Harvard University

The Deeper Learning Dozen is a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The project supports a community of practice with 12 superintendents and their team members, all of whom are committed to making the changes necessary so that all young people and adults equitably experience deeper learning. The work will result in an understanding of how to create changes in systems, policies, practices, roles, beliefs, and assumptions. This grant will expand how the project shares its learnings, including through a book that reflects on past school reform approaches in contrast with some of the project’s work. (Substrategy: District Deep Dives and Networks)

The Lab for Democracy Renovation sits within Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Members of the lab research and develop governance innovations needed to achieve healthy democracy in the 21st century — for massively scaled up, complex, digitally powered societies with significant social heterogeneity. The lab also investigates strategies for bringing those governance innovations into existence. This grant supports the general operations of the lab and its four focus work areas: governance of emerging technology, political economy for power-sharing liberalism, aspirational federalism, and the reimagining of American democracy.

The HKS Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation brings remarkable faculty together with global leaders in the democracy field to develop constructive dialogue, exceptional scholarship, and bold ideas. In an era of spiraling inequality and political polarization, the idea of freedom as a core political value has dropped from progressive discourse. The Center’s Freedom Project — in collaboration with the Boston Review — aims to recover the word from its distortions, and to reframe it as a cornerstone of post-neoliberal democracy. Convening philosophers and academics, together with practitioners, it will revisit foundational concepts toward changing the public conversation of what a just society looks like, and what it can accomplish.