The Most Dangerous Man in America by Leonie Haimson - The Huffington Post

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Bill Gates sure is a popular guy. He is appearing this afternoon at the national conference of the American Federation of Teachers in Seattle, after having recently been the keynote speaker at the annual National Charter School convention.
Just this week, Warren Buffett announced he was giving an additional $1.6 billion to the Gates Foundation, which already had a $35 billion endowment; by far the largest in the nation.

In the past eight years, the foundation has spent nearly $4 billion promoting his personal education agenda; at first providing subsidies to districts that would agree to close down large neighborhood high schools and start small schools in their place; and now encouraging the rapid and widespread proliferation of charter schools. Gates also is aggressively promoting efforts to create programs that link teacher evaluation and compensation to standardized test scores.

And his generosity has not merely been expressed through his foundation. In 2008, he contributed four million dollars to help persuade state legislators to extend mayoral control in New York City .

As Gates explained at the time,

"You want to allow for experimentation.... The cities where our foundation has put the most money is where there is a single person responsible."

In other words, he supported mayoral control because it allowed him to impose his large-scale experiments on inner city public school students, without fear of resistance from communities; instead, he has only to convince one person. No wrestling with elected school boards, nor with parents who resent having their children's schools closed, privatized, or otherwise radically transformed; no need to bother with any of the messy artifacts of democracy which might stand in his way.

According to publicity materials put out by the Gates Foundation, it has "improved 2,602 schools, engaged 40 school districts, and reached at least 781,000 students."

Actually, it has reached lot more students than that, as its small schools initiative had a profound impact on inner city schools with the most disadvantaged children.

In recent years the Gates initiative has turned districts upside-down, at first establishing as many small schools as possible, creating thousands of new administrator jobs, eating up classroom space, and compelling the neediest kids who were excluded from the new small schools to travel long distances to attend even more overcrowded large schools in worse conditions than before, relegating those schools to failure.

The small schools created in their place, with several schools sharing one building, were forced to fight fiercely over scarce space, losing science labs, art rooms, libraries, and intervention spaces in the process. The same situation is now unfolding in NYC as the rapidly proliferating charter schools are wedged into public school buildings. As a result, the existing public school, with much higher concentrations of English language learners, special needs students, and homeless children, is now in many cases forced to provide instruction and mandated services in hallways and closets.

Such large-scale experiments on children would never be allowed similar fields like public health, where first carefully controlled pilot studies must be performed, with the informed consent of parents, to ensure that the proposed interventions have positive results, and the risk of collateral damage is minimal.

Consider the consent and experimentation protocols enforced when trials for new drugs are undertaken; or the consent and monitoring procedures that were used in developing and implementing the Salk vaccine program against polio, despite the urgency to battle the epidemic of a devastating disease.

Now the US Department of Education under Arne Duncan has taken up the Gates agenda, writ large, but with a perhaps better sense of public relations, calling this single-minded approach "innovation" rather than experimentation.
Former Gates officials fill the high ranks of the department; including Jim Shelton, former education program director at the foundation and now Assistant Deputy Secretary for "Innovation and Improvement". Joanne Weiss has already been promoted from heading its "Race to the Top " fund to become Duncan's chief of staff. Weiss was formerly COO of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which finances charter school expansion with dollars provided by Gates.

Not surprisingly, the $4.3 billion federal "Race to the Top fund" and the other grants being doled out by the US DOE are pushing states to eliminate their caps on charter schools, to forcibly close many schools and/or mandate that they fire their teaching staff; then turning them over to charter school operators or start new schools in their place while adopting teacher evaluation systems linked to standardized test scores.

After pretty much setting the priorities for the administration, the Gates Foundation then stepped in and "helped" states write their applications for the "Race to the Top" funds. Along the way, numerous states, in the midst of plunging tax revenues, changed their laws on charter schools and teacher evaluation to qualify for these funds.

All this, despite the fact that an expert panel from the National Academy of Sciences pointed out that there was no research backing for this agenda, and urged caution before the federal government essentially bribed cash-strapped states to enact its provisions.

Since the panel's findings had to go through a lengthy peer review process, as does all good science, it did not make the short deadline that the US DOE set for public feedback on the "Race to the Top" proposals, leaving them free to ignore it.

When George W. Bush adopted environmental policies that ignored the scientific consensus from expert bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, he rightfully got blasted by advocates and the mainstream media. Where was the outrage when the NAS experts on testing and evaluation were ignored by the Obama administration? Instead, there was ....silence. The NAS warning was pretty much ignored, as educators and politicians were steamrolled by an undemocratic oligopoly of the deep-pocketed Gates Foundation and elected officials (some authoritarian types like NYC's Bloomberg, others merely weak-kneed and cowed by the inside-the-beltway group think.).

