The challenge of educating young people to become fully engaged American citizens was put into sharp focus by a conference I attended last week in New York City, hosted by the Ford Foundation. Students, educators, non-profit leaders, scholars, and funders came together for a day to talk about how civic education in school and after-school …
Interesting post from longtime Open Educational Resources scholar David Wiley on what’s he’s learing about the theoretical benefits of OER and the empirical research that supports those theories: I’m continuing to learn an incredible amount as I work with Lumen Learning, supporting institutions as they go through the process of replacing traditional textbooks with Open Educational Resources …
Rukmini Banerji works on the ASER (Annual Status of Education) initiative, part of Pratham, in India. Experience has shown that simply being in school does not automatically translate into learning for students. As we enter this new phase of global goal setting for education, UNESCO, through its Institute for Statistics, has initiated a very timely …
Sarah Brown, the CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, announced last week that she’s stepping down after 20 impressive years and the board has started a search for her successor. Let me just say: Sarah is a hard act to follow. In founding the National Campaign, Sarah created an organization that …
Congratulations to the hardworking team at the Washington Monthly for an outstanding January/ February issue. Given how this magazine consistently punches above its weight, the Madison Initiative is pleased to be helping underwrite their efforts with a multi-year grant for general support. In this issue I’d recommend you be sure to read Donald Kettl’s “Ten Secret Truths …
The bell has rung. Civil society leaders from India, Pakistan, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Mexico, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania have come together, with optimism and conviction, asking others to join a movement to ensure that all children learn the fundamental, life-changing skills of reading and arithmetic. But will anyone answer? That’s the question I found myself …
Hillary, Jeb, Mitt, Rand—will they or won’t they? When and how will they? Twenty-one months out from the next presidential election, somehow we’re already caught up in the high drama of the campaign. Our democracy has a presidential fixation that rivals that of teenagers addled by the latest pop stars who also go by first …
This post originally appeared on the Grantcraft blog. -ed. One way I mark the passage of another year is the welcome arrival of the latest Blueprint — the annual industry forecast report written by Lucy Bernholz and published by GrantCraft, a service of Foundation Center. This year’s report, Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2015, provides us once again with …
So let’s say you were trying to make a big dent in problems facing people in poor countries, like inequality, poor health and nutrition, illiteracy, and corruption. Let’s say you had big ideas, lots of access to powerful decision makers and the smartest analysts, but relatively little money compared to the scale of the problems. …
According to many newsrooms, fact-checking articles are among the most requested, and most read, content they produce. In recent years groups like Factcheck, Flackcheck, FactChecker (home of the “Pinocchios”), Politifact and Punditfact have emerged to address growing questions of truth in politics. Fact-checking is done with at least three possible goals in mind, each with distinct audiences associated: For the broader public, to …