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. …
Today, President Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaces the controversial No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The bipartisan passage of ESSA propels the nation into a significant pendulum swing that will shift us away from what some characterized as the long arm of the flawed NCLB accountability system over to …
One of the best things about working in philanthropy is the chance to get in on the ground floor of great ideas. Even better is watching those ideas grow into something unanticipated, something bigger and better than anyone foresaw or expected at the outset. That field still includes MIT’s vibrant OpenCourseWare, which today averages a …
The Hewlett Foundation commissioned Management Systems International to conduct a formative evaluation of the Early Learning Innovation Fund, which began in 2011 as part of the Quality Education in Developing Countries (QEDC) Initiative, a partnership between the Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This report is part of a series of evaluations …
What determines whether educational innovations conceived on the ground ultimately result in better learning outcomes for students, and how can we take the most successful innovations to scale? A recent evaluation of part of our Quality Education in Developing Countries Initiative suggests some answers. In 2011, we awarded two grants to support grassroots innovations in …
In a world where both resources for policy research and the attention spans to take it in are finite—that is, in the real world—less can definitely be more. Less research can mean that there’s more money and time for the activities other than data collection, analysis, and synthesis—more time and money, that is, for the …
The Hewlett Foundation’s Education Program engaged SRI Education (part of SRI International) to evaluate the Foundation’s investment in the Open Educational Resources Research Hub (OERRH), which is based at the Open University in the UK and was founded in 2012 to conduct, support, synthesize, and disseminate research on the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) …
The Hewlett Foundation commissioned ORS Impact to develop this evaluation, which provides an independent analysis of the progress, impact, and coherence of the strategies utilized by two highly regarded intergovernmental organizations—the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—to advance Open Educational Resources (OER) both independently and jointly. The …
Textbooks aren’t new or novel, and they certainly don’t represent the cutting edge of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that the Hewlett Foundation has long supported. But it’s precisely because of the way they are deeply embedded in the education system that they have the potential to shift OER from the exception to the …
Thomas is a second grade teacher at Okum Primary School, an hour’s drive from Lira in northern Uganda. Each day, he and his co-teacher, Jacqueline, have the responsibility of teaching 120 second graders how to read, write, and calculate, among other skills they’ll need to prepare themselves for a bright future. Next door their colleague …