Women's Philanthropy--Women's Issues

Foundation Center Education Funding Watch 12.09.10

December 8, 2010
In this issue of Education Funding Watch, the Foundation Center's newsletter devoted to education-related topics, you'll read about a survey which found that over two dozen college presidents received more than $1 million in total compensation in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available. You'll also find links to other education-related news, resources, funding opportunities for individuals and organizations, and job listings. Education Funding Watch is available exclusively to visitors who register at the Foundation Center's Web site.
Thirty College Presidents Earned Over $1 Million in 2008, Survey Finds According to a survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education, thirty private college presidents received more than $1 million in total compensation in 2008, up from twenty-three the previous year. The annual survey, which examined the compensation of nearly 450 college presidents, found that, as in previous years, the top earners included a number who received large payouts after stepping down. The highest paid executive in the survey, Touro College president Bernard Lander, received nearly $4.8 million in compensation in 2008-09. Lander, who founded Touro as a Jewish college in 1970 and presided over its growth into an operation with thirty-one schools and colleges, was awarded $4.2 million in deferred compensation after the board determined he had been underpaid compared to presidents at similar institutions. Read the story» Recent Education News from Philanthropy News Digest Washington State University Receives $26 Million Gift From Microsoft Co-Founder Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's gift to the newly renamed Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health will be used to build programs and cross-train scientists in Washington State and Africa.... Posted: 12/6/10 SkillUp Washington Receives $1.8 Million from Gates Foundation The two-year grant will help the Seattle-based organization launch SkillLink, a college preparedness program for youth provided by community colleges, nonprofits, and local workforce boards.... Posted: 12/3/10 Lumina Foundation Announces $25 Million in Third-Quarter Grants The grants will support efforts to prepare students academically, financially, and socially for success beyond high school; improve college completion rates; and increase higher education productivity and capacity to serve more students.... Posted: 12/2/10 Indian Billionaire Pledges $2 Billion to Support Education The gift, the largest ever awarded by an Indian, will fund the educational activities of the Azim Premji Foundation, which works mainly with schools in rural India.... Posted: 12/2/10 Walmart Foundation Awards $1.9 Million to Jobs for the Future The organization will use the grant to help seven community colleges in North Carolina develop occupational and technical pathways for adult students and improve their counseling capacity as well as the capacity of their youth-serving community-partners.... Posted: 11/27/10 University of Oklahoma Receives $12 Million Gift From Alumnus The OU Health Sciences Center will use the gift, the largest in its history, to complete construction of a seven-story cancer facility and to endow two research positions and a Healing Garden.... Posted: 11/26/10 MetLife Foundation Announces $3.8 Million in Education Grants Grants were awarded to nonprofit organizations working to encourage collaborative teaching and school leadership as a strategy for increasing student achievement.... Posted: 11/25/10 Horace Mann Offers College Course Scholarships for K-12 Educators A total of $30,000 for tuition, fees, and other educational expenses will be awarded to U.S. public and private school K-12 educators taking college courses; residents of Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, and Hawaii are not eligible to apply.... Posted: 3/01/11 More education news... Funding Opportunities Washington Post to Recognize Outstanding Washington-Area Teachers and School Principals The awards honor school principals and teachers at public, charter, and private schools in the Washington metropolitan area who go above and beyond in their service to students.... Deadline: 1/14/11 Burroughs Wellcome Fund Invites Applications for Career Awards for Science and Mathematics Teachers in North Carolina Five awards of $175,000 will be awarded to outstanding science and math teachers working in elementary, middle, and high schools in North Carolina.... Deadline: 1/18/11 Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Establishes New Dissertation Fellowship in Education and Human Potential Awards of $25,000 will be given to doctoral students at U.S. graduate schools whose research relates to helping low-income students excel academically; two fellowships will be awarded in 2011.... Deadline: 2/04/11 Bezos Scholars Program @ the Aspen Institute Seeks Applications From High School Juniors and Educators Seven-day, all-expenses-paid scholarships to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival June 26 to July 2, 2011, in Aspen, Colorado will be awarded to twelve public high school student/educator teams.... Deadline: 2/11/11 SEVEN Fund Offers K-12 Teacher Summer Fellowships to Study Solutions to Poverty The 2011 fellowships will enable three public school teachers and one Catholic school teacher to travel to Rwanda to study enterprise solutions to poverty.... Deadline: 2/15/11 Middle and High School Teachers Invited to Apply for National Science Teachers Association Shell Science Lab Challenge Grants totaling $93,000, including a school science lab makeover, will be awarded to middle and high school science teachers across the country with a replicable approach to science lab instruction..... Deadline: 2/28/11 More requests for proposals... Send Us Your Feedback We'd like to know what you think of Education Funding Watch. Please send your comments to eduwatch@foundationcenter.org. Advertise in Education Funding Watch Education Funding Watch is e-mailed the second Wednesday of the month to more than 86,000 subscribers with a stated interest in education. For information about our advertising rates, contact Mitch Nauffts at (212) 807-2433 or mfn@foundationcenter.org.	Follow the Foundation Center!              StudentsFirst.org Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system, has jumped back into the education reform debate. Rhee, who resigned from her position as the head of D.C. schools at the end of October, has launched StudentsFirst, a national campaign dedicated to promoting "the interests of children in public education and pursuing transformative education reform so that America has the best education system in the world." The StudentsFirst site offers a trove of stats, a handful of videos, a blog, and a mechanism that enables visitors to connect with like-minded reformers in their community. Click here to learn more. Digital Education A new report from the Digital Learning Commission, a blue-ribbon panel headed by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former West Virginia governor Bob Wise, argues that digital learning can be the catalyst for the transformational change in education we all want. The report. Digital Learning Now!, (20 pages, PDF), offers ten foundational principles of "high-quality digital learning," along with a call to action and a list of things state leaders can do to promote and create support for digital learning initiatives in their states. Click here to download the report. Dissertation Fellowship Award The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has created a dissertation fellowship program to advance its understanding of the factors and contexts that help low-income students excel academically. The foundation will make one-time awards of $25,000 to two graduate students in 2011, and plans to offer as many as five fellowships annually in coming years. While the dissertation topic must concern education and human potential, graduate study may be in a diverse range of academic disciplines. Click here for complete program guidelines and application requirements. Job Opportunities Technical Programs Coordinator Collaborative for High Performance Schools Northern California Posted: 12/05/10 Director of Development University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia Posted: 12/03/10 Vice President for Institutional Advancement Prescott College Prescott, Arizona Posted: 12/03/10 Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations Earth Institute, Columbia University New York, New York Posted: 12/03/10 More job opportunities... < Advertisement > The Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies offers a wide range of educational opportunities and op options to a diverse community of students and professionals. With more than 665 credit and non-credit courses, dozens of programs, degrees, and certificate tracks, and nearly 3,000 students each year, there is a path to success for everyone. Improve Yourself. Improve the World.
Please direct allcomments or suggestions to eduwatch@foundationcenter.org. The Foundation Center • 79 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003 • (212) 620-4230

