts of speech learned, but students would also theorize about the nature of language and how thoughts were shaped through the use of words. The study of Latin and Greek were essential to the Renaissance enterprise, especially since both ancient languages were not spoken in the West. Young scholars would learn these languages in order to interact directly with the rediscovered manuscripts from the East, written predominantly in Greek.

Students learned how to reason carefully by acquiring skills in logic. The dialectical method drew opposing viewpoints together in order to establish the truth of statements. Aristotle reigned supreme, his theory of syllogism providing powerful tools to thinkers of all eras by carefully defining premises and conclusions by way of deduction. Several of Aristotle’s works were already known during the Middle Ages, but texts from Constantinople were quickly translated into Latin and formed the new logic (logica nova).

The most revolutionary of the arts in the Renaissance was rhetoric. The scholastic theology of the Middle Ages was mired in dialectic thought that was beholden to rigid dogmas. Even more important than the new logic were the rhetorical texts discovered in the early renaissance: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Brutus’s Orator. The study of rhetoric not only entailed acquiring skill in expression, but also the study of examples of rhetorical skill, what we might call profane literature. Quintilian in particular focused attention on the rhetorical ideal of the good man speaking well. Notions of the good man coincided with the emerging humanism of the time. In the face of the fall of society, rhetoric provided a set of concepts to call individuals to noble civic duty.

Impact on Society

If western society was going to survive the fall of the Christendom of the middle ages, a renewal of educational goals was necessary. This renewal set in motion a reconsideration of human beings as self-directed individuals capable of setting the course of society through their own moral agency. In some ways this was a challenge to the church and to God, yet in other ways it refined conceptions of church, God and theology. Martin Luther, for instance, concluded that Aristotle was the foundation upon which the authoritarian doctrine of the Roman church was based. Only through removing Aristotelian concepts of the soul and ethics does one properly encounter the soul and ethics of scripture. However, in challenging these conceptions, Luther challenged the authority of the church, leading to a break with the Roman church and a broader reformation of Christianity throughout Europe. Francis Bacon would likewise challenge Aristotelian notions of deductive reasoning based on syllogisms, formulating a new scientific method around induction. Beginning with facts observed through sense perception, the scientist derives general truths through the observation of nature. Revolutions in society impacted not only theology and science, but economics, politics among other areas of knowledge.

A Modern Educational Renaissance

Society is due for a rebirth today, and perhaps is observing the sparks of one in an educational renaissance that parallels that of Italy and broader Europe in the 15th century. In her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Dorothy Sayers proposes a return to an old form of education as a mean of accomplishing renewal today. This statement lays out three important ideas. First, the success of a free, democratic society depends upon the quality of education its people receive. Publishing her article in 1947, Sayers would have been all too aware of the dangers of the far-right authoritarianism of Nazi Germany as well as the emerging threat of authoritarian communism in the Soviet Union at the outset of the Cold War. However, the most significant threat to democracy was not fascism or Marxism in foreign lands, but the loss of the liberal arts tradition within our own lands. This leads to Sayers’ second point, that the “wheel of progress” had made certain unfulfilled promises. Progressivist educational theory almost completely took over schools in earnest during the late 1800s, although Sayers is correct that progressive educational thought had been around since Locke and Rousseau. The cultural and moral relativism of the progressive program eroded a sense of truth residing outside the individual. Instead, the internal motivations of the child took on central importance, guided by insights in the fields of psychology and sociology. Education took on more utilitarian aims, forsaking the long-held notion that education imparts the norms and ideals of society.

The claim has been made that Western civilization has fallen. Rod Dreher for instance traces a centuries-long decline of Western society through key revolutions. In his book The Benedict Option, he considers how we are seeing a cultural decline today that parallels the decline of Roman culture in the 6th century. Dreher looks to the past in how Benedict formed intentional communities to preserve the heart of Christian culture and to weather the fall of Western society. Similarly, we can look to the past to identify educational theories, methods and practices that will enable us to rebuild and renew Western civilization. Yet for several decades now there has been a growing sense that educational reform is needed and in some sectors already occurring. Add this to the growing literature on neuroscience and educational psychology. We find ourselves at the very same intersection Renaissance intellectuals found themselves: the recovery of that which was long-forgotten in a context of burgeoning intellectual pursuit.

Here at Renaissance, we’ve been accelerating learning for all for over 30 years. Although we’re a global business now, we’re actually very proud of our humble beginnings. It all began back in 1984. Judi Paul, a mother in Port Edwards, Wisconsin, just wanted her four children to love reading as much as she did. Reading had always been a source of joy for her, but she was saddened to see that her children didn’t seem to share the same passion. In fact, she realised, they hadn’t even read the classic novels that she’d loved so much at school. And so one afternoon in 1984, she curated a list of her favourite classic novels, and assigned them all a points value based on their difficulty and length. And to ensure that her children were comprehending what they were reading, Judi wrote multiple-choice questions for each novel, rewarding her children when they answered the questions correctly. Starting to sound familiar? Judi’s new creation worked a treat with her children! In fact, word of its success quickly spread to a nearby school, St. Mary’s Our Lady Queen of Heaven Catholic School. Teachers there were so impressed by the programme that they offered to pay for it!

“My students loved gobbling up book after book.” Lynda Borgen, a teacher at St. Mary’s Our Lady Queen of Heaven Catholic School, was one of the first teachers to use this new programme. “It gave each one of them a sense of accomplishment when they would finish reading something and pass their Accelerated Reader quiz. Judi and Terri worked closely with Lynda and the other teachers at the school, and they’d tweak the programme according to the feedback they received as they regularly visited. The teachers loved being able to gauge their students’ comprehension and keep track of what they were reading. Word quickly spread to the other schools in the surrounding area. Little did Judi know that 35 years later, Accelerated Reader would be used by millions of students across the globe. Including, in fact, Lynda’s grandson, using it at the same school, since renamed, in Wisconsin Rapids!

Renaissance Learning: Acquisitions and Growth

Renaissance Learning to Merge With AlphaSmart (2005)
Renaissance Learning Is Sold to Hellman & Friedman for $1.1 Billion (2014)
Google Capital Invests $40M In Learning Analytics Firm Renaissance Learning At $1B Valuation (2014)
Renaissance Learning Acquires UClass (2015)
Renaissance Acquired by Francisco Partners, and New CEO Takes Helm
Schoolzilla Acquired by Renaissance (2019)
Renaissance Learning to Acquire Nearpod in Blockbuster $650M All-Cash Deal (2021)
Edtech: Lalilo racheté par le groupe américain renaissance

tags: #renaissance #education #foundation #history