Articles Explore How and Why to Support Equal Opportunities in Classrooms

NEW BOOKS

Gender and Educational Philanthropy: New Perspectives on Funding, Collaboration, and Assessment
edited by Alice E. Ginsberg and Marybeth Gasman

The contributors to this volume explore how grant makers can encourage educational equality between boys and girls, how they might respond to the different needs of both sexes, and how race and sexuality influence educational achievement.

The articles focus on collaboration between groups; different approaches to promoting gender parity; and involving youths in the grant-making and evaluation process.

Divided into two sections, the book devotes the first seven chapters to defining gender equity and examining how foundations can design their grant making to encourage it. The second half, in five chapters, focuses on collaboration and evaluating the effectiveness of grant-making programs.

In the first section, an article entitled “Grant Making With a Gender Lens” explores “how gender differences shape the prospects for effective programs and supporting social change — goals central to much of philanthropy.”

Submitted by GrantCraft, a nonprofit-consulting group that creates educational materials for foundations, the chapter concludes with a selection of lessons that foundations can take away, warning them that they should not exclude the needs of boys and men and that in addition to gender, considerations of race, class, sexual orientation, and other characteristics should also be part of any analysis of grant making.

Other chapters include case studies, media and policy analyses of efforts to promote gender parity, and an interview with the editors about gender equity in education.

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010; http://www.palgrave-usa.com; 261 pages; $69.95; ISBN 1-4039-7533-7.