Spencer Foundation: Vision Grants

The Vision Grants program is designed to support the field in producing research that disrupts long-standing inequities toward more just and equitable systems. While we are in a time of major challenges in education, we are also in a moment of possibility. We believe that visionary and cross-disciplinary/multi-method scholarship, conducted in generative collaboration with stakeholders in the field, including policy-makers, practitioners, and communities, can contribute to reimagining and transforming educational systems toward equity. 

Vision Grants will provide planning funds for teams to develop proposals for research projects that: 

• Are focused on key challenges and opportunities that have the potential for increasing equity in education
• Engage across disciplines and/or research methods
• Collaborate with practitioners, policymakers, and communities (and other stakeholders)
• Have clear sightlines to transformational change through research at a systemic level

We imagine that research projects developed with these planning grants will consist of a range of project types. We expect that these grants will go far beyond solely documenting inequality, to instead make significant movement toward policy, practice, or pedagogical change in a way that transforms an education system or systems. We also expect that a range of disciplinary perspectives would be thoughtfully employed, and that these research projects will require multiple methods. Ideal projects will engage across disciplinary traditions or methods, rather than utilizing one disciplinary perspective or lens and/or one methodological tradition.  

The Vision Grants allow teams to join together and generate ideas for collaborative scholarship that develops a new vision of what equitable educational systems can look like, consider which disciplines have taken up these issues previously (and why they have fallen short or encountered limitations), and foreground important ideas that will allow new and ambitious research to emerge. For example, Vision Grants might lead to research projects that:

• Develop a new policy, pedagogical approach, practice, or intervention, e.g., at the K-12 or post-secondary level, that has the potential to have a transformative and systemic impact and explore the feasibility of implementing it at the state or local level, or within a system.
• Build upon approaches or policies that have worked well in one setting, with the goal of studying them in a range of settings to better understand how, where, and with whom they work and why.
• Work in partnership with youth at the city, state or federal level to reimagine the choices young people have to learn beyond school.
• Work with communities to co-design approaches that improve educational equity by working across sectors (e.g., education and health, housing, criminal justice).
• Connect scholars with legal teams to impact litigation strategies in local, state, or federal contexts of educational inequity.
• Rethink effective approaches to teacher and educational leader preparation, learning, and development, and partner with systems of teacher and leader preparation and/or accreditation to enact changes that would increase the diversity and robustness of the educator and leader pathways.

These are just examples. We welcome proposals that consider creative ways to understand and solve complex problems with the goal of reimagining and transforming education systems for equity.