Education Week - August 29, 2012 - 9

EDUCATION WEEK

AUGUST 29, 2012

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programs, or programs that place a business leader in a school for a week. But if you look at the longterm data trends, those are not transforming programs.” Local foundations are following the lead of the national “venture philanthropists,” donors who are looking for measurable returns on their charitable investments, said Janelle T. Scott, an assistant professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the relationship between philanthropy and school choice in urban communities. In some cases, the ties between local foundations and national philanthropies are explicit. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle, the Los Angeles-based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation of Bentonville, Ark., all fund local organizations working in the education sphere, including some foundations. (Both Gates and Walton also provide grant support for reporting in Education Week.) The U.S. Department of Education also has supported some of those local foundations through its Investing in Innovation, or i3, grants.

“you’re setting the terms for how the community can engage with you,” Ms. Scott said. The 6-year-old Mind Trust, which founded cee-Trust, made a big splash last year when it released a report recommending a complete restructuring of the Indianapolis district. (See Education Week, Jan. 25, 2012.) Previously, the organization had focused on incubating education entrepreneurship opportunities in the city. “If we had presented something that wasn’t a comprehensive new vision, it wouldn’t have gotten nearly the same attention, I don’t think,” said David Harris, the founder and chief executive officer of the Mind Trust.

Out of Bounds?
But Eugene G. White, the superintendent of the Indianapolis Public schools, said that the Mind Trust and similarly situated philanthropies mean well, “but they don’t really have a real feel for what people say they want and what they need.” He continued, “Sometimes, they get too far into their particular missions. I think that happens to a lot of them, and until their funders see that and stop funding them, they’ll keep wandering out in the wilderness.” In some cases, however, foundation leaders said they shifted their missions only after working closely with traditional systems in their communities and finding that the work yielded results that were disappointing or did not last. For example, Amy C. Hertel, the manager of strategic development, research, and evaluation for the 97-year-old Minneapolis Foundation, said the organization helped conduct a survey of overall education charitable spending in Minnesota. The survey found that in 2010, about $243 million was spent in education philanthropy statewide, with $100 million of

that money going to the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. But while 65 percent of the charities felt they were funding work that would close achievement gaps among students, Minnesota has some of the largest gaps in the nation. The disconnect between money spent and results achieved presents a new opportunity for the organization, she said. “Convening and advocacy are things that we can do from our position on speaking on behalf of the entire community,” she said. The Skillman Foundation in Detroit, founded in 1960 to support programs for children and needy families, is one of the organizations featured in the cee-Trust guide. Under its mandate “to help develop good schools and good neighborhoods for children,” the organization “focused on very discrete programs that we thought were silver bullets,” said Tonya Allen, the chief operating officer and vice president of the program.“A lot of times,

people think that because our education results have been so underwhelming, that we haven’t done anything in Detroit. We’ve done a lot in Detroit, but the problem is that the innovations cannot be sustained,” Ms. Allen said. In 2004, Skillman moved from partnering solely with the Detroit district to promoting what it considered to be good schools throughout the city, regardless of whether they were private, charter, or regular public. One of Skillman’s current projects includes supporting Excellent Schools Detroit, which is developing a “school quality review” that will measure the city’s charter schools, independent schools, and regular public schools against the same measures, providing some guidance to parents looking for good options for their children. Excellent Schools Detroit, whose board includes representatives from charters, the district, a parents’ group, and other charitable

Coverage of the education marketplace and new approaches to schooling in the Industry & Innovation section of Education Week is supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

organizations, is an example of a foundation bringing together disparate groups to support items on which all agree, Ms. Allen said. But Skillman’s shift was not received well in all quarters, Ms. Allen said. “We had tremendous amounts of pushback from the union,” she said. “But we also gained credibility as someone who is trying to facilitate an honest conversation about the state of education in our city.”
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Economic Realities
At the same time, as state and local funding sources are strapped for cash, districts and other education organizations are more receptive to the funding that these private organizations have to offer, Ms. Scott said. The organizations often share a vision that embraces charter and private and traditional public schools, as well as alternative training programs for teachers and principals, Ms. Scott noted. What is still an open question is whether these city-based foundations are open to views that deviate from those specific types of reform, she said. “If you already know where you want to go”—and your organization holds the purse strings—

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school principals and our incredible fundraisers, but we’re trying to stay at the systems level. How do you raise money? You have people who say, “Wow, I want to be a part of that.” So if you look at our track record, that’s where our initial dollars came from. It helps that you have someone as magnanimous as Cory Booker helping to do that. Then you have a second wave of funds from investors who are contributors and want to see plans, want to see leadership in place, and want to “test it as you go” to make sure what you’re working toward is both realistic, thoughtful, and well-planned. So that’s the second wave of investment, and again, if you look at our track record, that also happened. I do think you have to have really compelling, thoughtfully presented ways in which progress is measured and articulated, and folks can understand how their influx of cash can move you to the

next level. It’s always difficult to raise money, particularly in this environment, but I think we’ve been relatively successful adhering to that road map. What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s level of involvement at this point? He recognizes that he’s not an educational expert. He is completely hands-off; he has a little company to run called Facebook. We certainly keep him abreast of our work and progress to date, but his involvement is intentionally hands-off, and I admire him for that. I know a lot of times people who give donations feel like it entitles them to a level of expertise they may or may not have, and I think he’s very thoughtful about that. He thinks, “I’m going to hire educational experts, let them do their jobs, but be clear about the direction that they’re going.”
To read an extended version of this interview, go to
www.edweek.org/go/taylorqa

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ROB MANCABELLI
Author and Educational Innovation Expert

WILL RICHARDSON
Co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice

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Education Week - August 29, 2012

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