Vision Grants

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. 

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

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 understand better 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.

While the Vision Grant program stands on its own to spark research ideas and collaborations, being awarded a Vision Grant is also a prerequisite for applying to the Foundation's Transformative Research Grant program (TRG, $3.5 million), which are designed for large-scale research projects that transform education systems for equity.

For more information, see: https://www.spencer.org/grant_types/vision-grants.pdf#page=2