Steering Capital: Optimizing Financial Support for Innovation in Public Education

Examines efforts to align capital to education innovation and calls for clarity and agreement on problems, goals, and metrics; an effective R&D system; an evidence-based culture of continuous improvement; and transparent, comparable, and useful data

Supporting and Scaling Change: Lessons From the First Round of the Investing in Innovation (i3) Program

Assesses the degree to which the i3 program helped advance innovation in public education. Outlines takeaways, challenges, and recommendations for the Education Department and grantmakers, including optimizing support for different stages of innovation

Pull and Push: Strengthening Demand for Innovation in Education

Examines policy, information, and cultural barriers that minimize the "demand pull" for educational innovation. Calls for encouraging early adopters, bolstering smart adoption, providing better information, and rewarding productivity improvements

Paid Sick Days: Attitudes and Experiences

Analyzes survey findings on Americans' views on the importance of paid sick days as a basic workers' right and support for legislation guaranteeing paid sick days by age, race/ethnicity, income, education, family structure, and political affiliation

Expanding the Supply of High Quality Public Schools

Two levers that play critically important roles in determining how quickly and consistently successful schools and design models can be replicated. One is the degree of managerial responsibility, support, and control the organization chooses to exercise. The other is related to specificity of school design.This paper examines the school development landscape in the context of these levers, with examples of organizations that have chosen different paths with different tradeoffs and outcomes

The price elasticity of charitable giving: does the form of tax relief matter?

This paper uses a survey-based approach to test alternative methods of channeling tax relief to donors - as a tax rebate for the donor or as a matched payment to the receiving charity. On accounting grounds these two are equivalent but, in line with earlier experimental studies, we find that gross donations are significantly more responsive to a match change than to a rebate change. We show that the difference can largely be explained by the fact that a majority of donors do not adjust their nominal donations in response to a change in subsidy. This evidence adds to the growing empirical literature suggesting that consumers may not react to tax changes. In the case of tax subsidies for donations, this has implications for policy design - we show for the UK that a match-based system is likely to be more effective at increasing money going to charities.Charitable giving, tax subsidies, private provision of public goods

The price elasticity of charitable giving: does the form of tax relief matter?

This paper uses a survey-based approach to test alternative methods of channeling tax relief to donors – as a tax rebate for the donor or as a matched payment to the receiving charity. On accounting grounds these two are equivalent but, in line with earlier experimental studies, we find that gross donations are significantly more responsive to a match change than to a rebate change. We show that the difference can largely be explained by the fact that a majority of donors do not adjust their nominal donations in response to a change in subsidy. This evidence adds to the growing empirical literature suggesting that consumers may not react to tax changes. In the case of tax subsidies for donations, this has implications for policy design – we show for the UK that a match-based system is likely to be more effective at increasing the total amount of money going to charities.charitable giving, tax subsidies, price elasticity

Encouraging Social Innovation Through Capital: Using Technology to Address Barriers

Outlines how technology can help foster a robust capital market for public education innovation by improving content, linking technology with face-to-face networks, and streamlining transactions. Suggests steps for government, foundations, and developers

Exploring the feasibility of international collaboration and relationship building through a virtual partnership scheme

International collaboration is an under-studied component of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This study sheds light on the process of international collaboration by illustrating an exploratory approach to the process of forming and maintaining collaborative partnerships. Participants in this study were put into pairs (each one comprised of one individual from the University of Glasgow and another from the University of Wisconsin System) and asked to participate in email correspondence over the course of one year. The text of participants’ emails was pooled and analyzed through a general inductive approach using NVivo software. The study, though small in nature, helps to illustrate and further understand international collaborative relationships. We offer suggestions for future international collaborations and discuss the implications of emphasizing such partnerships within SoTL

Family religious involvement and the quality of family relationships for early adolescents

Examination of association between the religious involvement (number of family religious activities, parental worship service attendance and parental prayer) and quality of family relationships with results indicating that religiously involved families of adolescents (ages 12-14) living in the U.S. are more like to have stronger family relationships than families that are not religiously active