In 2001, the Carnegie Corporation of New York teamed up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to invest a combined $60 million in high school reform; earlier this year, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced a $23.5 million grant to support three charter school organizations in Los Angeles; and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation decided to give the Dallas Independent School District $5 million to assist with the collection of student and teacher data.
These donations represent a very small sample of the private funding that goes into public schools. A mere snapshot, this list highlights the dollar amounts now available to at least some public schools; the people, foundations, and corporations behind the money; and the kinds of educational programs they are supporting.
The private funder whose impact is most commonly recognized these days is the Gates Foundation. With close to $40 billion in charitable assets, it also has the deepest pockets. In addition to Carnegie, Dell, and Broad, others whose names feature prominently in education are the Annenberg, Ford, Wallace, and Hewlett foundations. These and several other donors command the high dollar figures that tend to make headlines.
Major, multimillion-dollar grants are typically aimed at large-scale systemic change, such as dividing large high schools into small ones, implementing reading programs that put all elementary students on the same page, improving teacher quality, or bringing data-collection systems into the 21st century. The most common forms of giving, however, are much smaller in scope. According to Donna Fernandez, founder of the SchoolGrants newsletter, the average grant ranges from $5,000 to $25,000. Taken together, charitable donations to the nation’s elementary and secondary schools amount to an estimated $2 billion plus. (This sum, of course, is dwarfed by the $500 billion in local, state, and federal funds that keeps public schools up and running on a daily basis.)
The amount of private money going into public education has been on the rise since A Nation at Risk declared in 1983 that the educational standards of American schoolchildren were alarmingly low and threatened the nation’s competitive edge. Regardless of the denomination—$1,000, $50,000, or $30 million—the grant money available to public schools is expected to grow for years to come. The challenge facing most school districts is not only how to get this money, but how to use it effectively.
Vision and Priorities
A multitude of factors can determine whether private donations ultimately make a difference.
“Any grant is a lot of work. You’ve got to be willing to do it well,” says Sheldon Berman, superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Ky. “It’s not [as if you’re] just getting the money and doing what you want with it.”
Berman is one of several superintendents who have a reputation for knowing how to use grant money effectively. He and other education experts emphasize the need for districts to have a strategic plan solidly in place.
“If I were advising districts,” says Robert Schwartz, academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “[I’d say] the most important thing is to have a coherent reform and improvement strategy and be able to make your case. Show how the private dollars you would be seeking would advance your strategy.” To make the best possible use of private funds, Schwartz and others say, leaders should adhere to the district’s vision and priorities regardless of other funding opportunities that may come along.
There are, however, exceptions to this rule. “Don’t be too rigid about it,” says Berman, who got his job in Kentucky in part because of the entrepreneurial and fundraising skills he demonstrated as superintendent of Hudson Public Schools in Massachusetts. Strive to find the common ground between the district’s goals and the foundation’s goals, he says.
In Louisville, for example, one local foundation likes to support the arts. “It isn’t necessarily a strategic goal of ours,” Berman says, “but if the foundation has an interest in the arts and enables us to do something more with students, that’s an advantage for everybody.”
“If I were advising districts,” says Robert Schwartz, academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “[I’d say] the most important thing is to have a coherent reform and improvement strategy and be able to make your case. Show how the private dollars you would be seeking would advance your strategy.” To make the best possible use of private funds, Schwartz and others say, leaders should adhere to the district’s vision and priorities regardless of other funding opportunities that may come along.
There are, however, exceptions to this rule. “Don’t be too rigid about it,” says Berman, who got his job in Kentucky in part because of the entrepreneurial and fundraising skills he demonstrated as superintendent of Hudson Public Schools in Massachusetts. Strive to find the common ground between the district’s goals and the foundation’s goals, he says.
In Louisville, for example, one local foundation likes to support the arts. “It isn’t necessarily a strategic goal of ours,” Berman says, “but if the foundation has an interest in the arts and enables us to do something more with students, that’s an advantage for everybody.”
Knowing When to Say No
Thomas Fowler-Finn, superintendent of the Cambridge (Mass.) Public Schools, notes that his district’s student demographic attracts both philanthropic foundations and academic researchers: half the students are economically disadvantaged; 35 percent are white, 35 percent are black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and 10 percent are Asian. “We are everybody’s idea of what the country looks like,” he says.
With so much potential interest, “we could easily get off our main focus,” Fowler-Finn says. So when grants are announced, the first thing he asks is, “Does this one further our plan?” If it doesn’t, he says, turn it down—as his predecessor did a few years ago, when the Gates Foundation was in its second year of donating funds toward the restructuring of Cambridge Rindge and Latin (High) School and the terms of the grant conflicted with the school’s approach to desegregation.
Berman and Jesse Register, former superintendent of Chattanooga’s public schools, also decided not to pursue Gates Foundation support when it did not fit in with their high school reform efforts. Register was also willing to risk losing a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation when it appeared the terms of the grant might be incompatible with Chattanooga’s plans for school-based professional development. District staffers had been working on a grant proposal for a year, Register recalls, before he became aware that the proposal did not take into account the fact that the district was in the process of decentralizing instructional support services. Instead, it assumed that professional development would continue to be centralized at the district level.
