SESSIONS & SPEAKERS

How do the power dynamics of the grantmaking role, combined with the class and race privileges many of us possess, shape our work—and what thoughtful practices should we adopt regarding power and privilege? This seminar offers a critical examination of the structures and processes of education philanthropy, with particular consideration to identifying personal professional practices as well as organizational strategies to bridge the gulf between the world of education philanthropy and the communities we hope to serve. Together, we will consider how to move from naming equity as a goal of our work to putting practices that promote equity at the center of how we work.

Has post-Katrina rebuilding resulted in better opportunities and outcomes for students in New Orleans schools—and what lessons have we learned to drive school change in the years to come? Through an examination of educational reform efforts in the city during the past five years, this seminar explores key school change issues: strategies for teacher training, recruitment, retention and accountability; managing high-functioning schools in multi-layered systems; parent, youth and community involvement in decision-making ; options for the fiscal support of high-quality schools; and governance issues concerning state/local control of public schools. Together, we will explore points of consensus and points of dissension, outlining next steps to increase student success in New Orleans.

Debate continues in the United States as to whether teachers' unions help or hinder efforts to improve K-12 education. But to achieve real reform, we need to reframe the debate to ask: "How can teachers' unions most effectively work with districts and other partners in improving education?" Drawing on examples of unions playing a positive role in education change, this session will engage the participants in charting a course that supports unions, school districts and community partners to work together for their ultimate common interest: improving teaching and learning in public K-12 education.

Nonprofit organizations play a critical role in advancing equitable education reform, but too often they are limited by their capacity to reflect on whether and how they are making progress toward that goal. This session will present the highlights from the newly published monograph Measuring the Immeasurable: Lessons for Building Grantee Capacity to Evaluate Hard-to-Assess Efforts. Hear from the funder, an evaluator and a grantee about how this approach to evaluation capacity building, implemented using a newly developed tool, enables grantee organizations to reflect on and improve their work.

About half the achievement gap in school can be attributed to gaps already evident at kindergarten entry. Improving early childhood program quality is critical to addressing disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes. States and communities are investing in initiatives to strengthen their early learning systems, with Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) as a key policy lever. This session will explore how QRIS can strengthen early learning system components, improve early learning programs and be developed within a P-3 framework to promote coherent transitions between early learning and elementary settings.

In response to recent philanthropic and government initiatives calling for increases in our nation's postsecondary graduation rates, it's critical to understand what role funders can have in identifying and accelerating strategies that result in dramatically higher graduation rates. This session explores how P-16 collaboratives in El Paso and New York City have leveraged institution and funder partnerships to align education systems, resulting in doubling or near-doubling of college completion rates. The session also provides insight on the principles of concerted action initiatives, and how funders can catalyze similar collaboratives to replicate this success in more communities.

Despite bold investments in state, district and school reform initiatives, 30,000 schools are failing to meet their annual achievement targets. While it is clear that traditional reform strategies have not been sufficient, research suggests that school transformation models that incorporate both school and community based strategies show great promise.   Join foundation and education leaders to discuss investing in expanded learning opportunities as a transformation strategy.

How can establishing common goals for our investments in student learning–both in- and out-of-school–as well as developing measurement tools and data collection systems, increase collaboration and accountability? In this session, non-profit intermediaries from Pittsburgh and Boston will address this critical question by discussing examples of coordinated local efforts to develop youth outcome frameworks. They will share lessons about their stakeholder engagement and planning processes; early application and anticipated uses of the outcomes frameworks by the public and by funders; and their respective education and service delivery partners.

This session highlights efforts to promote strategic uses of data and evidence to inform policy and practice in the critical areas of college readiness and teacher effectiveness. The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project improves the quality of information about teaching effectiveness available to education professionals—allowing for more fair and reliable systems for teacher observation and professional development. The Strategic Data Project (SDP) partners with education agencies to incorporate high quality research methods and data analysis in strategic management and policy decisions. Hear from the funders, researchers and school leaders about lessons learned from these projects.

Information coming soon.

In April of 2010, Grantmakers for Education held “Innovation in Education, Redesigning the Delivery System of Education in America,” a new kind of convening. Using future-forecasting and systems design processes, the meeting guided education philanthropists through development of a shared vision for transforming U.S. education to better meet the needs of twenty-first-century learners. Participating grantmakers identified strategic leverage points for systemic transformation and formed action groups around those elements. This session will cover both the innovation process for the original convening and the follow-up cross-organizational work that is underway.

