Recognizing the challenge that nonprofit and public-sector leaders face in engaging the American public in meaningful education reforms, an influential group of philanthropic leaders came together to partner with the FrameWorks Institute in developing an effective new ways of talking about this critical issue: a new Core Story of Education.
With funding from Nellie Mae, Ford, Hewlett, Mott, Kellogg, NoVo and Raikes Foundations; significant previous related funding from Lumina and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and recently-added funding from the Noyce Foundation, this collaborative endeavor has supported extensive quantitative and qualitative research to identify how to reframe critical issues in education reform.
The resulting, research-based reframing strategy is The Core Story of Education: a narrative framework that orients a wide variety of expert communications around a consistent set of tested message elements, thus organizing and amplifying the potential of the education sector to redefine and reinvigorate the public conversation on teaching and learning. These new research findings add vital communications tools and strategies to aid education experts and reform advocates who have struggled in recent years to counter the harmful narratives that now constrain public understanding of the education system.
Telling Stories Out of School: Reframing the Education Conversation through a Core Story Approach
This toolkit provides a compendium of tools, resources, and media for both communicators who specialize in a specific area of education as well as those interested in more general communications.
Putting It Back Together Again is a multi-media MessageMemo that unifies all the work on assessment, skills and learning, learning space and time, teachers and teaching, equity and disparities and the system’s goals and reforms. It explains how Americans think about key aspects of education: where and when it takes place, how it happens, how we know it happens, what promotes it, what impedes it and with what consequences for society. And it explains the reframing devices – Values, Explanatory Metaphors, etc. – that we have developed to direct that thinking toward more effective policies and reforms.