Tag: Education

Creating a Hotspot for K-12 Innovation

Creating a Hotspot for K-12 Innovation

A Philanthropy Roundtable Event on Breakthrough Education Giving
Co-hosted by Donors Forum

Sofitel Chicago Water Tower • Chicago, Illinois
October 28-29, 2015

Chicago is becoming a center for big K-12 ideas and an ideal setting to discuss how donors and education entrepreneurs can create dramatic improvements for kids nationwide. Home to a new crop of personalized learning models, design incubators, and promising startups, the city also boasts emerging innovators in charter schools, policy, leadership development, and advocacy. Chicago’s forward-thinking donors, investors, and venture philanthropy funds also make the city an exciting place to discuss how funders can make a big difference by thinking outside the typical K-12 box.

Attendees had the opportunity to spend two days with hundreds of leading education philanthropists, visit inventive schools, and join high-level strategic conversations about effective K-12 giving.

Event Schedule

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

7:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Site Visits

Chicago’s Next Generation Learning Models

Attendees had the opportunity to visit leading examples of personalized learning, including Intrinsic Schools, a learning environment unlike any other school. Intrinsic is made up of interconnected “pods,” each an open studio with spaces dedicated to individual and small-group learning. Students receive personalized learning plans to monitor their academic progress, and access a school-wide blended learning tool as well as Socratic style teaching. Perhaps most astounding is that the cost of this futuristic and breathtaking space was one-fourth the cost of comparable district schools. We also visited two other exemplary models: Chavez Multicultural Academy, a district school, and Chicago International Charter School: West Belden.

7:00 a.m. Registration Opens

Sofitel Chicago Water Tower
20 East Chestnut Street
Chicago, IL 60611

7:30 a.m. Bus Departures Begin

Donors had two options for their first site visit school:

• Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center

• Chicago International Charter School: West Belden

After this first site visit, both groups convened at Intrinsic
Schools and toured as one combined group.

1:00 p.m. Return to Sofitel Hotel

• Networking Luncheon

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Optional Discussions

Session #1: What’s Working to Educate High-Ability, Low-Income Students

Giuseppe Basili, director of strategic initiatives, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation
Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, professor, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
Chester E. Finn Jr., president emeritus, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (moderator)

Session #2: How Donors Can Make Meaningful Early Childhood Investments

Katherine Kaufmann, partner, The Bridgespan Group
Diana Rauner, president, Ounce of Prevention Fund

3:10 p.m. – 4:10 p.m. Opening Plenary

Welcome

Adam Meyerson, president, The Philanthropy Roundtable

Cultivating The Next Generation of Education Startups

Deborah Quazzo, founder and managing partner, GSV Advisors
Margaret Angell, director, education innovation portfolio, CityBridge Foundation
Alicia Herald, founder and CEO, myEDmatch
Deborah McGriff, partner, NewSchools Venture Fund (moderator)

We made a special visit to LEAP Innovations, Chicago’s nationally-recognized education innovation center that helps educators and entrepreneurs reimagine learning and develop next-generation school models. Located in 1871, Chicago’s hub for all digital startups, attendees got a rare glimpse into how talented entrepreneurs use dedicated space and resources to test ideas, validate concepts, engage technical experts, work with mentors–and ultimately turn big ideas into reality.

5:00 p.m. Opening Reception and Open House: LEAP and 1871

6:00 p.m. Big-Idea Pitches

Solving America’s Toughest K-12 Problems

Attendees had the opportunity to hear a number of solicitation-free, big-idea pitches from newly-forming education organizations, schools, and initiatives from around the country. Following brief reactions from a panel of experts, attendees were able to ask questions and offer constructive feedback.

Welcome

Jim Oliff, chairman, CME Group Foundation

Master of Ceremonies

Phyllis Lockett, CEO, LEAP Innovations

Pitches

Brian Hill, co-founder and CEO, Edovo
Gareth Genner, founder and CEO, Parish Academy
Blair Pircon, CEO, The Graide Network
Amy Charpentier, KIPP Through College director, KIPP: Delta
Ryan Hoch, co-founder, Overgrad

Expert Respondents

Barton Dassinger, principal, Chavez Multicultural Academic Center
Edith Gummer, education research director in research and policy, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Deborah Quazzo, founder and managing partner, GSV Advisors