Latinos are the fastest growing minority population in the U.S., and they have the highest drop-out rates. Even when Latinos succeed in high school and enter college in STEM fields, one in three drop out the first year. At the same time, a growing number of STEM jobs are going unfilled because of a lack of qualified workers. This session explores how a community college in New York City is bridging this gap using a collaborative model to ensure Latino students stay on track to graduate in STEM majors and enter careers that will help America compete in the world’s economy.

Smart, strategic, and forward-thinking philanthropic investments have had a significant impact in cultivating the landscape for deep education reform. Join this moderated “fishbowl” conversation to learn more about how investments in policy change, coalition-building, advocacy and on-the-ground “proof points” can create the political and policy climates needed for states to move quickly and effectively toward real reform. Foundation leaders and education reformers from Delaware and Tennessee will discuss the role that philanthropy played in positioning those states as early Race to the Top winners, and the role that philanthropy can continue to play to ensure quality results.

Using a case-study approach and hypothetical scenarios, this session will engage participants in a discussion of funders’ capacity to bring educators and policymakers together to improve the quality of the teaching workforce. The scenarios feature three family foundations that have supported the development of a new statewide model for evaluating teachers in underperforming schools. When one of the state’s poorest performing high schools fires all of its teachers, teachers unions and district leaders across the state become polarized, and the new evaluation system is in jeopardy of being abandoned.

Foundation efforts to improve after-school opportunities generally focus on strengthening individual program providers. But often overlooked are strategies that improve entire city-level systems to coordinate and support after-school programs. A new, two-year, five-city study by the RAND Corporation finds that such efforts can improve both access and quality, particularly when they leverage the power of data collection. This session will include perspectives of a funder, a researcher and a city leader to explore how data can be used to drive improvement of citywide after-school systems.

ESEA reauthorization will shape education for a decade, making this a critical moment to examine federal policy trends and assess their impact on education philanthropy and on America’s most vulnerable children. This session explores the pros and cons of the Administration’s competitive funding frame, as in Race to the Top; the new federal role in innovations, as in i3 Funds; and newly proposed conditions on Title I. The discussion will focus on ways grantmakers can collaborate and leverage resources in the current policy climate to ensure that historically disadvantaged children are not left behind.

This session will explore the challenges and successes of reshaping education programs in struggling rural communities, with a focus on the powerful impact that investing in nontraditional education options can have on education outcomes. Drawing on examples of programs that are dramatically shifting poor student performance, transforming likely dropouts into college-bound graduates, the audience will engage in an interactive discussion about rural implementation of diverse improvement strategies: charter schools, increased parental involvement, improved after-school options, leadership support in public schools and incentive-based performance.

Information coming soon.

"Civil Rights and education" evokes historical images of litigation, epic marches and barred school house doors. But today, dysfunctional schools and classrooms, ineffective teaching, standards and assessments unaligned with college or careers, lack of transparent P-16 education data, and a dearth of academic acceleration strategies bar low-income students and students of color from realizing their potential. This session focuses on twenty-first century advocacy, examining how the Campaign for High School Equity and its partner organizations (NCLR, NUL, NIEA, LULAC, SEARAC, NAACP, AEE, MALDEF, NALEO & LCCR) are working to guarantee that federal and state education policies provide all students the opportunity to excel.

Join the conversation as panelists share their perspectives and engage the audience in an examination of how funders can improve access to quality summer learning programs. Discuss grantmaking strategies that are catalytic and focus on building community-wide systems of support for summer learning. Find out how school districts are transforming outdated models of summer school and leveraging additional resources from other public agencies and community organizations. Learn how strategic investment in efforts to align and coordinate existing resources can offer exciting new opportunities for young people during a time of budget cuts.

How can out-of-school (OST) programs drive students’ achievement and interest in STEM, fostering the skills they need in school and the engagement to pursue STEM careers—while concurrently improving the K-12 science teacher pipeline? This session explores how OST and STEM grantmakers can work in aligned ways to meet these strategic goals. Showcased initiatives focus on using OST as a platform for strengthening and broadening the K-12 science teacher pipeline; integrating science content into youth development-focused OST programs at scale; and engaging underserved students in rigorous OST science programs that can launch them on the path to STEM careers.

