From the Gates Foundation’s high school initiative 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 teaching practices, forge school-community relationships, shape policy agendas and redirect research, the nature of its influence remains shadowy and little understood.

Resident Scholar Frederick M. Hess

To explore the issues posed by the role of educational philanthropy and the generational shift among leading donors, I recently recruited 11 scholars and analysts to examine the subject. Their collected analyses were published last October in With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K-12 Education. I want to share key insights that emerged from the research and then discuss five key challenges that loom for givers, educators and policymakers.

U.S. taxpayers are spending upwards of $500 billion on K-12 schooling this year. Meanwhile, University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene estimates that all philanthropic giving to K-12 schooling combined amounts to less than $2 billion. In his evocative phrase, conventional philanthropic reform strategies amount to little more than casting “buckets into the sea.” This makes it imperative that donors and recipients think long and hard about leverage.

As Dan Fallon, chair of the education division of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has observed, “No one should be under the illusion that a foundation is going to create something remarkable in the shadow of a $500-billion enterprise. Our task is to help get good ideas into the marketplace so that society has good alternatives from which to choose.”

While donors may have limited dollars, the Gates Foundation’s high school effort or the Walton Family Foundation’s support for school choice illustrates how money can have a vastly disproportionate impact on the direction of America’s schools. Led by new donors--typically entrepreneurs and hands-on corporate leaders from the new economy, like Bill Gates, Jim Barksdale, Michael Milken and Eli Broa--a variety of major funders are today more and more embracing a theory of entrepreneurial giving that favors endeavors like charter schools, new high schools and nontraditional programs for recruiting teachers and leaders.

American K-12 schooling is a wonder of statutes, regulations, legal guidelines, licenses, organizational routines, contractual provisions and political pressures. At times, the prohibitions and restrictions seem so dense that it is only natural that most education reform is about tinkering with more easily influenced elements like curricula, pedagogies, training and management routine--creating a constant whir of activity but changing little of substance.

Given their independence, flexibility and resources, I believe reform-minded philanthropists are in an exceptional position to upend this cycle of tinkering.

In fulfilling this promise, five central challenges emerge for givers, policymakers and educators.

1. Donor commitment to embracing a coherent reform strategy may sometimes clash with efforts to foster diverse ideas and entrepreneurial approaches. Rather than seeking to determine whether one or the other tack is the “right” course, donors should recognize this as a healthy tension to be accepted and monitored.
2. Grantmakers should be mindful of the perils posed by the “political economy” of evaluation, in which researchers dependent on philanthropic organizations for access and support have good reason to provide genteel evaluations while few of their peers have much incentive to turn a skeptical gaze on new initiatives. 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.
3. 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. Given the understandable pressures on any given foundation or grant officer to exercise caution, this is a place where high-profile givers must understand that how they use their megaphone may matter as much as their particular funding decisions.
4. 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. Donors and foundation staff have an understandable preference for schools, scholarships and concrete programs where they can see the children benefiting from their largesse. Nonetheless, deepening the educational talent pool is probably the single most important role givers can play.
5. Finally, recognizing that the price of innovation has too often been faddism and a fascination with the new and the glib, the new generation of donors have sought to discipline their giving by emphasizing results and accountability. Whether they can keep this sensible discipline from morphing into green eyes hade bean-counting or an aversion to risk-taking will require striking a difficult, thoughtful balance in the years ahead.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI.