Yesterday was an important day for a couple reasons: 1. It was the due date for Clear Fund Round One applications (excepting the applicants who’ve been given extensions, which so far is everyone who’s asked for one). About 1/3 of the charities we invited to apply have submitted; we have 33 submissions for Cause 1,…
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Two questions about education
Researching Cause 4 has been frustrating. On one hand, I immediately ran right into a pretty terrific overview of what’s known about how to improve high schools. On the other hand, I have a couple burning questions that I’m struggling to answer, and I’d appreciate any thoughts. 1. How does the achievement gap break down…
Anonymity rocks
I’ve been flooding our readers lately, so today I just want to brag a little bit about an aspect of our application process. We provide a public online discussion forum as one way for our applicants to ask questions and give feedback. One of the advantages of that it lets our applicants criticize us anonymously…
My favorite cause
This is a response to the Giving Carnival topic I posted a couple days ago. I’m passionate about all of the 2007 Clear Fund causes, and about many others as well, but the one that revs me up the most is inner-city education in wealthy societies. The reasons for this are complicated and tough to…
Giving Carnival 8/07: Bare your soul
This blog is hosting the Giving Carnival this week. The Giving Carnival is a horrible name for the following: the host chooses a topic, anyone who wants to writes/submits a post on that topic, and the host posts links to the ones he wants to (in a space this small, generally everyone) with commentary. It’s…
Wanna get pumped about GiveWell?
Read the debate over at Tactical Philanthropy, on the following question: Clarity in charity – good or bad? (My wording.) It reminds me of when I used to read really old arguments for democracy and free speech (I’m talking about Locke, John Stuart Mill, etc.) and think, “Huh, there were people who disagreed with this…