Unpacking the Koret Task Force Model:
Task Force Strategy -- Academic Style
Perspectives
"By using academic and administrative structures already in place at the institution, a task force leverages previously budgeted assets to create a disproportionate amount of focused, significant scholarly work on prevailing policy issues and empowers the team of scholars to participate strategically with the director in defining the group’s goals."
-- John Raisian
Tad and Dianne Taube Director, Hoover Institution
From the President
The Koret Foundation is committed to creating innovative approaches to solving entrenched problems. The inefficiencies and failures of the American education system are certainly both complex and long-standing; our partnership with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University has generated a targeted approach to untangling these multifaceted challenges.
Our 1999 partnership with Hoover envisioned a new model for academic engagement with current policy issues. By bringing together leading education scholars from around the country, we created a venue with Hoover in which these experts could converse, argue, and, most of all, learn from each other as they tackled the complex issues facing K–12 education. Over the past eight years, the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education has produced highly acclaimed, award-winning, influential work that has changed the landscape of the K–12 education arena.
In this current issue of Perspectives, John Raisian, the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, outlines the origins, activities, and future of the task force model, while Koret Task Force Chair Chester Finn Jr. provides an insider’s perspective on the lively and often provocative atmosphere within a task force.
We congratulate the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education on its contributions to the national debate, and we look forward to the fresh perspectives emerging from the Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security, as well as Hoover’s other new task forces.
-- Tad Taube, PresidentKoret Foundation
By John Raisian
Tad and Dianne Taube Director, Hoover Institution
Stanford University
An enterprise steeped in academic tradition, the Hoover Institution seeks to determine how, as an academic organization, it can proactively provide pertinent information as well as advice on policy decisions to our society. By recruiting extraordinary intellectual talent, the Hoover Institution has been able to convene scholars, resident and nonresident, and to induce them to combine their efforts within a task force — or “virtual faculty” — with specific objectives defined in advance by the institution and the task force membership. Such task force strategies represent a novel way to organize the institution’s academically oriented research.
The Task Force Model
In the task force model, Hoover fellows and other scholars split into teams that work together on commonly defined, fully integrated topics and projects, rather than working on complementary research agendas patched together according to individual interest. A scholarly chairperson, who is also a member of the group, and a managing director, who organizes the task force’s human and financial resources, lead the task force.
By using academic and administrative structures already in place at the institution, a task force leverages previously budgeted assets to create a disproportionate amount of focused, significant scholarly work on prevailing policy issues and empowers the team of scholars to participate strategically with the director in defining the group’s goals. A task force thus instills a collective approach that focuses on an institutional agenda while also allowing the greater involvement of others, including task force investors and the institution’s directors.