The landscape of early childhood programs has evolved as a largely fractured landscape: most public early education programs such as Head Start and state pre-K have been limited to low-income children or children with identified risk factors, and most private programs charge tuition that is too low to support a well-compensated workforce but still…

To address the learning crisis and other challenges facing children and youth (those 15-24 years of age) it is critical for governments, multilateral and bilateral funders, other donors, and implementers to have a clear understanding of program costs and cost breakdowns to inform financing decisions. For nearly a decade, the Center for Universal…

For nearly three decades, the United States of America has been the consistent leader in incarceration rates worldwide. A number of structural social problems have contributed to this reality (e.g., the school-to-prison pipeline, the 1994 Crime Bill, and aggressive surveillance and policing of poor and minority neighborhoods). Recently, a number…

In 2015, College Futures Foundation brought together seven community foundations, centering the goal of transitioning traditional, merit-based scholarship programs to a more strategic, need-based approach. College Futures envisioned this transition as a vehicle to improve college completion rates for low-income, first generation students, seeking…

In 2011, The Wallace Foundation launched the National Summer Learning Project (NSLP) to expand summer program opportunities for students in urban districts and to study the effectiveness of district-led summer programs and how they could be well implemented. Through the NSLP, The Wallace Foundation has provided support to public school districts…

Since the early 1990s, the Open Society Foundations have supported early childhood development, recognizing it as a prerequisite for sustainable political and social change--with a focus not only on young children, but on parents, caregivers, and the wider community. This report commemorates the Open Society Early Childhood Program, which, from…

Barriers to summer enrichment and learning experiences reinforce gaps in resources and opportunities in public education that face students from lower-income households. In a growing number of cities, new support structures are emerging to help parents overcome barriers to summer enrichment and learning for their children. These supports provide…

Earning a college degree is widely recognized as the most reliable pathway to economic stability (Carnevale, Smith, & Strohl, 2013). But it is known from a wide range of research that access to college is neither easy nor equitable, and that traditionally underrepresented students (including low-income students and Black and Latino students)…

This article briefly reviews the social, political, and economic context that explains the present status of elementary language education in the United States and addresses the challenges identified by recent reports on the state of language education in the United States. Different curricular models of world language education--exploratory,…

The building that houses Brooklyn Friends School's (New York) preschool, lower, and middle divisions stands on a quiet one-way street in an otherwise bustling downtown Brooklyn business district. After most students head home for the day, others come to the school to participate in the Horizons Program. The Horizons Program at Brooklyn Friends…

The COVID pandemic has led to a prolonged period of educational disruption with few precedents from the recent past to guide recovery. The Institute of Education's project, "Learning Through Disruption," set out to explore the knowledge schools have acquired from working with children and families during the crisis. The authors found…

Metropolitan universities are well poised in communities to be intermediaries among various actors involved in social innovation. Pace University established one of the first institutes on social entrepreneurship. Its unique position at the university level allows programming to transcend certain institutional challenges. The emerging field of…

Active involvement of multiple stakeholders is vital to ensuring effective implementation of education innovation. The ground-breaking collaboration described in this article addressed barriers to education through effective cross-sector collaboration among civil society, business, and government stakeholders.

Many states are passing "free" college plans, and policymakers at both the state and federal level continue to debate the merits of national "free college" or "debt-free college" proposals, also known as Promise programs. Both federal and state "free" college proposals are geared toward a policy objective of…

Cash transfer based social protection can potentially contribute positively upon targeted beneficiaries on a variety of developmental aspects. This study explored the pilot and scaled-up phases of the Harmonised Social Cash Transfer program to determine impacts towards improving under-eight children's access to food, education, and health…