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

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

An Unfinished Canvas: Local Partnerships in Support of Arts Education in California

In 2006, at the request of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SRI International conducted a study aimed at assessing the status of arts education in California relative to state goals. The final report, An Unfinished Canvas. Arts Education in California: Taking Stock of Policy and Practice, revealed a substantial gap between policy and practice. The study found that elementary schools in particular are failing to meet state goals for arts education. In light of these findings, The Hewlett Foundation commissioned a series of follow-up studies to identify policy mechanisms or other means of increasing student access to arts education. This study, focusing on the ability of school districts to leverage support for arts education through partnerships with local arts organizations, is one of the follow-up studies.Partnerships may allow for the pooling of resources and lend support to schools in a variety of ways including artists-in-residency programs, professional development for teachers, exposing students to the arts through the provision of one-time performances at school sites, and organizing field trips to performances and exhibits. According to the California Visual and Performing Arts Framework for California Public Schools, partnerships among districts, schools, and arts organizations are most successful when they are embedded within a comprehensive, articulated program of arts education. Questions about the nature of partnerships that California districts and schools have been able to form with arts organizations, and the success of these partnerships to increase students' access to a sequential standards-based course of study in the four arts disciplines, served as the impetus for this study.A team of SRI researchers conducted case studies of partnerships between districts and arts organizations in six diverse California communities in spring 2008. The case study sites were selected for their particular arts education activities and diverse contexts and, as a result, do not offer generalizable data about partnerships between school districts and arts organizations in California. Instead, we highlight the ways that a sample of partnerships promotes arts education in California elementary schools to inform others who may be interested in building partnerships between school districts and arts organizations

Sustainability of Remote Aboriginal Art Centres in Australian Desert Communities

This PhD thesis investigates and analyses the functions and business practices that underpin the sustainability and performance of remote Aboriginal Art Centre Cooperatives. The thesis draws extensively on the work of Mazzarol et al (2011a; 2011b; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c) and develops a new culturally appropriate Combined Framework for use as a research tool that enables a systematic analysis of the sustainability of remote Aboriginal Art Centres