In addition to meeting our Foundation's overall criteria for place-based grants, Education grant requests must also satisfy the following guidelines.
Proposed grant projects must benefit public elementary and secondary schools (K-12) that serve a significant number or portion of students in a given community.
Within these bounds, we make two general types of grants:
- grants directly to schools or school districts; and
- grants to education resource organizations that are working with schools and school districts.
| The majority of Cowell grants support the in-service professional development of teachers through training, coaching and structured collaboration. Our purpose is to help schools develop effective, coherent and responsive instructional programs, including both first-teaching for all students and targeted, temporary interventions for students who need additional support. Because in many communities where Cowell is currently active English Learners comprise a large, historically under-served segment of the student population, some recent grants have focused particularly on building effective systems of instruction and support for EL students. |
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We also fund projects that support students’ learning by strengthening connections among schools, families and other agencies in the community, and projects that link classroom lessons to carefully aligned and structured programs beyond the school. It’s not unusual for projects to combine two or even all of these elements.
Proposed grant projects are evaluated for the clarity of their rationale and intentions, the quality of the resources they would provide and the commitment demonstrated by all those whose participation would be required in order for the project to succeed. It is vital that the plan for the grant project provide sufficient time and expert support for teachers to master new teaching and assessment methods, subject knowledge and ways of working together to improve student learning.
In general, we do not fund direct services to students, such as tutoring or technological interventions; instead, our focus is on the quality of interactions between students and their teachers.
What We Fund
Education Overview
