http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en nicholas_jenna@gsb.stanford.edu Copyright 2010 2010-02-24T07:00:54+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/lessons_in_courage/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/lessons_in_courage/ In Afghanistan, grief is never far away. “You are always losing somebody,” says Sakena Yacoobi. A native of Afghanistan, Yacoobi has lost friends and colleagues to bombings and kidnappings. She has seen routine health matters turn fatal for want of basic medical care. When the losses pile up and Yacoobi gets to feeling “a little down,” she asks her bodyguard to drive her to a nearby preschool. There, it doesn’t take long before this short woman in a hijab is smiling. “I see kids singing, drawing, playing, learning. Their happiness is my happiness,” she says, “and I am ready to go 100 miles per hour again.” For more than a decade, Yacoobi has devoted her considerable energies to rebuilding educational opportunities in a country that had almost forgotten how to learn. The Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), which she founded in 1995, now reaches 350,000 women and girls annually with programs that extend from preschool through university. In addition, men and boys benefit from AIL’s leadership training, which promotes peaceful strategies for resolving conflict. AIL also provides health education, operates medical clinics, and teaches income-generating vocational skills like carpet weaving. Through all these initiatives, AIL emphasizes critical thinking “so that… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:40+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research1/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research1/ In 1988, Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s famously conservative prime minister, approved a revolutionary reform: Allow secondary schools to shrug off local control and become autonomous, central government- funded entities. To convert into one of these so-called grant-maintained schools (GMs), a school had to secure the majority vote of its students’ parents. By 1997, some 900 of the United Kingdom’s 3,500 state-funded secondary schools had gone GM (the rough equivalent of a conversion charter school in the United States). Damon Clark’s father was the principal of a GM school. Two decades later, Clark is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Florida, where he has uncovered the first evidence that GM schools fare better than standard schools on national exams. “GMs increased the pass rate on their Grade 11 exams by about 5 percentage points,” from a 40 percent to a 45 percent pass rate, he says. He further finds that upturns emerged as early as two years after the GM conversion and persisted eight years later, at the end of his study. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, advocates of charter schools and their analogs contend that giving schools greater autonomy not only will… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:40+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/qa_joanne_weiss/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/qa_joanne_weiss/ Joanne Weiss’ career demonstrates that social innovations are often created and driven by people who reach across the nonprofit, for-profit, and government sectors. Weiss started her career by co-founding and leading several for-profit companies, most of which were in the educational field. She then joined the nonprofit NewSchools Venture Fund, which for the last 12 years has funded nonprofit and for-profit educational reform organizations. And last year Weiss was recruited to be the director of the U.S. Department of Education’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top Fund. The Race to the Top Fund is not a typical government program. Instead, it borrows from the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, most notably the idea that competition can stimulate change. Rather than getting grants based simply on how many children are in school or how many schools are failing, states must compete for money by putting forward innovative programs that improve their educational system. Some states will get money and others will not, based on performance and outcomes. In this interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric Nee, Weiss explains what the department hopes to accomplish with Race to the Top, what criteria will be used to judge the states’ proposals,… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:37+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_next_the_flattened_campus/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/whats_next_the_flattened_campus/ There was no welcoming party for incoming freshmen when the University of the People offered its inaugural slate of classes last September. Indeed, most students enrolled in the world’s first online, tuition-free university will never meet face to face. But friendships “are already going strong” among learners who live in Colombia, Indonesia, Sudan, and 50 other countries, says University of the People founder Shai Reshef. With a goal of dramatically increasing access to higher education, the University of the People is taking advantage of open education content as well as new modes of learning. Around the world, Reshef says, “demand for higher education is so much greater than supply.” Thanks to the Internet, information that was once sequestered on university campuses has become freely available. Since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started putting lectures and course notes online, the OpenCourseWare Consortium has grown to include lectures, exams, and other content from 200 higher education institutions. Meanwhile, college students are showing an increasing interest in e-learning. In the United States, 12 million students currently take at least some of their postsecondary courses online. “The Internet lets this information flow all over the world,” says Reshef, an Israeli entrepreneur with extensive experience… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:32+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/which_fix/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/which_fix/ In his recent remarks at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan focused on chronically underperforming schools. “They’re often unsafe, underfunded, poorly run, crumbling, and challenged in so many ways that the situation can feel hopeless,” he said. And they’re a full 5 percent of our nation’s schools — some 5,000 in total. Education reformers offer two strategies for redeeming these schools: turnaround and fresh start. Turnaround strategies keep the same students and site, but change many of the school’s core elements, such as staff, programs, partnerships, and buildings. In contrast, fresh start strategies open a new school from scratch — often with new students, staff, and programs. In most cases, fresh start schools are charter schools — that is, independent public schools that a state board of education, school district, nonprofit, or other authorizing entity creates. Both turnaround and fresh start strategies assume that the school is the critical unit of change, so both rely heavily on school leaders. Both strategies also require a compelling vision and the ability to make it operational. And both demand substantial initial investment. Because these two strategies