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Vol. 35 No. 2 - Winter 04-05:
Foundation and Corporate Support
Spencer Foundation
Two UM Education School professors involved in very different research activities received important help from the Spencer Foundation. Professor Lesley Rex
, a former high school teacher and teacher educator, became an educational researcher to get answers to important questions such as: How can white middle-class teachers successfully reach out to low achieving under served students of color? Through her research, she has illustrated how, with a willingness to be self-aware and to talk openly about race, a motivated teacher can cross daunting racial and cultural barriers.
“With this study, I am addressing the critical need for applicable insights into how to prepare white teachers to teach students unlike themselves,” Rex writes. Government statistics, she notes, indicate that teaching remains primarily a white woman’s profession; yet, there is little research about white teachers in black classrooms—particularly in high schools. A $35,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation funded Rex’s research, which included working with a graduate student. Grateful for the funding, Rex points out that her study was extremely time-intensive. “I need to be in classrooms talking to students over time and see on a day-to-day basis how things develop,” she says.
For her colleague Roger Goddard
The speaker program goes hand in hand with another initiative that Goddard helped launch: a new dual master’s in business administration and educational studies. Goddard knows of only one other university, Stanford, offering such a degree, and he says that the new master’s program is drawing many applicants from around the country. Persons getting the degree might assume such positions as assistant superintendent of finance or director of business management. The ripple effect of the speaker program will help define a “scholarly agenda” for the new combined program, Goddard says.
Since it began making grants in 1971, the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation has funded approximately $250 million on research aimed at improving education around the world. The foundation notes that it is “especially interested in groundbreaking and creative ideas in research.” Spencer’s founder, Lyle Spencer, established an educational publishing company, Science Research Associates (SRA), which provided the basis of his wealth and ultimately made possible the creation of the Spencer Foundation. Charles Dollard, Spencer’s friend and one of the original directors of the foundation, stated, “Lyle had a passionate belief in education as the modus vivendi of a democratic society.”
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Who should attend college? It’s a personal question, yes, but the answer can affect everything from voting patterns to earning potential. Thanks to a pair of grants from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, U-M Education School Professor John Burkhardt
“The Kellogg Foundation funded us to develop a set of materials that would guide community-based discussions about higher ed purposes and the question of who should go to college,” explains Burkhardt. “With their money, we’ve been organizing dialogues in communities around Michigan and training moderators.” High-level Michigan policy makers are involved with the study, which started in fall 2004, and will target several regions.
A former administrator with the Battle Creek–based Kellogg Foundation, Burkhardt points out that the research project (supported in part by the two grants, which total almost $240,000) is very much in keeping with the foundation’s tradition. “The Kellogg Foundation has a long history of supporting projects that ensure that community voices are reflected in public decisions and public policy,” says Burkhardt. Cereal industry pioneer Will Keith Kellogg established the foundation in 1930. The foundation has continuously focused on building the capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions to solve their own problems.
W. T. Grant Foundation
A foundation that values young people allowed UM Education School Professors Elizabeth Moje
Although educators have long known that mastery of reading and writing is crucial to academic success, less is understood about how students approach those activities, both in and out of school. Elizabeth Moje wants to give educators a picture that has both depth and breadth. Selected as a William T. Grant Faculty Scholar, she’s in the fifth and final year of a $290,000 research effort that encompasses predominantly Latino adolescents in southwest Detroit.
“My goal is to understand more broadly than one typically does in education research where, when, how, why, and what youth read and write,” says Moje. With that end in mind, she and a team of researchers observed hundreds of middle school students in numerous classes, interviewed 60 of them, and followed 15 students over five years.
She wants to use this understanding as a springboard for action. Moje cites published research showing that youth feel empowered if they use their reading and writing skills to “take some sort of helpful action in the world.” She and her researchers are currently engaged with several youth in preparing a photo essay on “life for young people in Detroit”. We envision future work making a video from the photo essay. The work will also evolve into a book that may be co-authored with the youth.”
Explaining the opportunity her grant funding provides, Moje comments, ”Grants such as this are important for at least three reasons: First, this work focuses on adolescents and, until recently, few funding agencies have been interested in the learning and social lives of adolescents. Most teachers, administrators, and other people who work with youth are not able to study young people closely in multiple contexts. The findings of my work allow me to develop strategies and practices that school and community-based people can use in teaching and youth work.
Second, the W.T. Grant Faculty Scholar Award allows for longitudinal research that examines youth development over time. Few studies can achieve the depth and breadth of understanding that can be achieved in a five-year sustained program of research.
