For many years Lowell Milken has been a strong force in the field of education. Milken had considered creating a center that would foster teaching excellence and quality student performance in America's schools and in 2007 that vision became a reality with the opening of the Lowell Milken Center. The center operates a wide range of projects which aim to change the world by teaching the importance of understanding and respecting all people.
The Lowell Milken Center believes that when schools use available resources properly and imaginatively they can prepare students for the changing world by providing them with a successful and meaningful educational experience. The Center emphasizes elements that are not adequately addressed by the present educational system, principally the goals of regarding each person as an equal regardless of that individual's race, nationality or creed.
The Lowell Milken Center strives to produce superior educational performance by rewarding teachers and students who create learning models that stimulate the students' analytical skills and produce quality research material.
The Center invites individual students and groups of students to develop a project of interest in conjunction with the Lowell Milken Center. Project options may include performances, documentaries, exhibits, essays or websites and focus on individuals who have impacted the world around them but, for some reason, have not received adequate recognition. Students are required to maintain records of their research which should include a project outline, research that involves both primary and secondary resources, data analysis and a thesis.
Students and their teachers are rewarded for submitting quality project material via the Milken Discovery Awards, one of the Milken Center's projects. To date, students have submitted many significant research projects including a play based on the life of Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved thousands of Jewish children during the Holocaust, a documentary on two white students who supported the Afro-American students who integrated Little Rock's Central High School and a re-enactment of the story of Mary Bickerdyke, a Civil War nurse.