2020 Educational Leadership Grants
Breck School
Golden Valley, MN
Breck's Dynamic Learner Profile creates a partnership with students, faculty, and parents to support learning how to learn while developing student self-efficacy and drive for lifelong academic and personal success.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1.25
Friends' Central School
Wynnewood, PA
Friends’ Central School will expand the scope of education around consent and healthy relationships beyond its traditional sphere in health education to a more comprehensive goal of building communities of consent within schools. This enhanced focus on consent education addresses a significant and ongoing gap in the US education landscape. Our schools are failing to help young people develop healthy, consent-based relationships whether online or in real time, whether social or intimate. Consent education is not only an essential step in helping young people avoid situations of sexual harassment, assault, and violence, but also can be used to strengthen a community’s commitment to equity and justice by listening to and uplifting unheard and undervalued voices in a school community. We believe practices and pedagogy rooted in consent will enhance students’ personal and communal lives. The Edward E. Ford Educational Leadership grant will allow Friends’ Central School to host a bi-annual conference on consent and healthy relationships for students from the surrounding area, and a bi-annual Summer Institute for faculty and staff from all over the US. Further, utilizing the successful Core Team model, Friends’ Central students will create an ongoing partnership with another area school to help them establish their own Consent Core Team and implement consent based practices in their own school community.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1
Click Here for the full article in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Hewitt School
New York, NY
The Hewitt School in New York City was on the path of innovation well before our world was shaken by a global pandemic. On March 6, 2020, Hewitt, an all-girls, K-12 school, launched a strategic vision to better prepare girls and young women for college, career, and lives of meaning and purpose. The vision calls for teaching and learning focused on real-world, transdisciplinary challenges—days after announcing their vision, Covid-19 presented countless transdisciplinary challenges. Amid the disruption and uncertainty of a global pandemic, Hewitt’s commitment to reimagine how, when, and where school happens is more timely than ever. Hewitt was delighted to have been awarded a $250,000 Educational Leadership Grant in November 2020 from The Edward E. Ford Foundation to transform an outmoded model of education so that students may learn how to thrive in a rapidly changing world, and fulfill their new mission: to inspire girls and young women to become game changers and ethical leaders who forge an equitable, sustainable, and joyous future.
“We are honored and humbled that The Edward E. Ford Foundation has determined that our upper school is an exciting place to invest. This grant will allow us to focus on our bold and ambitious vision of reimagining and redesigning the experience of upper school education in this city and country,” said Head of School Dr. Tara Christie Kinsey of the Foundation grant.
This prestigious grant is funding a landmark step in advancing the strategic vision for Hewitt: a new learning and innovation researcher position. Assistant Head for Learning and Innovation Dr. Maureen Burgess explained, “Hewitt’s inaugural learning and innovation researcher is the lynchpin of proving that the future of education innovation will not only transform young lives but also give educators new and meaningful ways to measure what, how, and why innovation works.”
Following an extensive, competitive national search, Sarah Odell took on this role on July 1, 2021. As part of serving on the academic program design team, Sarah will conduct studies that will inform the School’s work at each phase of design and implementation, as well as institute systems for the ongoing, sustainable collection of actionable feedback to guide the continued evolution of teaching and learning at Hewitt. Sarah will partner with academic leaders and faculty to translate research findings into meaningful, age-appropriate steps for classroom implementation, and work with teachers to regularly investigate the effectiveness of our program in meeting the needs of our students and families.
Sarah Odell is a feminist scholar, researcher, and educator who has extensive experience working with influential women and creating gender-focused programming. A former executive intern to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sarah has also worked as an editorial assistant at HarperCollins Publishers and taught courses on female American writers and feminist theorists at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. While at Miss Porter’s, Sarah created an internship program in Washington D.C. where seniors at the girls’ school interned for organizations that championed policy for women and families including NARAL: Pro-Choice America; the United Nations Foundation; the Feminist Majority Foundation; the Congressional Black Caucus; and the Malala Fund. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Wellesley College, Sarah earned her masters degree at the University of Pennsylvania where she authored a thesis on women and educational leadership in independent schools. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Departments of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Gender and Women’s Studies, studying gender inclusive leadership in K-12 education. Her dissertation is titled Listening for Resistance: Stories Challenging the Binary in K-12 Educational Leadership. Sarah’s research has been presented at the University Council for Education Administration (UCEA) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual conferences. Sarah has been awarded the W. Charles and Helen Reed Scholarship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education to support her in the final year of her doctoral work. She will complete her doctorate in the spring of 2022.
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1
Maret School
Washington, DC
To realize success in today’s unsettled environment, educational institutions must navigate seismic change by remaining ever more agile and strategic. In a world that is increasingly driven and evaluated by quantitative data, the field of institutional research in independent schools is more important than ever. It provides effective pathways for schools to make responsive improvements, drive innovation, and quantify success in all facets of their mission.
Maret will use its Leadership Grant and matching funds to expand the School’s growing institutional research program and lead a national Center for Institutional Research in Independent Schools (CIRIS), featuring a fellows program, summer lab, and resource hub. By harnessing the power of collaboration, over the next five years Maret will create a cohort of expert practitioners from across the country and help advance institutional research capacities and data literacy throughout the independent school community.
Click here for Maret's Institutional Research Page
Grant Amount: $250,000
Match: 1:1