Spreading Good Ideas Through the E.E. Ford Foundation

In the past six years as executive director of the Edward E. Ford Foundation (E.E. Ford), I’ve visited more than 400 independent school campuses in more than 40 states. I’ve spent at least two hours in conversation with each of the school heads, discussing their schools’ successes and challenges. I have dug into the finances of these schools and reviewed their audited financial statements. This work is done as part of the foundation’s grant-awarding process. But I’m often asked by heads of school and others about what I have learned from all of this. While I don’t pretend that any wisdom accrues along with my frequent flyer miles, I can point to three clear, heartening patterns I have seen.
 
Good people find their way to independent schools. I’ve met thousands of teachers and administrators who are deeply committed to the lofty idealism that so often draws people to this work. Those I meet during my visits inevitably answer my question, “What keeps you at this school?” with an enthusiastic “the students!” This happens in schools from Buckle, Tennessee, to Boston to Berkeley, California. The people I’ve met who are committed to students and to good teaching are an inspiration to me. I know many schools arrange my visits with a carefully selected group of people, but, even still, I can state with conviction that from coast to coast, from our country’s southern to northern borders and including noncontiguous states, there are very good people working throughout the world of independent schools.
 
There is no one right way to go about the work. From the tiny Watershed School (ME) enrolling all of 40 students to The Westminster Schools (GA) with more than 2,000, from the progressive to the traditional to the faith-based, from day to boarding to military to schools addressing students with diagnosed cognitive challenges, I’ve come to see the importance of a school’s mission and how the independence of independent schools manifests itself. E.E. Ford makes grants to schools that approach their work informed by their unique history, expressed in the aspirational language of their mission, and flavored by regional differences that reflect great points of agreement and the strength of intentional and significant differences in the programs, traditions, and institutional culture. For example, nearly all the schools that I visit have an interscholastic athletics program. At Wyoming Seminary (PA), it includes most of the familiar sports—and with an impressive 30 percent of their 2018 graduates continuing in these sports in Division I, II, or III colleges or universities—while at Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CO), kayaking, mountain biking, and rock climbing are among the interscholastic sports offered. As another point of contrast: We gave the single largest grant in our history ($2 million) to the Mastery Transcript Consortium for the work it’s doing with pedagogy and student assessment just as we have a long history of support for schools that do not give grades. At the same time, we have equally long histories of support for schools that passionately believe that grades, traditional curriculum, and well-established approaches have long worked well and continue to be what they choose to provide. Schools of radically varying missions can all be successful with their students. There is no one right way.
 
We need to establish better connections with each other. Like a 21st century independent school Johnny Appleseed, I find myself distributing Golden Delicious seeds of “global citizenship,” nurtured through projects pursued at urban coastal schools, to rural schools in the Midwest or South pursuing similar goals but via as yet inchoate means, and offering hybrid Honeycrisp/Granny Smiths of project-based programs or inquiry-based curriculum in Deweyan schools in exchange for McIntoshes of “entrepreneurialism” to other “outcome-based” schools. It is this third point—how can we better share our good ideas throughout the independent school world?—that is increasingly a focus for the E.E. Ford board.

One way the foundation can best accomplish its goals is when a school comes to us with a modest, experimental idea seeking a Traditional Grant ($25,000–$100,000). If we say yes, and if the school experiences great success in pursuing its idea, the school can then sometimes return to us for an Educational Leadership Grant ($250,000) to expand the now-established program and promulgate this good idea more broadly. A few very successful ideas can then also be the focus of a follow-on second Traditional Grant to more formally spread the good word. This is what happened with Winchester Thurston School (PA) and its City as Our Campus program. Heathwood Hall Episcopal School (SC) took cues from Winchester in creating its experiential Columbia Connections program. These two schools are aligned in many ways with the Chesapeake Watershed Semester at Gunston School (MD): All three incorporate place into their curricula. This is just one example of schools that are—or could be—coordinating parallel efforts. We’ve recently funded similar place-based proposals from ‘Iolani School (HI), South Kent School (CT), and Midland School (CA). Many schools pursue projects that would benefit from knowing about the efforts of their peers—if only they knew of these colleagues pursuing similar objectives.
 
If I had 72 hours in a day, I’d make sure that the leaders at Girls Preparatory School (TN) responsible for its city-as-classroom program and the leaders at Grace Church School (NY) who used a grant to expand the school’s partnerships with local museums, research facilities, and higher education institutions, were in an ongoing conversation with all the schools mentioned above.
 
