More black, Latino and low-income students in North Texas could be better prepared for college, thanks to a new multi-million dollar investment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Two partnerships -- one involving Dallas ISD and one Educate Texas -- will receive nearly $8 million over the next five years under the Gates Foundation’s Networks for School Improvements program, part of a new initiative aimed at boosting graduation rates and college enrollment for black, Latino and low-income students.

The two North Texas grants are among 19 awarded in the initial class, from a pool of 532 applications.

Robert “Bob” Hughes, the director of K-12 education strategy for the Gates Foundation, said the goal is to focus on concrete, measurable achievement that can be monitored for progress and improvement so that successful models can be copied by others. A third-party research center will evaluate the efforts.

“We aim to support groups of schools to solve common problems that prevent students from succeeding,” Hughes said.

Dallas ISD’s partner, the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Learning, will receive a $7.4 million grant to work with the district to train teachers, instructional coaches and other educators on strategies for improving writing skills.

The work will center around six DISD high schools -- Carter, Kimball, W.T. White, Adamson, Wilmer Hutchins, and North Dallas -- and middle schools that feed into those schools: Spence, Kennedy-Curry, Atwell, Hector P. Garcia, Marsh and Zan Holmes.

Despite widely celebrated gains, DISD has flatlined in improving students’ writing skills, particularly in the southern part of the district where many African American students and children learning English struggle to catch up, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said.

Eight of the campuses taking part in the initiative are in the southern part of the district.

“Literacy is very important,” Hinojosa said. “If you know how to write, you will not only know how to read but you will be able to understand; you’ll be able to interpret; you’ll be able to communicate.”

DISD and the Institute for Learning’s efforts won’t be focused on trying newfangled instructional models, said the district’s chief academic officer Ivonne Durant.

Instead, the partnership will first do a “deep data dig” at each campus, to try and identify why students -- particularly English-language learners and black students -- begin to struggle. The interventions for students will be different from school to school, Durant said.

“We’re not really looking for anything that is huge, brand-new, out-of the box,” she said. “We want to look at what’s not happening for those students in those schools, why are the students not getting it at this particular grade level, and them move forward on helping them.”

The Institute for Learning has worked with DISD before, dating back to Hinojosa’s first tenure as the district’s superintendent. The two groups worked together for six years as part of Hinojosa’s "Dallas Achieves" reform plan, which was launched in 2005.

Educate Texas, a public-private initiative from the Communities Foundation of Texas, was awarded $500,000 to focus on improving math in about 10 area schools that have not yet been identified.

If a student misses high achievement in the middle school years, that can limit opportunities in high school, which in turn can impact how prepared a student is for college.

“We really see eighth grade math as a gatekeeper course,” said Kristin Kuhne, senior director of insights and analytics at Educate Texas. “If we can get that foundation set there so that those kids can go confidently and successfully into algebra II, it just unlocks a lot of other courses for them once they get to high school.”

The 15-month grant will fund Educate Texas’ work with the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas and Learning Forward, a membership association for educator professional development, to help schools identify where their specific weaknesses are in math and what strategies are best to address them. Kuhne said the goal is to develop the network program further for long-term work.

Another grant could impact North Texas students, as well. National charter school network KIPP was awarded nearly $500,000 to focus on college counselors in its high schools across 16 states. The charter operator -- which has schools in Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston -- opened its first area high school this month in Oak Cliff.

The Gates Foundation plans to invest $460 million in the Network for School Improvement initiative over the next few years. The foundation has long invested in education reform efforts with mixed results. A recent report by the Rand Corporation, for example, found that the Gates Foundation's efforts to improve teaching didn't achieve their goals for students.

It’s not the first time DISD has received financial backing from the Gates Foundation. Its personalized learning program was launched thanks to a Gates Foundation grant, and the district was awarded $3.77 million in 2009 to modernize its student data information system. Melinda Gates is a Dallas native, the valedictorian of Dallas’ Ursuline Academy in 1982.