But the Gates Foundation has been quite clever in ignoring or suppressing evidence that contradicts its corporate mindset.

In 2002, the foundation commissioned a survey through Public Agenda that asked teachers and parents about their views on small schools, before launching its big offensive. While the vast majority of parents and teachers responded that they believed that class size was more important than school size, the Foundation was not deterred from going forward with its goal of foisting small schools on the nation.

Small schools may or may not be preferable, yet whatever the size of the school, it is the classroom where most learning takes place, and the size of the class is thus an even more critical factor. Unlike the earlier generation of small school proponents, Gates never made class size an explicit, core element of his reforms, but instead focused on the more amorphous buzzwords of "rigor, relevance and relationships."

In 2006, Gates again commissioned a study, called "The Silent Epidemic", which found that three fourths of the high school dropouts surveyed responded that they would have been deterred from leaving school if they had been offered smaller classes:

While some of the students' best days in school were when teachers paid attention to
them, many others had classes that were so big that teachers did not know their names. In our
focus groups, participants repeated again and that they believed smaller class sizes would have helped ensure that teachers maintained order in the classroom and would have provided more individual attention. .... the need for smaller class sizes and more personal instruction emerged more than 12 separate times from the participants in our four focus groups Seventy-five percent of survey participants agreed that smaller classes with more one on one teaching would have improved students' chances of graduating.

Yet again, such findings did not seem to influence their policies, or lead them to encourage school officials to make smaller classes an essential element in their reform.

Subsequently, in independent evaluations of the small school initiative commissioned by the foundation, the value of class size came up repeatedly in interviews with students as teachers, as either the most critical aspect of their new schools, or as a focal point for dissatisfaction when despite their expectations, class sizes remained too large or had increased over time. Some of the new small schools failed miserably; while others succeeded, but when I asked the researchers who wrote these studies why they had not examined class size to determine its possible relationship to these schools' ability to improve student engagement and achievement, they responded that they had not been allowed by the Gates foundation to include this as a factor in their analysis.

The same problematic approach to research is reflected in the Gates' studies of charter schools. Earlier this year, Tom Toch, co- founder of Education Sector, an influential DC advocacy group, was commissioned to do a study of charter management organizations (CMO's), the best known of which is KIPP. Toch concluded after two years of investigation that the CMO's were unlikely to be able to maintain quality while expanding as rapidly as Gates, the NewSchools Venture fund, and others were recommending. His conclusions were changed without his knowledge; as he explained,

"I removed my name from the report because a good deal of my analysis was removed and, as published, the report does not reflect my research findings on the current status and future prospects of charter management organizations."

Among Education Sector's board members and one of the reviewers of this report was a high-level official from the NewSchools Venture Fund, the Gates-supported group that provides start-up money for charter school expansion. Soon after, Toch resigned from Education Sector, the organization that he had co-founded.

What is the next experiment Gates is likely to foist on our schools? It looks to be online learning, as the new magical answer to "personalized" instruction, without the unfortunate need to actually hire any teachers. This practice has been once again pioneered in NYC schools through the discredited practice of "credit recovery," in which students are encouraged to spend a few days online, cutting and pasting their answers into a software program, in order to quickly gain the credits they need to graduate, even if they have failed all their courses and/or never attended class. (See here and here for how this scam is now operating in NYC schools.)

Watch out, America! You have nothing to lose but your public school system, at the hands of the richest man in the country who, like a spoiled child carelessly playing with toys, breaks one after another.

Bloomberg’s Offshore Millions by Adam Roston The New York Observer (Additional reporting by Azi Paybarah and Reid Pillifant)

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It was a dark time for the city. In 2008, and early into the next year, morale was low, Wall Street was sputtering and Mayor Michael Bloomberg was steeling New Yorkers for pain. Brace for service cuts and tax hikes, he warned—while also pledging to find a way to keep tax money, particularly from the city’s richest citizens, from fleeing.

“I’ve said this before, but the first rule of taxation is, you can’t tax too much those that can move,” Mr. Bloomberg intoned on a radio show late in the crisis. “You know, we’re yelling and screaming about the rich. We want the rich from around this county to move here. We love the rich people.”

And yet the richest New Yorker of them all—Mr. Bloomberg himself—had been ignoring his own advice.

According to an extensive review of the mayor’s financial records by The Observer, even as Mr. Bloomberg was trying to counter the loss of taxes and other income from the richest New Yorkers, the foundation he controls was in the process of shuttling hundreds of millions of dollars out of the city and into controversial offshore tax havens that would produce nothing at all for the city in terms of tax revenue.

By the end of 2008, the Bloomberg Family Foundation had transferred almost $300 million into various offshore destinations—some of them notorious tax-dodge hideouts. The Caymans and Cyprus. Bermuda and Brazil. Even Mauritius, a speck of an island in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Madagascar. Other investments were spread around disparate locations, from Japan to Luxembourg to Romania.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s about as opaque set of investments as you can find,’ said Rich Cohen, who covers foundations and charities for Nonprofit Quarterly.