The district, he says, was in the last stages of receiving approval for the NSF funds “when I saw where the grant was headed. I stopped it, and I asked the two people who had written the grant to change it. I just about gave both of them a heart attack.” The NSF, as it turned out, was amenable to the changes. Otherwise, he says, “it would have been counterproductive to how we were restructuring.”
Chattanooga’s Story: Building on Results
Register became superintendent at a critical time in the school system’s history. In 1996, he was hired to oversee the merger of Chattanooga’s troubled inner-city school district with the more affluent suburban schools in surrounding Hamilton County.
During his 10 years at the helm of the joint system now known as Hamilton Public Schools, he implemented an impressive number of successful reforms, many of them funded with $100 million in government grants and private funding from corporations and nonprofit foundations such as Carnegie, Gates, and the local Benwood Foundation.
The grants paid for large-scale change at every level of the education spectrum. The Gates and Carnegie money went into dividing large comprehensive high schools into much smaller career academies; funds from the National Education Association Foundation and the Lyndhurst Foundation went into middle school reform; and $5 million from Benwood targeted reading instruction at inner-city elementary schools.
“Our success,” Register says, “built on the fact that once we started getting the grants, we were getting results.” The first major grant was the $5 million from the Benwood Foundation, which quickly led to signs of improvement, and soon after that, he says, Carnegie, Gates, and the Public Education Foundation came through with a combined total of $14 million for high school reform.
“There were only two or three major initiatives that were in our sights,” he says—high school reform, addressing the issues of low-performing urban schools, and leadership development. “So when we applied for and went after those grants, we made sure they were complementary of each other and the [overall] direction of the district. And that’s my story. That’s the bottom line.”
Putting the Puzzle Together
While a district’s strategic plan should serve as the blueprint guiding school leaders through the complex world of education philanthropy, school administrators say there are other key factors that contribute to the successful use of grant money.
Berman likens the entire process to “putting pieces of the puzzle together” and says that an important piece is finding a way to institutionalize the grant-seeking process. He does that by making it a routine part of the job for certain administrators. Every curriculum director in his district, whether they’re in charge of reading, math, science or social studies, is responsible for pursuing grants. It’s part of their evaluation, he says.
In Chattanooga, Register says, working with private grants was part of a collaborative culture that involved input from all levels of the school system and allowed those adept at working with grants to rise to the top and apply their skills. In addition, the local public education foundation played a major role in the school system’s reform efforts.
“The fact that we had the partnership [with the public education foundation] really precipitated interest from outside funders,” he says. “When national foundations are looking at you, they really look toward a partnership as being a real strength.” And in Chattanooga, academics and researchers took note.
“That’s a district,” says Harvard’s Schwartz, “where a combination of foundation dollars, a strong local education fund, and strong leadership in the school district managed to move the needle in terms of student achievement.”
While the biggest assets a district can have in terms of fundraising involve vision, leadership, and collaboration, the biggest challenge is sustainability—putting the organizational structure in place and finding a way to keep a program going once the grant money comes to an end.
“Funders don’t want reform to be contingent on external funds forever,” says Elizabeth City, director of instructional strategies for the Executive Leadership for Educational Excellence program at Harvard University and author of
Resourceful Leadership: Tradeoffs and Tough Decisions on the Road to School Improvement. “Some really see themselves as feeding innovation [or] seeding a pilot, and the district is going to have to figure out how they are going to fund it on a bigger scale” (see sidebar "What Do Donors Want?"). “That said, I think funders have learned over the last 10 to 15 years that real improvement takes much longer than they [initially] thought,” she continues.
Certain kinds of programs, she says, lend themselves to sustainability more than others. If a large-scale high school reform effort requires a large investment up front but much less once the initial changes are in place, then sustainability is not necessarily as much of an issue as it is with other programs. But if private dollars pay for a principal development program or an in-house teacher development program, that kind of money must be found elsewhere when the grant comes to an end.
Even so, a savvy superintendent knows how to strive for sustainability. For example, in his former post as superintendent in Hudson, Mass., Berman made sure that $1.4 million in NSF funds awarded to the district would have staying power. The funds provided district personnel with the expertise needed to develop their own lesson plans and teaching strategies for math and science. The approach included an ongoing, self-sustaining form of embedded professional development, he says.
In his new district in Kentucky, Berman is using grant money from the local Gheens Foundation to set up the Gheens Center, which will be a clearinghouse for grants and innovative reform efforts in Jefferson County schools. In essence, the initial grant will help create a system for tapping into future grants.
“You can think about giving as a tool to help you take the next step in terms of a district performance,” says Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of
With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K–12 Education. But in addition to a strategic model, he says, districts need to have “a fiscal model where it’s clear how, after that initial investment, you are going to be able to maintain and sustain at steady-state funding.”
In short, says Hess, “You have to think of philanthropy as a springboard and not a crutch.”
Lucy Hood is a freelance education writer based in Washington, D.C
