About the Carnegie Foundation

The improvement of teaching and learning is central to all of the Foundation’s work. As we bring together researchers, teachers, policymakers and members of organizations with common interests in education, we work to invent new knowledge and to develop tools and ideas that allow us to foster positive change and enhanced learning in our nation’s colleges and schools. The Foundation seeks to be both an inspiration and catalyst as we work on issues of teaching and learning across regions, disciplines and levels of the education system.

Carnegie is an institution whose thinking and actions are organized around teaching and those who teach, from preschool to graduate school. Drawing on its historical mission, Carnegie is dedicated to the dignity of the profession of teaching and the cause of higher education.

Carnegie’s theory of change rests on our belief that educational leaders, in the classrooms, board rooms, and legislatures, would act far more intelligently and purposefully if they had: a better sense of what they were really doing; new ways of discerning how and what teachers and students were performing in their institutions; a richer understanding of what others were doing under similar as well as different circumstances; and thereby had access to better “visions of the possible” for the work they foster.

Carnegie is organized around the scholarship of teaching and learning. This concept of a scholarship of teaching and learning not only describes a type of research that the Foundation conducts and supports, but also a concept of moral action, as well as of dissemination and of cultural change. We have a “knowledge-building” agenda, an attempt to build a rigorous and dynamic field around teaching and learning. It is critical to understand that a scholarship of teaching is not synonymous with excellent teaching. Faculty frame and systematically investigate questions related to student learning not only to improve their own classrooms but to advance practice beyond them.

Carnegie is a conception of education as a continuous and interdependent system of institutions and people. No part of education can be significantly enhanced without addressing the power of those other parts of the system from which it draws and to which it contributes. The programs of the Foundation thus interact thematically, strategically, and methodologically.

Carnegie is a highly collaborative learning community of scholars and educators. From the frequent cross-staffing of our projects to the design of a physical space, program integration is fostered. The backgrounds of the staff members vary, from law to philosophy, from life-span developmental psychology to theoretical physics, from higher education to early childhood, from anthropology to English literature, from history to mathematical psychology. We have much to learn from one another and seek opportunities for those exchanges.

Carnegie is about both liberal education and professional education. All education worth pursuing is inherently liberal, just as it is intrinsically professional. It liberates even as it obliges, it enlightens even as it increases doubt and skepticism. It expects of both its students and its teachers that they profess their intelligence and understanding, their faith and their love, their values and their commitments.

Carnegie is an organization whose programs are long-term and cumulative. Our average program is projected for five years, long enough to move from descriptions to analyses, from thoughts to actions, and from actions to lessons learned and wisdom derived.

Contact Information

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
51 Vista Lane
Stanford, CA 94305
Phone: 650-566-5100
Fax: 650-326-0278
Map and directions

Our contact page provides a directory of Foundation contacts.