With education reform efforts populated by a thousand “precious pilots” but very few large educational brands, grantmakers are more aware than ever that we will not achieve large scale impact until we are more thoughtful and capable in scaling up successful efforts and organizations. In this session, we will explore what it means to go to scale, the significance of a business model and its relationship to market forces, and which tactical elements grantmakers need to consider as they invest in scaling up.

Despite widespread awareness among grantmakers of the economic, educational and social benefits of high-quality pre-kindergarten, many states and communities still face challenges in linking access, quality and alignment, the key building blocks fo ensuring a Pre-K program will have large-scale impact. This session will illuminate effective strategies for creating successful Pre-K programs, with presenters each addressing one of these three building blocks. Together, we will explore the question of what role the federal government should take to help build effective early childhood education systems.

Information coming soon.

What must we do to achieve real and sustained change when it comes to persistent racial disparities in education? One key approach is examining how these disparities are perpetuated through structural racism, which is embedded in historical and contemporary public policies, institutional practices and cultural representations—often in ways that may appear race-neutral. This session will provide a framework to deepen understanding of structural racism, drawing on examples of a northwestern statewide afterschool network and a southeastern school district, which both use innovative strategies to address equity in education outcomes.

A significant portion of American college students are educated at minority-serving institutions (MSIs), which include hundreds of historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions and tribal colleges and universities. MSIs have the potential to play an integral role in reaching higher education completion goals set forth by the Obama administration. But although MSIs provide empowering environments for students, many of whom are low-income and first-generation to attend college, these schools face chronic underfunding and other serious challenges. Learn from a leading education foundation that supports MSIs, a noted MSI expert, and the heads of two White House Initiatives—one on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the other on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans—about effective strategies for working with MSIs to improve postsecondary attainment rates.

For students in low-performing schools, educational equity is not a theoretical proposition. It is a daily concern. The urgent need for reform has led young people to generate changes in policy and practice in their districts and states and, with the emerging Alliance for Educational Justice, at the federal level as well. Learn from an organizer, an official from the US Department of Education, and a funder about how youth organizing serves as a lever for reform and for the development of young people as active learners.

Information coming soon.

Education grantmakers are increasingly eager to engage with federal initiatives, particularly given the convergence of federal education efforts ranging from ESEA reauthorization to incentivizing the development of common standards to promoting development of the next generation student assessments. This interactive session explores how funders are collaborating, with each other and with grantees, to leverage federal opportunities. Using the model of recent strategic alignment and collaboration by the Hewlett, Ford, Sandler and Nellie Mae Foundations to support a national assessment consortia that applied for $350 million in federal funds, we will examine the impact of philanthropic partnerships that engage with federal funding efforts.

In financially tough times, effective grantmakers must leverage private sector resources to achieve breakthrough results. Advocacy and public policy grants are “upstream investments” that can leverage broader systemic change, yet advocacy has long been considered too hard to measure. This session offers funders interested in advocacy evaluation a hands-on understanding of advocacy evaluation design through case studies that will be useful, manageable, and resource-efficient.

An unprecedented level of activity is focused on turning around the nation’s lowest performing schools – but little is known on how do this effectively at scale. Grantmakers are already committed to issues critical to turnaround efforts, including: improving the quality of teaching, building leadership capacity, changing systemic conditions and sharing knowledge. This session will bring together the advice and perspective of foundation, state, district, and other turnaround leaders, along with the findings of a new FSG study, to help foundations leverage these efforts to produce the greatest benefit for the most disadvantaged students.

Collaboration and innovation must be key ingredients in an effective equity change agenda focused on closing the achievement gap among Black male students. In this session, members of the Black Male Donor Collaborative (BMDC), who work in partnership with leading researchers in urban education, will discuss research-driven policy recommendations dedicated to closing this academic achievement gap. Through a dynamic participant-exercise, attendees will gain the insight and energy needed to make effective grants, leverage resources and influence a change agenda to eliminate the academic inequities among Black males.

One in five K-12 students attend a rural school—where changing populations, inadequate resources, and staffing needs present very different challenges. Visit a rural Gulf school and see firsthand how concerns about equity and excellence play out in rural contexts, and what funders can do to support policies and practices that serve rural learners.

The cost for the tour is an additional $40 per person. Please register in advance to attend.