7:00 p.m. LEAP Reception

Thursday, October 29, 2015

7:15 a.m. Breakfast Roundtable Discussions

1. How Cities Can Develop Plans for Increasing the Number of High-Quality School Seats
Butch Trusty, chief impact officer, Education Cities

2. How New Approaches to Teacher Certification Can Transform Public Education
Don Nielsen, senior fellow, Discovery Institute

3. Building a Network of Independent Schools: Lessons from 20 Years of Growth
Jane Genster, president and CEO, Cristo Rey Network

4. How Can Donors be Effective in Supporting Alternatives to “College-For-All”
Blouke Carus, chairman emeritus and chief technical advisor, Carus Corporation

5. Hope Outside the Box: How Schools can Create Unconventional Funding Streams by Serving their Communities
Bob Muzikowski, president and founder, Chicago Hope Academy

6. Bridging the Opportunity Divide Through Career Preparation
Jack Crowe, executive director, YearUp Chicago

7. How to Develop High Schoolers into Real-World Entrepreneurs
Michael Miles, co-founder, INCubatoredu

8. How Charter Schools Can Promote Character and Civic Virtue
Steve Barney, trustee, Barney Family Foundation

First Book mixes market forces and philanthropy to help poor children

In a small, two-bedroom apartment in Corona, Calif., Trinity Santos, 5, reads her hardcover copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” again and again. She never tires of the Dr. Seuss classic, sometimes reading it to her 3-year-old brother, Joshua, said their mother, Diane.

Life is a struggle for the Santos family. Diane worked as a waitress before her children were born, and the family of four lives on the $35,000 that her husband earns as a phlebotomist. They don’t have much.

But the children own the four dozen books in a small, homemade bookcase, courtesy of First Book, a nonprofit organization that combines market forces and philanthropy to get new books into the hands of poor children to encourage early reading.

“I didn’t have books at home when I was growing up in the Philippines,” said Diane Santos, 33, who connected with First Book through a local parent­ education program she attended shortly after Trinity was born. “I learned the most important thing is reading with them, talking to them, introducing new words.”

First Book, founded in the District in 1992, has grown into a sophisticated national enterprise that gave away more than 15 million new books to low-income children and teens in 2015. But as financial troubles have deepened in households nationwide, First Book has turned to items well beyond books, this year adding winter coats, nonperishable snacks, toothpaste, fleece blankets, underwear and other goods to its charitable arsenal.

“There’s a profound need that is really unprecedented,” said Kyle Zimmer, 55, a onetime corporate lawyer who formed First Book with two friends after she volunteered at a D.C. soup kitchen and realized that many of the children had no books at home.

Even as the economy recovers from the housing collapse of 2008, many families continue to falter. The number of homeless children in public schools has doubled since before the recession, reaching a record total of 1.36 million nationwide in the 2013-2014 school year, the most recent one for which data is available.

Walton Foundation’s new education investment strategy: Scary or what?

The Walton Foundation is one of the biggest players in the education philanthropy world, having poured some $1.3 billion in K-12 education over the last two decades largely to support charter schools and fuel the “school choice” movement. But foundation honchos aren’t exactly satisfied with the results of their work and now they are using a new investment strategy to make a broader impact. For people who like the foundation’s philosophy, that’s good news. For those who think the foundation works against public education, it’s scary.

[Why are out-of-state billionaires putting big money into Louisiana’s board of education elections?]

A paper recently released (see below) titled “Investing in Change: The Walton Family Foundation Charts a New Course” looks at what the foundation has — and hasn’t — accomplished in its effort to fulfill what foundation K-12 Program Director Marc Sternberg calls its “moral obligation” to provide families with high-quality school choices. It quotes Walton Family Foundation Executive Director Buddy Philpot, who wrote in the foundation’s 2014 annual report released this year:

We know that empowering parents and students with options works, but now we want to do more. We have learned that while choice is vital, it is not enough.

Choice isn’t enough? So what is? Apparently dismantling traditional public school systems and creating collections of charter schools across cities.  The report, written by Michelle Wisdom and published by Grantmakers for Education (a national network of hundreds of education philanthropies) says:

There are a lot of similarities between the Walton Family Foundation’s approach and what has come to be called a “Portfolio Strategy”— a concept researched and supported by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). Portfolio Strategy identifies the entire city as the unit of change with respect to school reform, and tasks education and civic leaders with developing a citywide system of high-quality, diverse, autonomous public schools. These systems prioritize school autonomy, parental empowerment, and system leader oversight and responsibility for accountability.

