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Education

Widening access to high-quality education worldwide.

Every learner—from the struggling third-grader in East Palo Alto to the ambitious university student in sub-Saharan Africa—merits a high-quality education. That simple, but profound, conviction drives the strategic grantmaking in our Education Program.

To improve the education of individuals worldwide, we work to remove high-level barriers to their achievement: barriers in educational research, in institutions, in government policy, even in technology. Our progress in 2006 again proved the value of this targeted approach. Significant gains in our priority areas prepared the field for more extensive change—and benefited a widening circle of learners.

For example, this year we saw the increased value of funding Open Educational Resources, an international movement to provide educational materials on the Internet that the Foundation helped pioneer over four years ago. This movement combines the technologies that make high-quality materials accessible with the legal innovations that address copyright and intellectual property laws. This way, learning tools can be freely obtained—even reorganized and republished—by users around the world. Geography and limited resources no longer block someone’s desire to learn or teach.

Furthering this desire is also at the heart of our efforts in education reform. In urban school districts, in California community colleges, in the hallways where educational theory, policy, and finance are formulated, our grantees worked to secure the most vulnerable learners the advantages of the most fortunate. The resulting research, policy analyses, demonstration projects, and reform strategies described in this report point to real, measurable improvements in teaching and learning.

In 2006, the Education Program made grants totaling $48,079,100.