Ford Secondary School Initiative
Printer-friendly versionThe Institute has been helping leaders at the Ford Foundation to surface a theory of philanthropy, design elements for a new initiative focused on more and better learning time for secondary school students, and define the Foundation’s approach to this work.
Our current work builds on a previous Ford grant that supported four convenings of leading scholars, teachers, district leaders, provider organizations, and funders, with the goal of developing recommendations for achieving and maintaining teaching quality in hard-to-staff schools. A key point that emerged was that teaching quality has a collective component in addition to individual teacher quality, which is the almost-exclusive focus of current education policy.
The Ford work has impacted policy, practice, and funding arenas – it has been picked up in the writings of education researchers, used to inform an educator professional development network, and added to the knowledge base and decision making of organizations ranging from the Donors Education Collaborative to corporate funders. We are currently working on an easy-to-access guide on the topic for parents and interested district constituents for the Schott Foundation. This work has evolved into Ford’s current focus on extended learning time.