The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Transforming an Ailing School District

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When the Hewlett Foundation decided to intervene in the Ravenswood City School District in East Palo Alto, the little district was struggling with low test scores, low English-language proficiency, and high turnover of a polarized and demoralized faculty.

That was 2003, when the Foundation funded the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to embark on a multiyear plan to help turn around Ravenswood.

Today, thanks to the intensive involvement of the New Teacher Center, which supports the Ravenswood faculty with an array of professional development skills, schools in the 4,500-student elementary and middle school district have a new start. Annual teacher and administrator retention rose from 27 percent when the work began to 87 percent in the 2005–6 school year, standardized test scores are sharply up, and both student and faculty expectations have been transformed.

In its 2006 interim report to the Foundation, the Center reported, "The district culture is changing from one of mandates and negativity to a culture of support and an understanding of the need to invest in human capital at every level."

Connecting Educators Worldwide

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In 1999, Richard Baraniuk, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, had an idea for fellow educators around the world to share educational materials via a Web site, and Connexions was born. The project combines unique software to manage documents with an innovative legal framework that enables anyone to reorganize and republish the materials to create textbooks, courses, lesson plans, and study guides.

Since then, with the support of the Hewlett Foundation, Baraniuk’s pet project has become part of an international Open Educational Resources movement that the Foundation helped launch. Today the site attracts a half million unique visitors each month. To date, the Foundation has invested more than $75 million to help more than 1,350 grant recipients worldwide advance this movement to make location and money no barrier to education.

In 2006, The Tech Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley presented Connexions, still a Hewlett Foundation partner, with one of its annual awards honoring the use of technology to benefit humanity.