The Ford Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, for example, each made $500,000 grants in 1999 to the College's National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, which creates an active, non-partisan forum for sharing and disseminating information about the highly politicized issue of privatization in education. This is a resource that is not currently available to the educators and politicians who are leading the school reform movement.

The DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund has been a long-time supporter of the College's Peace Corps Fellows Program, which brings former Peace Corps Fellows to careers as urban teachers of subjects for which there are teacher shortages. The Peace Corps Fellows Program is also funded by the Chase Manhattan Foundation.

The Hechinger Institute, which is designed to improve press coverage of education by bringing reporters to seminars at which they meet educators and discuss educational issues, received grants from many foundations and corporations in 1999, including the Carnegie Corporation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The Replications Project selects outstanding schools, enlarges them by adding a team of three teachers for a period of one year, and then replicates their cultures and programs by having that team open a new school. Several foundations, including the Charles Hayden, Tiger, Clark, and Gimbel Foundations, and the New York Community Trust, provided the operational funding necessary to begin the replication process of three New York City schools in 1999.

In addition, grant-supported scholarship funds and matching grants enable TC to recruit and prepare outstanding students for careers in education, regardless of their individual economic constraints.

By underwriting the costs associated with this work, private sector organizations demonstrate their support of TC's vision for the future of education.

Published Tuesday, Sep. 18, 2001