Posted on 11th November 2009
The Ford Foundation last week announced a new $100m (£60m) initiative to ‘transform’ secondary education in urban schools across the country, saying it wants to help build the conditions and resources required to provide a great education to public school students.
The Ford initiative will invest in reforms and reformers whose visions of a just and fair public schooling system can galvanize all the players—parents, students, teachers, and community leaders, as well as scholars and policy experts.The seven-year, seven-city initiative will fund projects that address four basic elements of school infrastructure believed to have a decisive impact on the quality of education offered to the nation's most vulnerable student populations, namely: sufficient and equitable school financing, quality teaching, additional and more useful learning time, and meaningful accountability.
“Improving our schools, and giving the most vulnerable young people real educational opportunities, benefits all of us,” said Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas. “With this initiative we want to shake up the conversations surrounding school reform and help spur some truly imaginative thinking and partnerships.”
Early grants from the initiative include:
- American Institutes for Research: to develop new finance models to ensure that funds are allocated and dispensed in fair and equitable ways that reflect the individual needs of school districts and their students.
- Communities for Public Education Reform: a large-scale public engagement collaborative managed by Public Interest Projects that seeks to build grassroots support for improvements in teacher quality, fair and adequate finance, and stronger accountability.
- Generation Schools: to refine and test their extended day model to allow for greater learning opportunities and encourage teacher collaboration.
Dr. Jeannie Oakes, director of educational opportunity and scholarship at Ford, said the foundation “does not presume to have the answers, but believes that effective solutions are far more likely when all the stakeholders come together rather than competing to push narrow special interests”.