Why was the mayor’s flagship foundation sending hundreds of millions of dollars offshore? Neither the charity nor the mayor will explain. What is clear is that the issue could get prickly for Mr. Bloomberg, in part because his investment strategies have been so closely associated with Steve Rattner, the onetime boy wonder financier who remains under investigation by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for his involvement in a state pension controversy. Last week, Mr. Rattner’s former firm, Quadrangle Group, took the extraordinary step of excommunicating him, saying in a statement that it “wholly disavow[ed]” Mr. Rattner over his role in securing state pension contracts—conduct the company called “inappropriate, wrong, and unethical.”

On December 26, 2007—the same day that the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board opened the door for Mr. Rattner’s firm to manage the foundation’s money— the foundation immediately sent $210 million to a new fund—“QAM Select Investors (Offshore) Ltd.”—based in the Cayman Islands.

A month later, the foundation was given clearance to allow two city workers to use municipal time and resources on foundation work—on the assumption that the charity would “ultimately serve the city” and “further the interests and purposes of the city.”

And what of the benefit that was supposed to come New York’s way as a result of all of these millions? Mr. Bloomberg donated more than $1.8 billion to the foundation in its first three years of life, according to the foundation’s tax filings. About $67 million—$36 million in 2007 and $31 million in 2008—was given away. Much of it went to anti-smoking initiatives, including the World Lung Federation and an Indian anti-smoking group; other grants went to the government of Vietnam and the World Health Organization, for injury-prevention efforts. No grants went to organizations directly benefiting New York City.

Today, at a five-story Beaux Arts mansion on the corner of 78th Street and Madison, workers are putting the finishing touches on the foundation’s new headquarters, which Mr. Bloomberg purchased for $45 million. Flatbed trucks unload marble tiles for the building’s floors; electricians have installed subdued lighting and a heavy, automatic glass sliding door.

Several weeks ago, the foundation named a new 19-person board that reads like a who’s who of national politics and finance: Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, former Georgia senator Sam Nunn and former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson are among the members. It is all part of a push by Mr. Bloomberg to put the foundation on a par with other big charities and put his name on the list of America’s great philanthropists: Gates, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford have their foundations, and now so does Bloomberg.

BEYOND THE U.S. BORDER, in places like the Caymans, the climate for charities is much more inviting. Nonprofits like the Bloomberg Family Foundation are tax-exempt, but some investments that aren’t related to an organization’s core mission can be subject to a levy called the Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT, for short). So to avoid more than 40 percent in federal and local taxes on unrelated businesses, nonprofits use a legal loophole, routing investments through offshore tax havens.

“It cleanses the unrelated business taint from the total return,” Harvey Dale, of the N.Y.U. School of Law, told The Observer. “You invest in the same thing through an offshore entity. You are making the same investment; you are just putting an intermediary entity in the middle. Instead of investing directly in the hedge fund, you invest in the foreign entity, which, in turn, invests in the hedge fund.”

“Is (using the loophole) allowable under the law? Yes,” said tax expert Dean Zerbe, a former staffer at the Senate Finance Committee. “Is it something that is a best practice, particularly by an elected official? I think they should look very hard when they are engaging in this kind of activity. What does it say to the average New Yorker?”

The foundation’s tax returns indicate that Mr. Rattner’s team migrated much of its money to large hedge funds with ostensible island charters, including several in the Caymans, two of which list an address at P.O. Box 309 of the Ugland House, a building that “houses” an estimated 12,000 to 18,000 foreign businesses.

“Now, that’s either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam in the world,” said Senator Barack Obama during his campaign for president. “And I think we know which one it is.”

But tax havens—despite the protestations of the president, a slew of senators and at least one district attorney—remain legal. “I made a lot of effort to shut down that loophole,” former district attorney Robert Morgenthau told The Observer.

Mr. Morgenthau said he’d spoken generally about offshore loopholes to four U.S. secretaries of the Treasury, twice to the commissioner of the general revenue and, as it happens, to Mr. Bloomberg himself. The mayor seemed uninterested in the offshore issue, he said. “I’ve talked to the mayor about it, and the budget director,” Mr.

Morgenthau said. “We did get help from the State Division of Taxation and Finance. But nothing from the city.”

In spite of the flurry of investments, it appears that for years, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation had no office, phones, staff, Web site or public brochures. In late 2007, the mayor wrote a second letter to the Conflicts of Interest Board, looking for another blessing: Some of his staffers at City Hall, he argued, were asking him, “unsolicited,” if they could help with his foundation. Saying that the foundation would “ultimately serve city goals,” the board approved. At least three of his staffers were even allowed to use government resources, like office space, phones and Internet service, for foundation work.

