While the word assessment in education conjures up images of testing, its Latin root, assidere, means “to sit beside.” This raises a provocative question: In this era of high-stakes testing that’s used to rank kids and schools, what if we reclaimed the word assessment and put it more authentically in the service of learning? Going …
This evaluation provides an assessment of The Hewlett Foundation’s California Education Policy Fund (CEPF) in the 2014-2015 year to inform CEPF’s annual grantmaking strategies. With an annual grantmaking budget of about $3 million, CEPF supports organizations advancing a wide range of policies that focus on “deeper learning” in California schools. CEPF specifically prioritizes grantees’ efforts …
In 2015, the Hewlett Foundation commissioned Olive Grove Consulting and Informing Change to conduct a midpoint assessment of the Performing Arts Program’s Strategic Framework, 2012-2017. Based on interviews with grantees, peer art funders, and arts leaders, among others, as well as quantitative analysis of the Program’s grantmaking and a review of existing literature, the consultants …
The Audience Research Collaborative was a three-year initiative of the Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, which took place from 2012-2015. Conducted in partnership with the arts consulting firm WolfBrown, the goal of the initiative was to build the capacity of the Program’s grantees to understand their audiences. This final report by the consultants who led …
2015 marked the mid-point of our current Performing Arts strategic framework, which runs from 2012-2017, and lays out the goals of our grantmaking, as well as measures for how we’ll evaluate our progress. In order to get a view into how we’re doing, last year we engaged two consulting firms, Informing Change and Olive Grove, to …
The Performing Arts Program has been making grants to help emerging arts leaders develop satisfying and successful careers through the Next Generation Arts Leadership Initiative since 2009. The program commissioned Open Mind Consulting in late 2014 to reassess the arts leadership landscape in California and explore opportunities for future investments. Based on the research, this report …
CEP recently shared the full report and presented the findings to all staff. I asked Hewlett Foundation Evaluation Officer Amy Arbreton about the findings. These Grantee Perception Report (GPR) findings seem pretty consistent with our last survey, completed in 2013. Would you agree? What do you see as the major finding in these survey results? Yes, there …
If you’ve been around the international development business long enough, you’ve probably heard someone ask, “So, what do we know about what works?” Maybe it’s a parliamentarian, a minister, or the Administrator of USAID. Maybe it’s a reporter. Or maybe it’s a newly arrived junior member of a project team, hoping her middle-aged colleagues—who clearly …
Our work at the Madison Initiative remains squarely focused on improving conditions for dialogue, negotiation, and compromise in Congress. But one question we continue to wrestle with is this: How do we know how Congress is doing? Some Congressional observers have looked at metrics around “legislative productivity,” bemoaning recent Congresses as the “least productive” ever. …