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Virginia B. Smith, Former Vassar President, Is Dead at 87

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: September 7, 2010

Virginia B. Smith, a lawyer and economist who helped shape the contours of higher education as president of Vassar College, as a high public official in Washington and as a member of influential private research groups, died on Aug. 27 in Alamo, Calif. She was 87.

Vassar College

Virginia B. Smith

Her death was announced by the college.

As president of Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., from 1977 to 1986, Ms. Smith led a $100 million fund-raising drive, recruited students from community colleges, increased the endowment, raised faculty salaries and reinforced the college’s commitment to minorities.

More broadly, she worked to increase public support for higher education and to extend its benefits beyond traditional elites, goals that have been addressed by steady increases in federal and state financial aid and, most recently, by President Obama’s support for community colleges.

Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, which represents 2,000 colleges and universities, said Ms. Smith had climbed an uphill road.

“At a time when many educators assumed that high-quality education and widespread access to it were mutually exclusive, she devoted her career on and off the campus to proving them wrong,” he said. “It was the combination of things she did, her leadership in every position she held.”

Ms. Smith was chosen to lead Vassar from among 450 candidates for the job partly because she had a strong vision for using the Vassar presidency as a model of innovation for American higher education, said Elizabeth Runkle Purcell, who was chairwoman of the selection committee.

Ms. Smith arrived at her commitment to educational reform by apprenticing with Clark Kerr, the former president of the University of California system, who was known for trying to meld low-cost and high-quality education. In 1952 Mr. Kerr asked Ms. Smith, one of his former economics students, to join the Institute of Industrial Relations, which he had founded at the University of California, Berkeley, as an instructor and director of public programs.

After Mr. Kerr became president of the California system in 1958, he again recruited Ms. Smith, who had been on a leave of absence to study trade union education in England. In 1965 she was named as an assistant vice president of the entire university, the first woman to hold that appointment.

In 1967 Ms. Smith joined the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education as a researcher and later became its associate director. The commission, led by Mr. Kerr, made recommendations that continue to be influential, including ones on how better to categorize colleges and universities.

In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon named Ms. Smith the founding director of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, a part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. With a board of advisers, she dispensed $43 million in grants to 340 projects.

In 1975, Change magazine, which covers higher education, included Ms. Smith among the 44 most important leaders in higher education in the United States.

Ms. Smith’s appointment as the eighth Vassar president was announced in April 1977. When The New York Times asked her why she had been chosen, she replied matter-of-factly, “Because I was the best qualified.”

Ms. Smith was the second woman to run the college and the first one to arrive there after it had become coeducational. The first male exchange students had come to Vassar in 1969 and the first freshmen the next year. Around 41 percent of Vassar students were men at the end of Ms. Smith’s presidency in 1986.

