Efficacy Institute

CONTACT:

182 Felton Street
Waltham, MA 02453
(781) 547-6060
www.efficacy.org

Jeff Howard, Founder

DESCRIPTION:

The Efficacy Institute (EI) is another "Massachusetts original" national charity — providing training and consulting to (mainly) urban school systems, to improve academic performance and students' intellectual development.

EI was founded in 1985, with ideas based on a Harvard doctoral dissertation in social psychology, challenging the notion that human intelligence is fixed and immutable, and cannot be improved. EI's message is: Smart is not something you just are; Smart is something you can get, if you know how. EI has trained over 30,000 teachers, students, and parents, in more than 50 school districts and many community agencies nationwide. In Detroit for example, students in five Efficacy-trained schools improved standardized reading scores at a rate about four times that of non-Efficacy schools. In St. Louis, Efficacy training helped students in eight of the lowest-achieving elementary schools improve their math and reading scores at twice the rate of the total district.

Developed people are educated and principled. They use education to get the knowledge they need to understand the world, and to get the skills they need to make a living. They live by principles that make them positive factors in the lives of others. They work to make their communities healthy places in which to live.

(2001: CULTURE: Education: Formal: School-Related)