Breakthrough Greater Boston

Breakthrough Greater Boston is a nonprofit that prepares low-income students for college while training future teachers through a Students Teaching Students model. Students join a ten-year program of academic support aimed at getting them to and through college, while Teaching Fellows lead classes and receive intensive classroom experience, expert training and one-on-one coaching. The organization works to close opportunity gaps and fight summer learning loss.

Psychologist and MacArthur Fellow Angela Duckworth founded the program in Cambridge in 1992. It expanded to Boston in 2013 and Somerville in 2018, and now serves up to 750 students and trains about 150 Teaching Fellows each year. The organization reports that its students gain about two months in math each summer, that 94 percent of graduating seniors over the past decade were admitted to college, and that more than 82 percent of alumni persist in college.

What to Know

• Applications are open for students, Teaching Fellows and Instructional Coaches.
• Over 90 percent of students improve their biology, chemistry and physics skills each summer.
• Students improve their reading level by an average of 1.8 months in six weeks.
• On average, two thirds of students show measurable growth in assertiveness and empathy.