Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching

The engineering study sought to develop multiple views of engineering programs in the U.S. with the goal of describing common teaching and learning practices in engineering education. The centerpiece of the study was in-depth case studies or portraits of six schools carefully chosen to represent different kinds of excellence in undergraduate engineering education. EDUCATING ENGINEERS is planned to be published by Jossey-Bass in 2008. Sheri Shepherd was the consulting scholar and lead investigator of the project. She was assisted by Kate Whitin.

The project aimed to appraise and improve the relationship between philanthropic foundations and K-12 and higher education institutions. A conference, "Foundations and Education, was hosted, and a book of essays on the subject published by Jossey-Bass in 2006.

Completed in 2003, the Carnegie Foundation's new facility in the Stanford foothills was designed by Seidel-Holzman, architects. Landscape architects were by Royston Hanamoto Alley and Abey.

Seminar participants explored the teaching of practical reasoning from various professional viewpoints.

Carnegie Foundation is a philanthropic trust set up by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 as a pension fund for college teachers; in 1906 it was renamed the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) and began to sponsor educational studies, many of which have profoundly influenced American educational standards and policies. For the first few years of the CFAT existence, its principal function was in selecting eligible institutions and establishing rules for receiving retirement allowances. The resulting financial obligations ended up being greatly in excess of the CFAT resources. By 1917, the CFAT trustees, after an extensive study, concluded that a pension system paid out of income at no cost to beneficiary is expensive beyond all estimates and anticipation. In 1917-1918, under an arrangement negotiated by Andrew Carnegie and the CFAT the Carnegie Corporation of New York gave $1 million to found the Teachers Insurance Annuity Association of America (now TIAA-CREF), an occupation-wide contributory plan. The second purpose of the foundation, educational inquiry, was furthered by its efforts in surveying professional education and fostering professional standards in medicine (Flexner, 1910), law (Reed, 1921), engineering (Mann, 1918), and teaching. The CFAT was controlled by a self-perpetuating board of 25 trustees, chiefly presidents of colleges and universities. When Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) was founded in 1911, it shared the office space with the Foundation, and it was written in its constitution that the CFAT president would always hold one of the CCNY trustee seats. Pritchett was the first CFAT president who served at the CCNY trustee, followed by Henry Suzzallo (1930-1933), Walter A. Jessup (1933-1944), and Oliver Carmichael (1945-1953). Since 1955, the CCNY president John W. Gardner and then Alan Pifer served as "part-time" presidents of CFAT, with administrative responsibilities, while Clark Kerr was responsible for program. Throughout the late sixties and seventies, the Carnegie Foundation enjoyed renewed prominence due to the timely policy studies by the Carnegie Commission of Higher Education (and the subsequent Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education) both directed by Clark Kerr and funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York. The CFAT was closely affiliated with CCNY until the early 1980s, when it moved to new separate headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1997, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been located in California.

CASTL represents a major initiative of The Carnegie Foundation. Launched in 1998, the program builds on a conception of teaching as scholarly work as proposed in the 1990 report, SCHOLARSHIP RECONSIDERED, by former Carnegie Foundation President Ernest Boyer, and on the 1997 follow-up publication, SCHOLARSHIP ASSESSED, by Charles Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, and Gene Maeroff.

The Foundation's two-year study of legal education involved a comprehensive look at teaching and learning in American and Canadian law schools today. Field work was conducted at a cross-section of 16 law schools during the 1999-2000 academic year. The study provides an opportunity to rethink "thinking like a lawyer, " the educational construct currently employed, which affords students powerful intellectual tools while also shaping education and professional practice in subsequent years. Findings from the study were released in the book, EDUCATING LAWYERS, PREPARATION FOR THE PROFESSION OF LAW, published by Jossey-Bass in March 2007.

The CASTL program for K-12 teachers and teacher educators supports the development of ideas and expertise that contribute to improved K-12 education and teacher preparation and development. Working with teachers and teacher educators who are skilled at teaching diverse groups of students and well-connected to national networks in which to share their work, CASTL K-12/TE works toward creating an infrastructure to support the scholarly examination of teaching and learning. Participating K-12 teachers in a variety of subject areas create products that serve as resources to other educators and policymakers and provide examples to improve teaching and schools.

The project aimed to establish a multi-media teaching format for the study of various pedagogical methods. It was jointly funded by the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund and by the Carnegie Foundation.

Biographical/Historical note

The Carnegie Classification has been the leading framework for recognizing and describing institutional diversity in U.S. higher education for the past four decades. Starting in 1970, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education developed a classification of colleges and universities to support its program of research and policy analysis. Derived from empirical data on colleges and universities, the Carnegie Classification was originally published in 1973, and subsequently updated in 1976, 1987, 1994, 2000, 2005, and 2010 to reflect changes among colleges and universities. This framework has been widely used in the study of higher education, both as a way to represent and control for institutional differences, and also in the design of research studies to ensure adequate representation of sampled institutions, students, or faculty.