Wisdom’s report points to Walton’s involvement in cities with big charter presences, including New Orleans, where nearly all of the schools are charters, and D.C., where nearly half of students attend charters. These are hailed as successes in school reform. In the section about D.C., the report goes so far as to credit charter schools with contributing to  “dramatic improvements” in the traditional public school system, a statement that doesn’t take into consideration how demographic changes have improved D.C. school results. D.C. schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson contests the notion too.

There’s another part of the report that begs parsing. The report notes that the foundation realizes that it has not engaged communities as it has pushed school choice on them. It says:

One area where the foundation has received criticism is in the area of community engagement. It has been accused of  having a top-down approach that does not adequately address the needs and desires of parents, local advocacy groups and community groups. This is an issue the foundation is grappling with. “The provision of choice, and the publication of data on school performance, has sometimes had little impact, especially in districts where reform lacks adequate local ownership, community and wider civic involvement, and parent engagement,” Bruno Manno notes. He identifies two levers in engaging local partners and communities more thoroughly: 1) building an active coalition of supporters, and 2) cultivating local advocacy partners. “We need a local and civic base of support for the work that’s going on. The work we support requires a stable constituency to be advocates for schools over time. There is a political dimension as well, the community and families need to understand what options are available.”

Let’s review: After 20 years, the foundation realizes that its top-down approach doesn’t adequately address the needs and desires of parents, local advocacy groups and community groups. Now it wants to engage local partners and communities — not, apparently to ask what they actually want in their communities but to build “a local and civic base of support for the work that’s going on.”

Another surprising finding in the report is that the foundation actually considers itself to be a  neutral party in the school reform battles. It says:

The Walton Family Foundation theory of change has led it to support innovative and autonomous traditional public schools, new and existing individual charter schools and charter management organizations, private schools, locally-based education nonprofits and national advocacy and school reform groups across the United States.

The foundation sees its strategy as agnostic with regard to sector (public charter schools, traditional public schools, private schools). “The foundation’s investment strategy is clear: Schools thrive when they have autonomy, are chosen by parents, and are embedded in systems of good governance and accountability,” says Senior Program Officer Fawzia Ahmed. “When we invest in citywide systems, we invest regardless of sector.”

The foundation’s funding history includes a significant amount of support for charter schools, however. In fact, roughly two-thirds of the Education Program’s investments support the growth of a high-quality charter sector in some way. This seeming preference for charter schools is in line with the foundation’s theory of change that requires change agents, like new, high-quality charter schools, to increase competition in citywide school systems and to raise community expectations of what is possible in high-need areas and with students who face significant challenges.

GDR Back to Work in Nepal in Full Force

Over the past several months, Nepal has shown itself to be a place of hope, hard work and recovery.

Thanks in no small part to the many donors who contributed to the GDR earthquake rebuilding effort at the SMD School, the school recently received green tags from the Nepal Department of Education for three of its four buildings and classrooms are back in use.

A team of dedicated GDR volunteers recently traveled to Kathmandu to assess our future in this resilient country and screen children for fall clinics.

We’re very happy to share that the kids are lined up and ready to go and we’ll be heading over in full force to conduct three clinics this fall.

Bill Gates and the 3-Story-High Philanthropic “Selfie”

Linsey McGoey wonders aloud in the Guardian whether philanthropy is better off once the major donor has died—or, as she puts it, “Is the most effective philanthropist a dead one?”

McGoey seems to believe that the celebrity status of some billionaire donors gets in the way of necessary critiques of their financially backed influence. She uses as an example of that blinding celebrity halo a bizarre scene that played out when Bill Gates turned 60.

To mark the occasion, more than 1,000 schoolchildren in Chennai, India, were photographed in the courtyard of their school holding life-sized cutouts of Gates’s face, raised above their heads in military salute. A three-story-high image of Gates beams from the rear of the configuration, featuring an upbeat slogan: “Grow rich. Help others.”

She contrasts this to the understated approach of the Wellcome Foundation which “creates about the same ‘good,’ measured in financial contributions, many members of the public haven’t even heard of it—let alone praise the charity in the same way that the Gates Foundation is lauded.”

