Goals
The foundation is focused primarily on supporting education and medical research.
Among the foundation's initiatives are:
- The Milken Educator Awards, a teacher recognition program awarding $25,000 to individual educators for teaching excellence;
- TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement, a comprehensive school reform incorporating career advancement, collaborative professional development, teacher accountability and performance-based compensation;
- Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a cultural and historic project dedicated to preserving the diverse body of sacred and secular music inspired by 350 years of Jewish life in America;
- The Lowell Milken Center, an institution dedicated to the development of educational projects that feature unsung heroes as role models to 'repair the world.' Howard Cohen, Chancellor of Purdue University/Calumet, said about the LM Center: “History is not history until it is written or told. This is what you are doing so well with your unsung hero projects.”
The Milken Educator Awards has created a network of more than 2,400 teachers who have served as resources to policymakers, researchers, the media and general public on their subject areas.
The TAP system was profiled in Education Week for its comprehensive approach to school reform. The Center for American Progress released "Aligned by Design," a report by education researcher Craig Jerald that elaborated on this concept to specifically show how TAP's elements work together. South Carolina TAP was featured in TIME Magazine's February 2008 cover storyj. In 2006, BusinessWeek ranked TAP on its Top 10 List of Best Practices.
TAP's operating organization, the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching collaborates with other national education groups on teacher effectiveness issues. More than ten organizations co-wrote Creating a Successful Performance Compensation System for Educators, which lays out the essentials for an effective, comprehensive reform system.
Read more about this topic: Milken Family Foundation
Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)