Spencer Foundation

Since it was established in 1971, the Spencer Foundation has sought to support high-quality, innovative research with the potential to improve education. In pursuing that goal, we have always had broad ideas about the questions such research might ask, the methods it might use, and the ways in which we might support it. 

A broad approach to supporting education research reflects our awareness that the educational enterprise itself is complex; it depends on students’ cognitive development, cultural values, and social backgrounds, teachers’ practices, knowledge, and attitudes, institutional structures, educational politics, markets for educated workers, and more. On one hand, this means that, in order to realize our goal of advancing understanding that leads to educational improvement, we must be open to a wide variety of research. On the other hand, because education is a complex process, we seek proposals that can help to describe and explain that complexity in meaningful ways that can lead to improvement.