The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research centre whose aim is to build a field around the use of improvement science and networked improvement communities to solve longstanding inequities in educational outcomes. It was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress. Improving teaching and learning has always been Carnegie’s motivation and heritage.
The Carnegie Foundation advocates for the use of improvement science to accelerate how a field learns to improve. Improvement science is explicitly designed to accelerate learning-by-doing and address problems of practice, it is a more user-centred and problem-centred approached to improving teaching and learning. The overall goal is to develop the necessary know-how for a reform idea ultimately to spread faster and more effectively. Since improvement research is an iterative process often extending over considerable periods of time, it is also referred to as continuous improvement.
Carnegie believes that the most effective and efficient way to organize improvement efforts is through networked improvement communities (NICs), a colleagueship of expertise building on the hard work and creativity of many. These are intentionally designed social organizations, each with a distinct problem-solving focus. As formal organizations, NICs have roles, responsibilities, and norms for membership and their features frame them as a scientific learning community. They maintain narratives that exemplify what they are about and why it is important to affiliate with them.
Since 2008, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been at the forefront of an emerging movement in education. In this regard, its mission is to promote the methods of improvement science in education and to foster the formation and growth of networked communities dedicated to making headway on longstanding inequities in educational outcomes associated with race, ethnicity, and poverty.
Carnegie Foundation’s work today builds on these efforts of advancing improvement science with thousands of school district leaders, principals, teachers, policymakers, and researchers across the country and around the world.