Human Services News

AEI - Short Publications

From the Gates Foundation high school initiative to the Annenberg Challenge, from the Children's Scholarship Fund to the Broad Prize for Urban Education, philanthropic efforts are playing a catalytic role in contemporary school reform.

Yet while such giving has helped define effective practice, forge school-community relationships, shape policy agendas, and redirect research, the nature of its influence remains shadowy and little understood.

U.S. taxpayers are spending upwards of $500 billion on K-12 schooling this year.

This makes it imperative that donors and recipients think long and hard about leverage.

The most visible and significant philanthropic undertaking of the 21st century is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's ambitious effort to reshape the American high school.

In February 2005, after several years of prominent Gates Foundation support for high school reform initiatives across the country, Gates delivered a keynote speech to the nation's governors at a National Governors Association conference.

Garnering headlines like "Mr. Gates Goes to Washington" on the New York Times editorial page, Gates told the assembled governors: "Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.

Philanthropy constitutes only a fraction of 1 percent of total spending on K-12 schools, but initiatives like the Gates high school effort, Walton Family Foundation support for school choice, and the Broad Prize illustrate how such money can have a vastly disproportionate impact on the direction of America's schools.

Just four years later, in 2002, the top two givers were the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, both prominent supporters of school choice and charter schooling.

The other is that the new donors, most of whom have made their fortunes as entrepreneurs and hands-on corporate leaders in the new economy, have little patience for educational bureaucracies, traditional approaches to giving, or pleas to give the public schools more time.

In a sector where even the most generous gifts are no match for the money routinely spent on outdated and outmoded systems, the "new" education philanthropy's influence will ultimately turn on its ability to change politics and policy.

The result: a culture in which evaluation can be more about public relations than learning, and in which thoughtful criticism of new "silver bullets" is rarely delivered in a timely fashion.

Third, when confronted with the possibility that they will be assaulted for their civic efforts, there is a temptation for donors to give in conventional, inconspicuous, educator-directed ways and to soft-pedal the policy implications of their more daring efforts.

Fourth, individual schools and promising programs have long enjoyed much greater support than "pipeline" programs (like Teach for America or New Leaders for New Schools) that channel a river of energetic, entrepreneurial talent into the education sector.