I see many NAIS schools throughout the country as individual nodes of courageous experimentation. Woodside Priory School (CA), La Jolla Country Day School (CA), and Convent of the Sacred Heart and Stuart Hall (CA) each are addressing student mental health challenges with E.E. Ford-supported initiatives, and I want these schools to not only know and learn from each other, but to have other schools who may be thinking and strategizing about how best to address this issue know what these three are doing.
 
If school A were Uber and school B were Lyft, they’d never share trade secrets. But this is not the operating ethos in independent schools where we share a common goal: what is good for children. I think this is structurally and operationally one of our great strengths. Schools are willing to share what works in ways that is inconceivable in the world of for-profit enterprises that are bottom-line oriented. I see a country speckled with great independent schools doing remarkable work but without an easy way for busy leaders and administrators to learn more about and from their counterparts.
 
Washington International School (DC) began a partnership with Harvard’s Project Zero and through a summer institute made this opportunity available to all DC-area schools, independent, parochial, and public, including charters. Landon School (MD) teachers participated in this WIS program, and Landon has now started its own partnership with Project Zero. Fugees Academy, a school serving only refugee students with locations in Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio, was the perfect resource for Vermont Commons School (VCS) in Burlington to come to know as VCS began a program to enroll and support refugee students at its school. There are a dozen girls’ schools pursuing the challenge of underrepresentation of young women in tech, science, research, and other STEM fields, and those working with the STEM Sisterhood at Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart (NJ) benefit from coordination with the GAINS program at Greenwich Academy (CT), and both should know what is going on in related initiatives at Harpeth Hall (TN) and Castilleja School (CA).
 
Wildwood School (CA) received an E.E. Ford Traditional Grant to help fund the first of its institutes, and three years later was awarded a Leadership Grant to expand its institute model. Meanwhile, Kent Denver School (CO) began its own institute program and received an E.E. Ford grant to develop an institute incubator.

I want all independent schools to know about the Athena Project at Deerfield Academy (MA), a web-based curriculum sharing tool supported initially by a 2015 Traditional E.E. Ford Grant and later by a 2018 Leadership Grant. Other schools in close geographic proximity could come to us to help them establish a consortium of partners offering blended classes, replicating the effort of BlendEd, which received an E.E. Ford Leadership Grant and in which several California Bay-area schools—The College Preparatory School, The Athenian School, Lick-Wilmerding High School, Marin Academy, and Urban School of San Francisco—are involved.

Even ideas that don’t seem like they are easily scalable deserve to be more broadly known. I think there are many independent schools that would benefit from knowing more about the micronet technology and high-altitude balloon experiments at Glenelg Country School (MD), the farm at Gill St. Bernard’s School (NJ) and the honey produced there, and the weeklong experiential education program at Germantown Academy (PA). These are but three schools I can mention when I randomly point my finger to schools that begin with the letter G that have recently received awards from us.

To promote these types of important independent school connections, we recently redesigned the E.E. Ford website and have made it possible to search funding projects by keywords. And starting this year, the foundation will have the option to dedicate one of its three annual meetings to focus on work other than the awarding of grants. In the future, we might, for example, make other Collaborative Innovation Grants as we did in the early days of the Mastery Transcript Consortium.

This is another facet of what I see that we can do. We know independent schools well. The E.E. Ford Foundation has been giving grants to NAIS schools since before there was an NAIS. In some regard, we can function as angel investors. St. Andrew’s Episcopal School (MD), for example, has a history of grants from us going back more than 30 years. Robert Kosasky and Glenn Whitman were deeply interested in expanding their Center for Transformative Teaching & Learning, and we awarded them a Leadership Grant to support CTTL in 2015. Subsequently, they have received additional six- and seven-figure grants from other foundations to take this excellent idea and related initiatives to a much higher and more ambitious level.

When I visit schools, I always meet with a group of students, and I often ask them my “magic wand” questions, one of which is, “What would you change about your school or about schools in general?” I love the answers I get, but I often find myself wanting to broadcast my own answer for independent schools generally. I’d like it to be easier for us to share good ideas, to more easily learn from our peers, to become a more coordinated network of independent schools pursuing our unique missions while reflecting our willingness to play well together by figuring out how this national (and international, though we focus only on the domestic) network of schools can be stronger together without having to give up any of our independence.
 

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The E.E. Ford Foundation Grant Recipients

Spring 2016 through November 2018 (inclusive)