“Most organizations on a par with the Gates Foundation are fair game for academic and journalistic investigation,” she writes:

When a health catastrophe strikes, many governments and UN organizations such as the World Health Organization are subjected to sustained internal and external review. The Gates Foundation, while as powerful, rarely faces the same scrutiny.

We need to challenge this silence. We need loudly to ask an uncomfortable question: do foundations narrow wealth inequalities or simply preserve them? Are foundations at their most radical when they exist to serve a benefactor’s hopes and whims—or when they’re emancipated from such an obligation?

McGooey generally believes that it is hard to be clearheaded about social inequities when that is the way that you, personally, have made your money. She posits that the “big three” U.S. foundations—Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie—only began to sympathize with labor and civil rights movements after their founders were dead, and that Ford’s grandson Henry actually resigned from the foundation in in 1977, writing that “a system that makes the foundation possible very probably is worth preserving.”—Ruth McCambridge

Another Gates Education Experiment Grinds to an End, Leaving Questionable Results Behind

As any observer of philanthropy knows, not all philanthropic investments in education are wins, and while the philanthropies and foundations can walk away from these sometimes-massive investments with maybe a mea culpa, the districts are often left with the detritus. In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it was launching the Empowering Effective Teachers initiative. The objectives of the Foundation’s investment were to “to bring district leadership, school board leadership, and teachers’ union leadership to the table to develop a plan to transform teacher effectiveness policies and practices [and] radically reorganize their practices and policies to ensure that every student is taught by an effective teacher.”

Now, as the end of the seven-year time frame for the program approaches, the Tampa Bay Times is looking at how the program has worked in one of the districts that partnered with the Gates Foundation:

A seven-year effort to put better teachers in Hillsborough County schools is costing the system millions of dollars more than officials projected. And the district’s partner in the project, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is spending $20 million less than expected. The numbers, found in recent reports, differ significantly from what was commonly understood about the high-profile partnership, known as Empowering Effective Teachers. The district was to raise $102 million for its part, much of it by aggressively pursuing grants from local corporations and other entities. Gates was to kick in $100 million, for a total of $202 million. But as the project stands in its final year, the district’s contribution will total $124 million in money and labor, while the Gates organization is paying only $80 million, the reports state. What’s more, the district has put the total cost of the program, so far, at $271 million.

The plan developed for implementation in the Hillsborough district in Florida included many of the features that educational reformers have seen as critical elements for a 21st-century school system: creating a teacher evaluation system that would facilitate the firing of “bad” teachers, replacing a salary structure that is based on longevity with one that ties teacher pay to educational effectiveness, and evaluating teachers in a system that uses standardized test results as a major component.

After seven years of effort, and with the Gates Foundation’s funding reaching an end, Hillsborough’s efforts show how challenging this prescription is to implement:

The original proposal and a 2010 timeline called for the district to fire five percent of its teachers each year for poor performance. That would amount to more than 700 teachers. The thinking was they would be replaced by teachers who earned entry-level wages, freeing up money to pay the bonuses for those at the top. But the mass firings never happened. While an undetermined number of teachers resign out of dissatisfaction or fear that they will be fired, only a handful of terminations happen because of bad evaluations. Also, while the initial proposal sought to pay teachers based on performance instead of seniority, the actual pay plan does both. Teachers receive pay bumps at three-year intervals and, if they score highly in the ratings system, they get bonus pay. Evaluators were supposed to serve two-year stints, then cycle back to the classroom. Instead, many stay three and four years. Critics say they become bureaucrats and not true peers. But [Anna Brown, who manages the Gates grant for the district] said that with more experience, they are better qualified to do the job.

Brown says dismantling the whole scheme now is unrealistic since one of its primary features, performance pay, is state law. But seven years later, there is little evidence that student outcomes are better because of this investment: “Most of what has occurred so far is procedural, putting systems in place to improve teaching and, in turn, future student achievement. Measuring that achievement in a meaningful way has yet to happen.” The district’s graduation rate has not significantly improved and does not compare with other metropolitan districts in Florida.

The story of Hillsborough’s experience looks very similar to The Prize, Dale Russakoff’s look at efforts to improve the schools in Newark, New Jersey. What now remains to be assessed is whether this lack of student progress is a result of not fully implementing the reformers’ game plan as designed…or a demonstration that this plan is seriously flawed.—Martin Levine