Project on Schooling and Children Receives Grant

The Harvard Project on Schooling and Children recently received $161,500 from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City-based foundation focusing on youth development, to support a new project as part of its Boundaries Task Force.

The project, called Hit or Miss? Examining the Influence of School, Social Service, and Community Interventions on behalf of Children's Learning and Well-Being, aims to achieve a better understanding of the impact of various interventions at the intersection of school, social service, parent involvement, and community building initiatives.

Focusing primarily on interventions designed to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children and children living in high-risk, urban neighborhoods, the Boundaries Task Force will review a broad array of existing literature on current efforts with the goal of identifying the major themes of action that undergird various initiatives. The Task Force will choose six to twelve initiatives that, through reputational as well as empirical data on outcomes for children, serve as exemplars of successful intervention approaches.

Professor of Education Richard Elmore will serve as principal investigator, and Lisbeth Schorr, director of the Harvard Project on Effective Interventions at the Medical School, will serve as co-principal investigator for the two-year grant. Elmore and Schorr will be joined by nine other Harvard University faculty members and several research assistants as they investigate exemplary interventions and interview program leaders to identify the philosophical and practical frameworks to which they attribute their success.

"Finding out what makes one particular intervention successful and another not is essential to improving children's lives. Practitioners, policymakers, and public and private funders need to know what interventions are successful and why, so that they can design programs and make policy and funding decisions that will produce the best possible outcomes for children," says Schorr. To ensure that the findings of the Boundaries Task Force reach the widest possible audience, the group plans broad dissemination, including a conference, video, Website, commissioned papers, and a final report.

Katherine Merseth, executive director of the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children, says, "Because Boundaries Task Force members come from academic fields ranging from education to medicine, from public health to law, from public policy to psychology, they bring a full range of perspectives, experience, and access to scholarship that will make this work unique in its ability to document, analyze, portray, and disseminate important new information about interventions and their outcomes for children."

For more information, contact the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children at 496-4938.