Our Charter

IVA’s capacity for success is also a function of a recent grant of a little over $ 1 million from the John Templeton Foundation. More than $ 600,000 of the grant will go directly to IVA (pending petition approval) and an additional $ 400,000 will go to Loyola Marymount University (LMU) to sponsor a series of events involving scholars and teachers that will immediately and significantly benefit IVA. We will discuss these two parts of the grant project in turn, highlighting their impact on IVA’s capacity for success.

The grant will fund the salaries of IVA’s Principal, a part-time Administrative Assistant, and a part-time Development Officer for the first two years of the school’s operation. The Development Officer will be in charge of seeking out and applying for additional grant funding, coordinating fundraising efforts at IVA, and creating a comprehensive and sustainable fundraising program for the school. The grant also includes substantial funding for a school website ($ 13,000) and advertising and marketing ($ 30,000 per year for three years). These generous budget items will ensure a very strong start for IVA, allowing us to spread the word, generate interest, and build enrollment. Finally, the grant will pay for a weeklong, onsite professional consultation with Harvard’s Ron Ritchhart, the world’s foremost expert on intellectual character and education. Ritchhart will observe classes, meet with and interview teachers and administrators, offer comprehensive written feedback and recommendations, and provide staff training. Taken as a whole, this funding will allow IVA to reach a large audience, provide necessary “bridge funding” as the school grows and builds enrollment, produce a sound long-term fundraising plan, and provide expert consultation and assistance with the implementation of IVA’s unique educational model.

The part of the Templeton grant that will go to LMU will sponsor several events and activities related to intellectual virtues and education. This includes a weeklong academic workshop to be held in July of 2012, a major academic conference in the summer of 2013, and the publication of an edited book volume. These events will assemble leading scholars from across the globe in mainstream philosophy, the philosophy of education, and educational theory and psychology. They are aimed at producing the first comprehensive and systematic articulation of an intellectual virtues educational model. And they will give special emphasis to the very practical question of how intellectual virtues can best be fostered in an educational setting. IVA will be a direct beneficiary of these events, as they will yield cutting edge educational research on an intellectual virtues approach to education—research that will immediately be utilized and implemented at IVA. 

This part of the grant will also fund a series of week-long and one-day “pedagogy seminars” held at LMU and spread out over the course of two years. These seminars, which are directed by IVA founding members Jason Baehr and Steve Porter, will bring together 15 junior high or high school teachers and administrators from Long Beach and Los Angeles to be instructed in, experiment with, and provide feedback on an intellectual virtues approach to education. Among the individuals that Baehr and Porter have already selected to participate are numerous teachers and two administrators that have expressed a significant interest in working at IVA. Because the seminars will begin in the summer of 2012, they will effectively serve as a comprehensive training module for IVA’s first generation of teachers and administrators.

IVA will also benefit tremendously from the writing of an “Implementation Guide” for an intellectual virtues educational model. During the 2012-2013 academic year, Baehr will be on a grant-sponsored academic leave, his primary task being to write, along with education expert and Harvard researcher Ron Ritchhart, a comprehensive “how to” guide for the implementation of an intellectual virtues approach to education. The Guide will spell out in careful and concrete detail what intellectual virtues are, why they matter, and how they can be fostered in an educational setting. It will address, among many other things, how intellectual virtue concepts can be brought to bear on pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. While intended for a broad audience, the Implementation Guide will serve as a manual for the implementation of IVA’s educational vision. Finally, the grant will also fund an “Intellectual Virtues and Education Resource Page,” which will be a one-stop online resource for teachers and scholars interested in learning more about or implementing an intellectual virtues approach to education (the Implementation Guide will be available for download on this site). This resource will also prove extremely useful to IVA administrators, teachers, students, and parents.

This grant project is a major event in the world of education. It is bringing together top scholars from across the globe, as well as many local educators and administrators, to reflect on the importance of intellectual virtues to education and to identify “best practices” for fostering intellectual virtues in an educational setting. All of these events and resources are designed to culminate in the implementation of intellectual virtues educational model at IVA. Thus they have the potential to bring an extraordinary amount of very positive and exciting attention to the city of Long Beach, to LBUSD, and to IVA.