have much in common, many school-change organizations — EdisonLearning,… Education 2010-02-24T06:00:27+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/strength_through_flexibility/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/strength_through_flexibility/ In June 1992, the five founders of what became the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) met at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy. Each woman was a minister of education in her home country (Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, the Seychelles, and Zimbabwe). And each lamented that only half of Africa’s school-age girls enrolled in school. FAWE’s founders understood the obstacles that girls met on the way to the schoolhouse. Many parents simply couldn’t afford school tuition and fees. Others preferred to keep their daughters at home to perform household chores and to take care of younger siblings. Girls who did make it to school encountered such indignities as bathrooms shared with boys, discrimination from teachers, and sexual harassment from both teachers and students. For the few girls who did make it through elementary school, pregnancies often cut short their middle and high school educations. But FAWE’s founders also knew that the rewards were great for girls who did manage to secure an education. Educated girls were—and are—less likely to suffer from violence and harassment. They live longer and contract HIV/AIDS less. They have fewer and healthier children. And they make greater contributions to their country’s economic… Education, Social Entrepreneurship, Government 2010-01-20T22:35:59+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/research/ As wealthier nations age, nonprofits are retooling their operations to accommodate an older volunteer workforce. But they would be remiss if they didn’t also look for help at the other end of the life span, reports Charlene S. Shannon, an expert in recreation and leisure studies at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She documents how “younger youth”—children between the ages of 8 and 12—are an energetic, useful, yet largely overlooked pool of volunteer labor. Interviewing younger youth and executive directors at Boys & Girls Clubs in Atlantic Canada, Shannon finds that the younger set’s needs and strengths are different from those of their slightly older counterparts. For instance, the difficulty that these small volunteers most frequently cite is that their assigned tasks are physically challenging. Dealing with rude people—both peers and older people—is also particularly taxing for them. But as legions of cookie-peddling Girls Scouts can attest, younger youth are particularly adept at fundraising. They are also well suited for assisting adults in tasks that require minimal responsibility, such as stuffing envelopes and tidying up after events. Helping seniors is also a younger-youth bailiwick. Recruiting 8- to 12-year-olds may be easier than coaxing adolescents and adults to volunteer,… Education 2009-11-19T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/funding_the_future_in_china/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/funding_the_future_in_china/ Growing up in a small farming village in rural Jiangxi Province, Liao Zhicheng dreamed of becoming China’s “outstanding entrepreneur” so he could “change the fate of the poor family,” he writes on a Web site. His rags-to-riches hopes started to come true when he enrolled at the Finance and Economic Vocational College of Jiangxi and earned top academic honors, including a national scholarship to supplement family support. His father encouraged him to use the extra funds “to eat a little better.” But when his father fell ill, the family budget got even tighter. Liao, 21, realized he needed to borrow 6,000 yuan (about $875) to make ends meet. A small loan would mean the difference between staying in school and going back to the village. Pondering how far he might go with a little help, he remembered a Chinese saying: “Give me a drip, I’ll return you the wellspring.” Liao’s saga—and his earnest promises to study hard, make prompt repayments, and bring honor to his ancestors—has convinced 18 Chinese lenders to pool their money and invest in his future. Their goodwill comes with terms: 8 percent annual interest and regular payments spread over 13 months, all tracked on a Web… Education, Social Entrepreneurship 2009-08-18T23:00:54+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/great_teachers_on_the_fast_track/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/great_teachers_on_the_fast_track/ A nation’s economic growth is directly linked to its people’s educational attainment, relate Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in their recent book, The Race Between Education and Technology. Yet since 1970, the United States has put fewer and fewer teenagers through secondary school. As a result, the country is quickly losing its competitive edge. To reform education, we know that we must get great teaching and great learning in every classroom. But to do this, Americans must first reject an endemic and persistent myth: Traditionally certified teachers are the most effective educators. This is especially critical because over the next five to seven years, fully half of current teachers are predicted to retire. The nation faces the challenge of recruiting millions of talented new people to fill these empty slots, with many openings in low-income areas where kids have been under-taught for years. Traditional certification—by which the vast majority of teachers undertake lengthy and costly studies at university-based teacher programs, followed by state licensing exams— is simply not the best way to get there. Thomas Kane, Jonah Rockoff, and Douglas Staiger are among a number of researchers to make this point. Their recent work, published in Education Next, followed the… Education 2009-08-18T23:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/its_not_about_the_work_ethic/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/its_not_about_the_work_ethic/ In 1517, a German priest named Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation when he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Since that time, regions that adopted Protestantism have grown more affluent than did regions that maintained their Catholic roots—a trend that another German, the sociologist Max Weber, attempted to explain in 1905. In his classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber contends that Protestants’ harder-working ways are responsible for their greater wealth. But a recent article by two German economists challenges Weber’s venerable theory. “Protestants started education efforts earlier than Catholics,” notes Sascha O. Becker, a professor of economics at the University of Stirling (Scotland) and the study’s lead author. Over time, it was this jump on schooling, not a religion-driven love of labor, that ultimately drove Protestants’ higher productivity. “Researchers have long known that education matters for prosperity and well-being,” says Becker. “Education helps you to get a better understanding of how the world works, helps you go beyond subsistence to do bigger things.” Luther was big on education. Opposing the Catholic practice of relying on priests to read and interpret the Latin Bible, Luther insisted that people read and… Education 2009-08-18T23:00:00+00:00