The Spencer Foundation announced today that its Board of Directors has voted unanimously to continue both the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship and the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship programs. This decision follows an intensive review of these programs as part of a broader consideration of Spencer's work in strengthening the future capacity of the educational research community. The Board and staff were greatly helped in their analysis by the many messages sent to us by members of the research community with comments and suggestions regarding our current programs and possible alternatives. The Foundation expresses its thanks to all who wrote.
The Foundation's work was greatly advanced by a consulting report prepared by Adam Gamoran and Sarah Bruch of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The authors analyzed the goals of Spencer's human capital development programs, reviewed the programs' histories, examined other fellowship programs in education and in other social science fields, and reported on empirical evidence on the effectiveness of Spencer's programs and of others. Larry Hedges of Northwestern University also contributed importantly to the study through his excellent regression discontinuity analyses of the impact of each of the fellowship programs on the careers of the scholars who were awarded fellowships. Both programs were found to have substantial and significant impacts on a variety of important outcomes, including numbers of publications, journal citations, attachment to the practice of research on education, and professional leadership in the field.
The Board therefore affirms its commitment to these programs with energy and enthusiasm. Details on the competitions to be conducted for the 2011-12 fellowship year are available on our website.
Finally, we must inform you that, after careful consideration, the Foundation has decided to end its recently introduced program of Exemplary Dissertation Fellowships. We are very proud of the talented scholars who have received these awards in the four years that we have piloted the program and we are grateful to the teams of outstanding scholars who have served on selection committees for the awards over that time. We have nonetheless come to the conclusion that the considerable time and money the Foundation has been investing in this program can be better invested in other directions.