The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) is one of the oldest and most influential nonprofit organizations in American education. ^{1 2}

Originally founded in 1905 by Andrew Carnegie to provide pension funds for university professors and administrators, CFAT quickly evolved into an educational research, policy development and advocacy institution that is generally credited with inventing, implementing or popularizing fundamental educational policies and practices such as credit hours, standardized testing, university accreditation standards, the modern system of medical and dental education, the Graduate Record Exam, and Pell Grants. ^{3 4}

History

Founding and Early Years

In 1906, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was chartered by Congress at the request of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who provided $15 million to launch the nonprofit (equivalent to an amount on the order of $500 million in 2024 dollars). ^{5 6}

Carnegie originally intended the foundation to serve as a pension fund for college professors and other higher education professionals, who at the time generally received low wages and had little financial stability. ⁷ The Carnegie Foundation did so by founding the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, which would become TIAA-CREF. ⁸

This had a long-term impact on American higher education as TIAA’s bylaws prohibited it from working with colleges or universities that were controlled by a religious organization or that imposed theological requirements on students or faculty. ⁹ This pushed a number of colleges and universities to disassociate or distance themselves from their founding denominations in order to have access to the TIAA pension system. ¹⁰

In 1918, a year before Carnegie’s death, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching spun TIAA into an independent nonprofit to focus on the educational reform component of its mission. ¹¹

Influence on U.S. Education Policy

Under its Congressional charter, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is directed to “do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education.” ¹²

In its first few decades of existence, CFAT played a critical role in modernizing and professionalizing America’s educational system. Its first major impact came in 1910, when Abraham Flexner’s “Medical Education in the United States and Canada” report identified major flaws with the education and training of doctors across North America. ¹³ The Flexner Report is generally considered to have sparked the transformation of America’s medical schools into the modern model. ¹⁴ Subsequent CFAT reports had similar impacts on the teaching of engineering, dentistry, law, and other professions. ¹⁵

CFAT also played major roles in formalizing education as a topic of academic study; expanding of undergraduate, graduate and doctoral educational degrees;  and credentialing educators. ¹⁶

In 1937, CFAT created the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), which universities use to assess candidates for master’s degrees. ¹⁷ As the G.I. Bill expanded college admissions after World War II, CFAT, the American Council on Education, and the College Board created the Educational Testing Service. The new organization took over administration of the GRE as well as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the National Teachers Examination, and other standardized tests. ¹⁸

In the 1960s, research and policy development work by CFAT led to the creation of Pell Grants as the foundation for federal student aid programs. ¹⁹

In the 1970s, CFAT began advocating for significantly larger federal involvement in funding and regulating education, which to that point had largely been viewed as a state and local issue. ²⁰

During this time, it developed the “Carnegie Classification” that divides institutions of higher education into specific categories such as doctoral-granting institutions, comprehensive universities and colleges, liberal arts colleges, two-year colleges and institutions, professional schools, and other specialized institutions. ²¹ These classifications are used by many government agencies to administer funding and regulatory environments. CFAT managed the Carnegie Classification system until 2022, when it transferred those programs to the American Council on Education. ²²

This accelerated under the leadership of Ernest L. Boyer, who had been the last person to hold the role of Commissioner of Education within the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare before President Jimmy Carter created the U.S. Department of Education with CFAT’s support in 1979. ²³ Boyer worked as CFAT’s president from 1980 until his death in 1995. ²⁴ In interviews, Boyer argued that inequities in educational opportunities between different parts of a state or regions of the country justified increased centralization of control over education funding. ²⁵

In 1988, Boyer gave a widely publicized speech at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education titled “An Imperiled Generation.” ²⁶ In it, he called for full federal funding of Head Start; expanded federal nutrition programs for mothers and infants; decreased class sizes; federal funding for Pre-K, after-school, and summer programs; a federal program to provide summer fellowships for teachers in urban schools; increased federal funding for colleges that admitted more students from inner-city schools; and an “urban youth service corps for college students to volunteer or teach a term in inner-city schools.” ²⁷

Boyer was also influential in the creation of the “common core” national undergraduate curriculum in the 2010s. While CFAT did not have a formal leadership role in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, Boyer’s 1987 book College: The Undergraduate Experience in America had identified the lack of a national core curriculum as one of the challenges facing new college students of that era. ²⁸

CFAT is working on developing a replacement for the “Carnegie Unit” credit hour system first developed in 1906 that that is based on students learning from teachers in classrooms. ²⁹ In a 2022 interview with EducationWeek, CFAT president Timothy Knowles said that CFAT was developing a system to replace credit hours with one that could potentially value student experiences “on a social justice project, or in an apprenticeship or internship in high school in the summer, or a summer job, or a farm.” ³⁰ Knowles added that this might redefine teachers’ roles so that they are “no longer singularly responsible for delivering all of the content in a particular discipline or even across disciplines,” but rather were seen as part of a larger educational environment. ³¹

School Choice

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was long seen by educational reformers as being opposed to school choice programs. In 1992, CFAT published a critical analysis of school choice programs such as charter schools and educational voucher programs titled “School Choice: A Special Report.” ³² Billed as “the most comprehensive review to date on school choice,” media coverage focused on survey findings that 70 percent of parents did not want to send their child to a different school. ³³

School choice advocates criticized the report, accusing it of bias and failures in research design, as well as for holding charter schools and voucher program outcomes to much higher standards than failing public schools in the same communities. ^{34 35}

CFAT has become more open to school choice, especially public charter schools, as its research has identified benefits to educational choice policies that provide educators, students, and families with more flexibility. ³⁶ CFAT’s board chair, Diane Tavenner, is the founder and CEO of the Summit Public Schools charter school network. ³⁷

Funding

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was originally endowed by Andrew Carnegie with $15 million in 1905. Throughout its existence, CFAT has continued to receive significant support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was set up by Andrew Carnegie to serve as a funding mechanism for his various philanthropies. ^{38 39}

Over more than a century in operation, CFAT has received grants and other funding from a wide variety of donors and government agencies. Donors to CFAT have included Atlantic Philanthropies, ⁴⁰ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ⁴¹ John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, ⁴² William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ⁴³ and the William T. Grant Foundation. ⁴⁴

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