One of the staffers was Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris. Aside from Mr. Bloomberg, Ms. Harris was the sole officer listed on his foundation’s tax return. A longtime Bloomberg loyalist, Ms. Harris worked at Bloomberg LP before joining the mayor at City Hall. On foundation tax returns, Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Harris each claimed to have spent .25 hours, or 15 minutes, per week on the charity—as it gave away tens of millions.

Last month, the mayor announced that Ms. Harris would take on even more duties at the foundation, although it is unclear if she will increase her time commitment.

The mayor’s press office referred all questions about the foundation to the organization’s press office, run by former mayoral aide James Anderson. “In order to avoid conflicts, the Mayor is neither involved in nor apprised of the specific investment decisions made on behalf of the foundation—and we are therefore not in a position to discuss them,” Mr. Anderson wrote in an email.

Yet Mr. Bloomberg does often discuss his charitable endeavors. “Other than Gates, nobody’s given away this amount of money,” he boasted to the New York Post’s editorial board earlier this month.

But the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides a contrast in its investment style. While the Bloomberg Family Foundation is hardly alone in embracing the savings provided by the offshore loophole—according to a 2007 New York Times piece, large universities like Yale and Duke, along with charities like the Rockefeller Foundation, engaged in the practice—The Times also reported that the Gates Foundation did not invest in offshore hedge funds.

“When instructing the investment managers, Bill and Melinda also consider other issues beyond corporate profits, including the values that drive the foundation’s work,” explains the Gates Foundation’s Web site. “They have defined areas in which the endowment will not invest, such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that they find egregious.”

Mr. Rattner’s Quadrangle Group wasn’t beholden to any such strictures relating to the Bloomberg Family Foundation’s portfolio, and throughout 2008, the foundation made liberal use of the offshore loophole.

The bulk of the investments ended up in the Caymans. The Rattner team transferred more than $71 million dollars to Highfields Capital Ltd., the Caymans arm of a Boston-based hedge fund. (Last month, Highfields’ co-founder, Richard Grubman, was arrested after he allegedly beaned a Ritz Carlton valet with the keys of his BMW.) Another $67.8 million went to Brookside Cayman Ltd, the island home of Brookside Capital.

Other money decamped for even more exotic locales: $710,000 zipped to the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Another $700,000 went to two funds on the island nation of Mauritius, about 500 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. A Brazilian hedge fund got $304,000.

Mystique surrounds even some of the smaller foreign investments. In one, the mayor’s foundation transferred $104,000 in cash to a Cyprus-based oil services firm called Geotech Oil Services Holdings Ltd., controlled by a Russian oligarch named Nikolai Levitsky; Mr. Levitsky was once the first deputy governor of the resource-rich Komi Republic in Russia’s Northwest.

Reached by phone, Geotech spokesman Denis Cherednichenko said he had no idea if the Bloomberg Family Foundation had invested in the company, but seemed surprised. He speculated it could have been through another hedge fund. He said three American funds invested in Geotech in 2007.

In another transaction, Mr. Rattner’s team invested $560,000 of the mayor’s charitable fund in BJJ Universul, a Cyprus-based company that develops real estate in central Eastern Europe. According to its Web site, BJJ was established in Romania in 2004 and has more than 40 employees, split between Bucharest and Sofia, Bulgaria, and focused on “greenfield and redevelopment opportunities in Eastern Europe with a current focus on Romania and Bulgaria.”

Compared with those of the great foundations of America, the Bloomberg investment strategies stand out. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s about as opaque set of investments as you can find,” said Rick Cohen, who covers foundations and charities for Nonprofit Quarterly, and who agreed to review the foundation’s tax return. “This involves extensive investments in hedge funds offshore, where the motivation and purpose is not discernible, so you can’t tell what kind of activity it is or who is going to benefit from the investments.”

One former state official, however, defended the activity. “I don’t think there is anything unusual here,” said Bill Josephson, who headed the state’s Charities Bureau when Eliot Spitzer was attorney general, and examined the tax returns for The Observer.

“It is impossible to look at this and determine the intent of the hedge funds investments. You can’t figure it out from the 990 [tax form],” Mr. Josephson said. “The Bloomberg foundation is not that significantly different from the foundations of other individuals who come out of the investment world.”

The mayor announced some time ago that he would strip his funds from the Quadrangle Group, while allowing many of the Quadrangle managers who tended to his money to continue to do so at another firm. Quadrangle continues to manage about $100 million in New York City pension funds, according to the comptroller’s office.

As for the increasingly isolated Mr. Rattner, who remains under investigation, the mayor stands by him. “He’s a friend whose advice the mayor has, and continues to, rely on,” said a Bloomberg spokesman. Mr. Rattner declined to comment.