“Third, the Faculty Scholar Award is dedicated to building an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars (e.g. anthropologists, psychologists, physicians, and sociologists) many of whom have begun to collaborate on related projects.” Moje, for example, is teaming with other researchers who study Latino/a youth in different parts of the country. This team is employing a variety of methods across a vast database to try to inform youth development and educational endeavors in a variety of venues.
Research on black students’ performance in school has tended to focus on why they underperform. Carla O’Connor
Now in the third year of the grant, O’Connor says that her work to date has raised questions about some commonly held notions. She says, “The presumption is that black student’s perceive a conflict between being black and doing well in school. Consequently, it is very common for people to believe that having a strong black identity will detract from students, ability to do well in school. But the work I’ve done to date shows it’s much more complicated than that.” Her work shows how and under what conditions black racial identities operate as protective factors. It also reveals the ways in which the practices and organization of schools (and not the black students themselves) establish tensions between having a strong black identity and doing well in school.
An advantage in doing a long-term study, O’Connor says, is being able to examine the ways in which “racial identity shifts over time” and in response to the challenges and demands students face as they change to adulthood. O’Connor is concerned with how these shifts may make students more or less able to successfully meet these challenges and demands. Such research might show teachers and administrators “how their practices might situate students’ racial identity as a resource rather than as a vulnerability.” An advantage in doing a long-term study, O’Connor says, is being able to examine the ways in which “racial identity shifts over time’ and with the student’s circumstances. Such research might show teachers ”how to engage students around identity.”
The founder of the former W. T. Grant Stores empire launched the foundation bearing his name in 1936. Its stated goal is to “help create a society that values young people and enables them to reach their full potential” and it pursues evidence-based research efforts. Early on, the New York City-based foundation initiated a watershed study in the use of interdisciplinary research, following William T. Grant’s interest in finding out why some youths succeeded in life and others didn’t.
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Recently, Annemarie Palincsar
The problem grows even more complicated when considering middle schools and high schools. By the time students reach secondary schools, subject matter teaching is often separate from literacy instruction. The range of reading skills among students differs widely, and the content poses greater challenges. Subject matter teachers aren’t necessarily well-prepared to teach reading comprehension in their disciplines, while literacy teachers and coaches often find their backgrounds too general to address the specific issues within particular disciplines. With generous support from the Carnegie Foundation of New York, Dr. Palincsar, Jean and Charles Walgreen Professor of Reading and Literacy at the School of Education, is embarking on a project, in collaboration with UM colleagues, Bob Bain
Foundation support such as that provided by Carnegie, which funds work that aims ‘to do real and permanent good in this world,” permits SOE faculty such as Dr. Palincsar to have a direct impact on schools and teachers across the country. Carnegie’s Education Division created a new subprogram focusing on intermediate and adolescent literacy, recognizing that expectations for student achievement have increased, “yet the way in which students are taught to read, comprehend and write about subject matter has not kept pace with the demands of schooling.”
Staples Corporation
“It’s been magical,” says UM Education School Professor Frederick Goodman
Thanks to Tom Cavanagh, star of the former TV series “Ed”, the university’s Interactive Communications & Simulations group (ICS)
Goodman was “thrilled” by the gift. Part of it went to replace a sluggish computer system, but the donation also helped advance efforts of ICS to orient young people to the potential of educational technology. Goodman explains, “For two decades ICS, a Computerworld Smithsonian Award winning project, has been offering thousands of students around the world a way to work together asynchronously in highly demanding educational exercises.” One ICS project allowed several high school students from diverse backgrounds to make videos of themselves, illuminating their different cultures. Another project provided scholarships for high school students to learn “how to develop software for socially responsible purposes,” says ICS project director Gary Weisserman. The students are now working with the Public Museum of Grand Rapids on using technology to reach out to potential museum visitors.
Staples, Inc., headquartered west of Boston in Framingham, Massachusetts, founded the office supplies superstore industry when their first store opened in Brighton, Massachusetts on May 1, 1986. Today, Staples is the world’s leading seller of office products. Through its Staples Foundation for Learning, Staples, Inc., has contributed to more than 150 nonprofit groups across the nation. The foundation’s mission is to “teach, train, and inspire people from all walks of life by providing educational and growth opportunities.” The Massachusetts-based company also sponsors a Recycle for Education program, which donates $1 to educational charities for each inkjet or toner cartridge brought into its stores for reuse.
by Eve Silberman
This article appears in the Winter 04-05 edition of the Innovator
