What is one thing the country’s largest private foundation has in common with nearly every other foundation in the U.S.? The need for feedback to ensure it is implementing the smartest version of its strategy. In fall 2022 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...
Jen Wilka
The Kids Aren’t Alright – Philanthropy Can Help
The back-to-school scene as I dropped my daughter off for her first day of school this year was delightfully normal. For parents around the country, recent weeks marked the first back-to-school season since the end of COVID-19 as a public health emergency, and this is...
Rethinking What Constitutes Impact
This post was originally posted on the CEP blog in March 2021. Foundations and individual donors need to reconceive impact in a way that puts hearing firsthand the experiences of those they seek to help front and center. If any area illustrates this point, it is...
Rethinking What Constitutes Impact
Foundations and individual donors need to reconceive impact in a way that puts hearing firsthand the experiences of those they seek to help front and center. If any area illustrates this point, it is education. After all, listening to students should not be a radical...
Students Weigh in on COVID-19: It’s Time to Listen
What 20,000 students have to say about their learning experiences this spring is critical to the path ahead. Education in the United States, as across the globe, changed dramatically when the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools around the country to close this spring,...
As Learning Changes, It’s Time for Students to Weigh In
With schools gone virtual and live conversations with students no longer possible, listening to students can feel harder than ever. There is always an inherent challenge for teachers, administrators, and education funders in authentically listening to students, given...
Unlocking the Potential of Beneficiary Feedback
How can we better listen to, learn from, and act on feedback from those we seek to help? The topic of listening to beneficiaries has received increasing attention in recent years. CEP research conducted in 2014 showed that most grantees of major foundations were...
Listening to Beneficiaries: Student Feedback on College and Career Readiness
At YouthTruth, we believe that the best way to understand how students experience school is to go directly to the source and ask the students themselves. Since CEP developed YouthTruth in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2008, we’ve...
3 Questions to Guide Educators’ Use of Student Feedback
This post originally appeared on Education Week's "Finding Common Ground" blog. Education is one of the few industries, perhaps the only one, in which everyone has a firsthand experience and a valid opinion. That translates into lots of ideas from various stakeholders...
Learning from Student Voice: Most High Schoolers Feel Unprepared for College and Careers
School’s out for summer. At YouthTruth, that means time for reflection, innovation, and preparation for the year ahead — including taking a deeper look at the aggregate student perception data we’ve accrued from surveys of hundreds of thousands of students around the...
Transforming School Culture Through Student Feedback: One School’s Experience
Jen Vorse Wilka introduces a video of a high school principal talking about his experience with the YouthTruth survey and how feedback he collected from his students has allowed him to alter the culture of learning at his school.