Virginia Beatrice Smith was born in Seattle on June 24, 1923, one of six children of a tool-and-die operator. She earned bachelor’s, master’s and law degrees from the University of Washington. She taught economics at what are now the University of Puget Sound and Seattle Pacific University.

Ms. Smith is survived by her partner of 57 years, Florence Oaks; her sister, Bessie Francis; and her brother, Frank.

In 1990, she came out of retirement for a year to be acting president of Mills College, a traditionally all-women college in Oakland, Calif., after the trustees’ decision to admit men had set off protests on campus. The trustees reversed their decision, and Ms. Smith, despite the Vassar precedent, applauded.

“The environment provides a special freedom of development,” she said of women-only education, at least at Mills. “Anyone who has had contact with women’s education knows it’s a different process. It would be great if, at some point, every woman could have some of this — sense the freedom of it.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 8, 2010, on page A25 of the New York edition.

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Much to learn from this education success story in Kenya

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/23/kenya-education-success-kibera

Starrays Hope school in Kibera shows the transformative potential of grassroots community education initiatives

•   Nanjala Nyabola
•   Friday 23 July 2010 18.00 BST

Kibera in Kenya has the largest slums in central and eastern Africa. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Nairobi's Kibera is a name that anyone familiar with Kenya generally associates with endemic poverty, crime and throngs of people struggling to survive in one of the toughest places. Yet beneath the surface, the stories of success and transformation in Kibera are plentiful. In particular, anyone who has ever worked in community education there knows that the volunteer-led educational centres in the largest slum of sub-Saharan Africa have developed an education-providing model that David "big society" Cameron should perhaps be invited to assess.

Since 2008, I've had the privilege of working on and off with one such centre and have been repeatedly impressed by their ability to merge the needs of the community with those of their students. Starrays Hope Academy was founded in 2004 by a group of teachers unable to secure employment in state-run or private schools, but interested in maintaining their skills while continuing their job search. The founder of the school, Jane Adhiambo, herself a resident of Kibera, donated a small piece land in the Olympic area on which several small wooden and corrugated iron sheet buildings were constructed to serve as a non-fee-paying high school.

Almost as soon as the school was started, it was apparent that several of the students at the school were struggling because the breadwinners in their families – mostly single mothers – were HIV positive. Undeterred, the school responded by offering counselling services to the families and setting up a childcare service where families could leave young children during the day. It also slowly emerged that several students were victims of sexual abuse within their own families, and while Jane was unable to reveal the extent of the problem due to privacy concerns, an indication of the gravity of the situation was revealed in the number of students who took advantage of the solution offered: Starrays Hope converted the small staffroom into a dormitory, and today 38 at-risk girls share 10 double-decker beds in a small room on the school site. At the same time, 14 at-risk boys have also been taken in, and in total about 60 people now live full-time on the site.

The school relies entirely on the generosity, not of western donors or international organisations, but of the community in which they live to survive. They have a small plot by the railway line where they grow vegetables to supplement the maize, beans and rice donated by the community. Volunteer teachers are compensated by receiving three meals from the school, and two ladies and a gentleman who have had children go through the school, volunteer to work as heads of house and cooks. Graduating students donate their uniforms to the incoming class and after graduation some students and their families continue to receive counselling from the school, particularly those living with HIV/Aids.

So integrated is Starrays Hope in its community that it emerged unscathed from the post-election violence (the large Anglican church of Kenya that was nearly razed to the ground is a five-minute walk away from the school). Even though the school is multi-ethnic, no student living at the school was threatened (sadly, many who live off-site lost most if not all of their family possessions). Not a single sheet of iron was damaged when the nearby railway tracks were ripped from the ground. Its ability to transcend ethnicity when violence threatened to bring the rest of the country to its knees speaks to the peacebuilding opportunities offered through true community-based education.

There are, of course, some issues: embedded in an impoverished community, Starrays Hope is severely under-resourced. The school is unable to consistently provide a balanced diet to its staff and students. Female students struggle with a lack of access to feminine hygiene products, and until my colleagues and I organised a fundraiser late last year, the mattresses the students shared were in an appalling state.

Teachers are constantly in search of better opportunities and can sometimes leave in the middle of the academic year, and the school has unfortunately had to turn away all but the most needy students. Most importantly, several eligible students who graduate from the school are unable to take up university places due to a lack of funds, making it difficult to impress upon the broader community the immediate benefits of obtaining an education.

Nonetheless, with the right support, schools like Starrays Hope are indicative of the transformative potential of grassroots educational initiatives. Unlike large anonymous donor projects, community-run schools function primarily on trust, meaning that the school is freed from multiple bureaucratic obstacles and able to focus on educating the students.

Similarly, the school can go beyond its educational mandate to function as a focal point for other necessary initiatives, such as the day-care centre and the HIV/Aids counselling initiative without having to regain the trust of the community from the ground up, thereby saving time and money. As countries all over the world seek out methods of developing holistic education systems, the example of Starrays Hope and other educational centres in Kibera will prove invaluable.