Bush Foundation’s School Design for Student Centered Learning Program: Executive Summary

Since 2016, the focus of the Bush Foundation’s education initiative has been making education more relevant for students throughout its region of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the 23 Native nations that share the same geography. In pursuit of this aim, the Foundation invested in intermediary organizations that partnered with schools and learning environments, to build capacity for and facilitate implementation of student-centered learning.
Over the course of the investment period, seven intermediary organizations were ultimately supported to work with over 80 sites and serve an estimated 50,000 students. Alongside these efforts, the Foundation partnered with Social Policy Research Associates (SPR) from 2019-2022 to: 1) document the story of how intermediaries were building sites’ capacity to attend to student agency, strengthen educator leadership and practice, and transform learning environments; 2) deepen the Foundation’s understanding of the intermediary investment strategy to inform future education initiatives; and 3) highlight successes, challenges, and lessons learned to contribute to learning for the Foundation, its grantees, and the field.