While almost nothing is known about the foundation’s investments since 2008, Mr. Bloomberg is now preparing to burnish his place in the annals of philanthropy. What exactly that means is not yet public.

apaybarah@observer.com, rpillifant@observer.com

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

NYC Public School Parents: Unholy Alliance: Al Sharpton and Joel Klein

I would encourage anyone who appreciates this blog entry to become a regular reader of the NYC Public School Parents blog...it offers key analysis and insight into the actions of the Bloomberg/Klein school administration...

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June 13: See update and correction on funders here.

Lots of publicity for the Klein/Sharpton alliance, inaugurated at the National Press Club yesterday, where no doubt they faced a less skeptical press corps than they would have in NYC -- though the Washington Post pointed out that “It was the kind of odd coupling that seemed more like the premise for a reality show than a news conference on education policy.”

As predicted, this "new" coalition will focus on charter schools, union-busting and teacher scapegoating – with not a single word about the need for any of the reforms that have actually been proven to work to narrow the achievement gap -- like class size reduction.

This strategic alliance, or "beautiful friendship" as Klein likes to put it, appears to be based upon the ideological biases of its funders -- the Gates and Broad foundations.

Accordingly, at the news conference, their statements were full of ignorant and self-serving nonsense:

NY Sun: “Mr. Klein said the achievement gap had "barely narrowed" in the more than five decades since the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the schools in the landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education.”

This is right-wing tripe that has been repeatedly disproved. The achievement gap, though still significant, substantially narrowed in the 1970’s and 1980’s. (See the analysis in this classic work, for example.)

USA Today: “Sharpton, a Baptist pastor and political gadfly, says that for years, civil rights leaders have been silent on education equity issues.”

Who is he kidding? While he has been missing in action on these issues, the NAACP and other mainstream civil rights organizations have led the charge on educational equity – including, most recently, helping sponsor the Florida constitutional amendment requiring smaller classes in all grades.

Baltimore Sun: “They [Klein and Sharpton] support … more accountability for everyone, including central office staff.”

Sure. Tell me a single educrat at Tweed who has been held accountable for their multiple fiascos, from the bus route disaster last year, to this year’s mix-ups with admissions to G and T programs, preK and middle schools. Not to mention the serial blunders of the Accountability office, from the ridiculous school grading system to failure of ARIS, the $80 Million plus super-computer system.

Meanwhile, according to the Daily News, “The entire English staff at closing Lafayette High School was handed walking papers this week, a move that would leave no licensed English teachers for next year's students, the Daily News has learned.”

Talk about educational equity! I guess those kids don’t need English teachers – another backwards version of equity, no doubt, in the twisted land of Tweed.

An article in the News reports on the continuing harassment of Sikh students, which unfortunately omits the fact that the DOE has refused to comply with a law passed by the City Council four years ago, requiring the reporting and disciplining of anti-bias crimes in schools.

Also see the article in the News about Marie Pollicino, Queens CEC member, who filed a complaint against the attempt by DOE to eliminate all authority of parents on School Leadership Teams to develop school budgets and Comprehensive Education Plans. See our blog in early January about this outrageous and illegal move by Klein et.al., just after the complaint was originally filed.

Meanwhile, this new coalition blathers on about the need for “increased parental involvement.”

As Sharpton said at the news conference, “Who is standing up for the children?"

Not either of these hucksters, that’s for sure. Nor the Gates or Broad foundations, which are bankrolling this unholy alliance.

How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System? - Interviews by Paul Tough - Education and Schools - New York Times

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For as long as wealthy Americans have given their money away, education has been a leading recipient of their largess. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller: the biggest philanthropists of the 20th century all gave significant portions of their fortunes to schools, teachers and libraries. Today, according to the Foundation Center, about a quarter of all foundation giving goes to education; overall, only religious organizations receive more charitable donations.

Since the turn of the millennium, education philanthropy has been undergoing a major transition, as a new generation of donors has emerged. The most prominent giver is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which made its first education donations in 2000 and now directs more than $350 million a year to schools. But Gates is not alone, and the philanthropists who have followed often arrive armed with controversial ideas about education and some very different approaches to giving their money away. Last month, The New York Times Magazine invited five interested parties to lunch to discuss the new world of educational philanthropy. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

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Participants

Steve Barr is the founder and C.E.O. of Green Dot Public Schools, a charter-school operator based in Los Angeles. Frederick Hess is the director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Vanessa Kirsch is the founder and president of New Profit, Inc., a venture philanthropy fund based in Boston. Joel I. Klein has been the chancellor of the New York City school system since 2002. Tom Vander Ark is the president of the X Prize Foundation. Until 2007, he was the executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Paul Tough is an editor of this magazine. His book about the Harlem Childrens Zone, “Whatever It Takes,” will be published in September.

