Grant Details

The Spencer Foundation invests in education research that cultivates learning and transforms lives. The Spencer Foundation provides funding for education-focused research projects, research training fellowships, and additional field-building initiatives. 

Both the Large and Small Research Grants on Education are field-initiated,” meaning that proposal submissions are not in response to a specific request for a particular research topic, discipline, design, or method. The Foundation's goal for this program is to support rigorous, intellectually ambitious and technically sound research that is relevant to the most pressing questions and compelling opportunities in education. They seek to support scholarship that develops new foundational knowledge that may have a lasting impact on educational discourse. 

The Spencer Foundation has various programs through which they award funding, including:

• Vision Grants: Vision Grants are research planning grants to bring together a team, for 6 to 12 months, to collaboratively develop ambitious, large-scale research projects focused on transforming educational systems toward greater equity. Different from many of our other programs, the proposal does not yet need to be a fully fleshed out research plan. Proposals are identifying a research topic, scope for impact, process and a team that will lead to a fully fleshed out research plan by the end of the grant period.
• Racial Equity Research: This program supports rigorous, intellectually ambitious, and technically sound research that is relevant to the most pressing questions and compelling opportunities in relation to racial equity in education. They encourage proposals from across the methodological spectrum, including qualitative methods, mixed-methods, and quantitative methods. They especially encourage proposals that utilize QuantCrit methods, social network analysis, geo-spatial mapping, and other quantitative methods that use critical lenses.
• Large Research Grants on Education: This program supports education research projects that will contribute to the improvement of education, broadly conceived, with budgets ranging from $125,000 to $500,000 for projects ranging from one to five years.
• Small Research Grants on Education: This program supports education research projects that will contribute to the improvement of education, broadly conceived, with budgets ranging from $50,000 for projects ranging from one to five years.
• Collaborative Research for Educational Change: They anticipate that research conducted through this program will result in new insights into the processes, practices, and policies that improve education for learners, educators, families, communities, and institutions where learning and teaching happen (e.g., schools, universities, museums, other workplaces).