Posse Foundation
Posse has a simple mission: create social supports at top colleges to reduce dropout rates among students from poor urban neighborhoods. Although many elite colleges are anxious to have low-income Read more…
Refine Search Results
Search Results for:
New Schools for New Orleans
As school reformers surveyed the wreckage after Hurricane Katrina closed New Orleans schools for six months, they resolved to grab the opportunity to completely remake that city’s disastrously failed education Read more…
The Mind Trust
Some of the most successful school-reform efforts today are driven by regional nonprofits with broad mandates to improve teaching, train principals, support school founders, and incubate launches of new charter Read more…
Blended Learning Schools
Marrying K-12 education with the technology revolution has been a slow and uneven process, with many dead ends. Halfway through the first decade of the new millennium, however, some educators Read more…
University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform
A criticism of the many schools of education in the United States is that they are much too wedded to the prevailing systems that have consistently underperformed. So it was Read more…
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
In the mid-2000s, state-level associations created to serve, improve, and defend charter schools were beginning to become very savvy and active in many parts of the country. A group of Read more…
Charter School Growth Fund
In 2005, as it was becoming clear that charter schools could produce powerful results among previously ill-served students, funders turned to the imperative of increasing the number of these effective Read more…
Math for America
James Simons is a walking advertisement for the power of math. The former chairman of the mathematics department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook got an Read more…
Opening University Offerings to the World
In 2001, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that for $100 million his university could put every one of Read more…
Pulling Talented Leaders into Education
“We need to change public education from a tired, government monopoly to a high-performing public enterprise. To do that you need better people in management and governance,” argues major education Read more…
Inspired Schooling
Seeing that “factory-style” public schools were having poor results, teacher Dan Scoggin went looking for an alternative. He became convinced that an emphasis on character development, linked to a demanding Read more…
Broad Prizes
The $1 million Broad Prize, the largest K-12 education award in the country, was created in 2002 to reward urban public-school districts that “demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement Read more…
Hewlett and Packard Families Make Stanford a Powerhouse
In 2001, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation made an historic announcement that it would be donating $400 million to Stanford University to reinforce its academic programs. This was just Read more…
Largest Gift in History to a College
In 2001, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of chip manufacturer Intel and author of many scientific papers and patents on semiconductors, gave the California Institute of Technology a massive $600 million Read more…
New Leaders for New Schools
In 2000, a group of students at the Harvard Business School became finalists in its annual business-plan contest with a proposal for a new organization to train principals. Later that Read more…
Don Fisher Takes KIPP Nationwide
For education-reform advocates, the KIPP Schools are among the greatest successes of recent history. Started in 1994 by David Levin and Mike Feinberg, two teachers fresh from Teach For America Read more…
Melding Work and High School via Cristo Rey
For years, venture capitalist B. J. Cassin gave scholarships to inner-city kids; then he wanted to help on a wider scale. In 2000 he and his daughter visited Chicago to Read more…
Reading in Mississippi
After selling his company Netscape, Jim Barksdale and his wife, Sally, gave the largest gift ever to improve literacy, $100 million, to start the Barksdale Reading Institute at the University Read more…
Center for Research on Education Outcomes
Multi-year foundation funding totaling $1.25 million allowed the creation of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at the University of Rochester in 1999. It was guided by one Read more…
Jubilee Schools
When he became Catholic bishop of Memphis, Tennessee, says Terry Steib, “I was shocked that our schools were closing. I thought, ‘That’s not the church’s way.’” In 1999 he announced Read more…