I. Investing in a Disruptive Force

Paul Tough: Here’s our scenario: We’ve been brought together today by a high-tech entrepreneur whose company just went public, netting him $4 billion. He has decided to give half of his fortune away, and he wants to give it to education — specifically to primary and secondary education in the United States. But this is not a field he knows. He has been working hard for the last decade, and he hasn’t thought much about philanthropy. So he has assembled this panel of experts to give him advice. Rick, let me start by asking you: What kind of impact will this gift have? Is $2 billion suddenly being injected into the realm of K-12 education a big deal?

Frederick Hess: Not on its face; it’s just a ripple. Each year, nationwide, about $500 billion is spent on K-12 education, and almost all of it comes from taxpayers. By that measure, this gift is a fraction of 1 percent of total expenditures. But in terms of existing philanthropy, yes, $2 billion actually would be a huge deal. No one has exact figures, but the best estimates are that K-12 educational philanthropy in the United States totals nearly $4 billion a year. So if our billionaire decides to spend the entire $2 billion just in fiscal ’08, that would be a big portion of the national total.

Tom Vander Ark: But if he does what most philanthropists do — puts it in the bank and only spends 5 percent each year — then it’s a relatively small portion.

Hess: That’s true.

Vander Ark: Which is why many newer donors are opting for a quicker spend-down. If that’s the case with our billionaire, here’s one question for him to consider: Do you think you can spend that much, that rapidly, in a high-leverage, high-impact fashion? The answer to that question is probably no. It’s a challenge trying to spend even 5 percent of that in a highly leveraged and effective way.

Joel I. Klein: Tom, just send that money in my direction! If you can’t spend it fast enough, I’ll show you how to do it.

Vanessa Kirsch: I think the amount of money is not necessarily the primary decision for our billionaire. He should really be thinking about the strategic influence he can have. Because if you are strategic about it, you can have an incredibly powerful impact with less money. Philanthropy can help invent and develop new programs and projects that work. And then it can help to scale those programs, so that they can be demonstration models that can really change an entrenched system.

Tough: Joel, you run the country’s biggest school system. What if this money was simply added to New York City’s regular education budget for next year? Would you be able to make a difference with it?

Klein: Well, I agree with Vanessa that philanthropists should think strategically, and what you’re suggesting would be about as nonstrategic an investment as you could make. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t like an additional billion dollars next year. But I think our billionaire should think about this entirely differently. There are two things that I would do with this money. One, I would try to set up a national institute for educational policy that does serious research. This is an industry in which there are so many myths, and that’s because there are such large gaps in our knowledge right now. And second, I would make bets on a few selected individuals. Look, we have lots of wonderful examples in America of educational success. The work Steve is doing with Green Dot is a terrific example. But what we don’t have is an entire urban school district — one that’s predominantly made up of minority kids, with lots of English-language learners and lots of poverty — that really works, that works in a way that people say, “O.K., I want to replicate that district.” To get there, you’re going to need a combination of circumstance and individuals. I would look for the most promising individuals and make heavy investments in them. Let’s say you choose Michelle Rhee, the new schools chancellor in D.C. That school system has long been one of the worst-performing in the country, and Michelle wants to really overhaul it. I think our philanthropist could make an eight-year bet on her. It’s the same kind of thing I would have wanted to have happen to us when we started six years ago in New York. To start, I’d give her a couple of million to do some planning. Then I’d ask her to sit down and show me what strategic investments she thinks a philanthropist could make in D.C. that the system itself, for whatever reason, is not going to make. And I would try to make three or four of these strategic bets around the country, on individuals who I thought had the talent, the longevity and the political support to make significant change feasible.

Tough: And are those individuals all superintendents of school systems?

Klein: Yes, superintendents with firm support from the mayor. What you need to create — and what, despite our progress, we haven’t achieved yet in New York — is a school district that people from other cities can come to and say: “This works. All we’ve got to do is replicate this.”

Tough: Steve, Eli Broad, who is one of the biggest philanthropists in the education world, recently decided that he wanted to make an impact on the Los Angeles school system. But rather than doing what Joel is suggesting and making a bet on the superintendent, he made that bet on you and some other charter-school managers. Why?

Steve Barr

Steve Barr: Because I’m a disruptive force. And he’s betting on that force gaining enough momentum that it will ultimately change the system, not just in L.A. but elsewhere, too, in a way that really realigns the education debate. The problem right now in education reform is that there is a tribal mentality. We have nonunion charters spitting out studies saying how good they are versus the unions doing the opposite. If you can find the common ground between those two groups, then you can start to move past that gridlock. In the fall, Green Dot is going to open a new charter school in the South Bronx, and it has the support not only of the mayor and the chancellor but also of the president of the biggest teachers’ union local in the country. That’s what change looks like, and that’s the kind of innovation that I would advise somebody to invest in. I think that’s why people invest in Green Dot. I like that we get good numbers and our test scores and graduation rates are fantastic, but people really invest in us because we’re a disruptive force. Our philanthropist should go out and find 100 people who are where I was a decade ago or where Mike Feinberg of the KIPP network of charter schools was a decade ago and invest in them.

