Dive Brief:
- The Harvard Graduate School of Education aims to make education act as the great equalizer many have historically claimed it is, targeting five cities in hopes of severing the link between socioeconomic status and educational outcomes.
- Louisville Business First reports the multi-year initiative, By All Means: Redesigning Education to Restore Opportunity, will focus on Louisville; Oakland, Calif; Providence, R.I.; Salem, Mass.; Somerville, Mass.; and Newton, Mass.
- Each city is expected to convene a "Children's Cabinet," in which school superintendents will join with leaders and activists from the communities' health, social, cultural, arts, and recreation sectors to come up with strategies to close achievement gaps and ensure success for all students.
Dive Insight:
Educational inequality is considered one of the nation's most intractable problems.
Education reform has garnered billions of dollars in investment as philanthropists put money toward new school models and initiatives in neighborhood schools. Many colleges and universities have attracted major donations for their work on the world's most serious and complex problems, from climate change to poverty. Nike co-founder Philip Knight just pledged $400 million to Stanford for such a scholars program.
Cluster hiring initiatives have also been a strategy for colleges to get interdisciplinary teams to put their collective knowledge toward single problems.
UC-Riverside's new cluster hiring plan was criticized by humanities researchers who felt left out of the push for "big idea" research that focused more on science, technology, engineering, and math. This focus, though, is likely to get the university more grant money down the line.