Tough: So is this the choice we’re giving our philanthropist? You can either put your money behind three or four great superintendents or you can invest in 100 disruptive outsiders?

Klein: I don’t see it as either/or. In New York, I’ve used philanthropic dollars to try to attract outsiders to the city, charter operators like Steve Barr or Dacia Toll of Achievement First. The Gates Foundation has invested more than $100 million in New York City since 2002, and a huge chunk of that has gone to these intermediaries. That has been critical. In fact, we’ve now developed several of those intermediaries into what we call school-support organizations, and we’re directly collaborating with them. But I’m skeptical whether disruptive forces are the right thing for our philanthropist to look for. I would rather look for people who can work the system from the inside, like Michelle Rhee.

Barr: Well, there are different kinds of disruptive forces. The reason I came to New York is because of the disruptive force that arrived here a few years ago named Michael Bloomberg. But the system, when you first look at it, needs a huge shaking.

Klein: Absolutely.

Barr: And either it comes from the top, like you did in New York, or it comes from the bottom, like we’re doing in L.A.

Klein: But what you’re trying to do is shake the system from outside the system. What I think is fascinating now is that in certain cities, the people who are the change agents, the disruptive forces, if you will, are the people who are trying to run the system. And that’s a different strategy.

Kirsch: I think these two strategies go hand in hand. In Washington, Michelle Rhee has been able to use nonprofits to do things that she can’t do herself. She’s got Teach for America bringing young, dynamic teachers into the D.C. public schools. New Leaders for New Schools is helping her train and select a new generation of principals. And the social entrepreneurs who run those nonprofits can only succeed if they’re backed up by philanthropy. They have very limited access to government dollars.

Vander Ark: This is the big debate in education philanthropy right now. There are two camps: the “fix the system” people and the “replace the system” people. There are philanthropists who only want to help the system get better, and they only invest through public-school districts. And then there is a group of philanthropists who don’t believe the system can be fixed or should be fixed, and they only invest in alternatives to the system, like voucher programs or charter schools. There are a few, like the Gates Foundation, that attempt to be a bridge. When I was at Gates, our belief was that if your long-term goal is to provide quality schools for all kids, then you have to do both. One of our main educational initiatives was to start new small high schools. It was mostly an outsider approach, and it was pretty successful. Of the 1,200 new schools, 80 percent of them are going to be good to very good. That’s a high rate of success. But we only reached, with those schools, 3 percent or 4 percent of American high-school students. You look at that and you say: “O.K., that was a good investment. It’s going to stick; it has lots of sustainability — but it won’t grow to scale fast enough.” If you want to make a real impact, you have to work inside the system, too.

II.Infrastructure vs. Sexy Money

2. 
   

Frederick Hess

Hess: I think these two camps tend to make the same analytic mistake. Ten or 20 years ago, the dominant givers in education were trying to work through districts. There was the Kellogg Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, all working from the inside. The biggest example was the Annenberg Foundation. In 1993, former Ambassador Walter Annenberg went to the White House and announced a $500 million gift to education. He said, essentially, “We need to drop a bomb on American urban education to shake things up.” Local foundations made matching gifts, so Annenberg’s $500 million was leveraged into more than $1 billion, invested in more than a dozen communities. And generally speaking, it was a substantial disappointment. There was very little change in an ongoing, meaningful way. You know, there’s a reason that Univac wasn’t able just to become I.B.M., and there’s a reason I.B.M. couldn’t just become Microsoft and Microsoft couldn’t just become Google. Organizations bake in the assumptions and the processes that made them successful. The way you hire your people, the way you reward your people, the internal practices you devise — they are all built around a certain set of assumptions and operations. When that larger world changes, it’s tough to retool. So when these reform-minded superintendents come in, like Alan Bersin when he arrived in San Diego or Paul Vallas when he got to Philadelphia or Joel Klein here in New York, they face enormous challenges. A school system is not an agile, nimble organization where if you can just hire the right people and start the right programs, you can turn things around quickly. You’ve got to work your way around outdated staffing processes, inadequate and bulky information-technology systems, abysmal and poorly conceived data-management systems. Alan Bersin was five years into his tenure in San Diego before teachers stopped putting transfer requests into a wooden box.

Tough: O.K., that’s the problem on the fix-the-system side. What is the mistake that the replace-the-system people make?

Hess: Those folks take the wrong lesson from successful programs like Green Dot and Achievement First and KIPP. They say, “Look, let’s just create options, and more good alternatives will emerge.” It’s a little bit like the mistake we made in planning for the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003: if we create a vacuum, good stuff will happen. Well, you know, effective markets aren’t created by vacuums. Markets are ways to channel human energy and ingenuity, but only when they’re transparent, when they’re structured, when you’re building on human social capital, when you’ve got talent and investment capital. If we really want to think about new solutions, it’s not just identifying the right people and the right programs; we need to create an environment where these people and solutions are able to thrive. So for me, if you’re going to do a locale-based strategy — whether it’s L.A. or New York or D.C. — the most important strategy is not putting money into the system and it’s not funding the five best charter operators. It’s attracting aggressive human-resource operations like New Leaders for New Schools or the New Teacher Project. It’s providing the kind of legal and business support that those programs need in order to expand and grow. These are things that philanthropists tend not to invest in because they’re not sexy but that are actually going to determine whether we’re able to make reforms work or not.

Klein: It’s the hardest money to raise. When I go to a lot of businesses looking for donations, they say, “Well, I’ll build a new school library,” or, “I’ll build a gym.” And that’s cool. I mean, we need all the libraries and gyms they can build for us. But it’s not strategic. We’ve got lots of schools with great gyms and libraries that are not doing anything for their kids. I mean, maybe they’re playing basketball. But smart philanthropists will invest in just the kind of things that Rick is talking about. In order to make real change, you have to understand human resources, you have to understand technology and the transparency of data and the ability to actually reward people for things other than showing up. These are fundamental game-changing strategies. And you need money from philanthropists to get that off the ground.

Hess: It’s not sexy money.

Klein: It’s not. But it’s exactly where philanthropy has been very effective in New York. The Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and the Tiger Foundation gave us money to totally retool our H.R. system. If I had tried to get that money from the existing budget for that kind of overhaul, it would have been next to impossible. But outside money is much more flexible than government money. So with philanthropic support, we were able to create a pilot program, get it off the ground, tinker with it, prove it worked — and only then expand it with city funds.

III. Inputs vs. Outcomes

Tough: Vanessa, is it hard to get potential philanthropists to think about these more systemic investments? Do they all start off wanting to donate gymnasiums and libraries?

Vanessa Kirsch

Kirsch: In the past, I think that was true. But we’re seeing a new kind of philanthropist. They don’t want to put their name on a gym; they don’t want to put their name on a building. They want to see change. My company is a venture-philanthropy firm. We work with about 50 wealthy donors, and we bundle their money and invest it strategically in a variety of nonprofits. And when these donors are starting out, I tell each of them that as they turn to philanthropy, it is important for them to keep their business hat on. They should spend their money the way they made their money, which means investing in great people, testing out new ideas, being tough-minded in evaluating what’s working and what isn’t.

Tough: Your approach sounds a little different from what Joel was describing. Instead of creating a single national strategy where all the parts fit together, you’re looking to support lots of different people who have a variety of different ideas.

Kirsch: I think those two approaches can reinforce each other. One of the things that makes America great is its entrepreneurial system. We have entrepreneurs in every corner of the private sector, and we have capital markets to support them. If you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a brilliant idea, there is a whole system in place to help you turn that into a successful enterprise: angel investors, consultants, seed capital, incubators. There are many talented entrepreneurs in the social sector too, but for those social entrepreneurs, there are no organized capital markets or support systems to give them the help they need to be the disruptions and innovators — and, just as important, to get their innovations to scale.

Vander Ark: Getting to scale is critical for two reasons. The first is straightforward: you want to take good organizations to scale so low-income kids have more access to good schools. The second reason is to reinvent the sector. And it’s terribly difficult to scale nonprofits today.

Kirsch: You’re right. The average grant from foundations to nonprofits is $50,000. Which means that if you’re running a nonprofit, you’re constantly living hand to mouth, year to year. The advice I’d give a philanthropist who wanted to support social entrepreneurs is to invest in the long haul. Take the things that work and double down on them and triple down on them and stick with them, because without that kind of support, growth is really difficult for a nonprofit. I mean, it’s hard to grow any business. But growing a social enterprise is incredibly hard.

Vander Ark: Whether our philanthropist chooses one big coordinated strategy or a series of smaller entrepreneurial bets, I would suggest organizing most of this giving around a specific geography — a city or a region — so that we can tie it to a set of student outcomes. Particularly if this is a new investor in education. One reason that people are drawn to education philanthropy is that they want to give back to kids, right? They want to make a connection with young people and feel that they’re helping the next generation. And if you invest in a specific place, you can go visit schools and have a tangible, visceral, personal sense that you’re making a difference for these kids and the kids that will follow them. That’s not unimportant for an investor whom we’re asking to sustain this energy and investment for a decade or more.

Kirsch: Well, if you look at our 50 investors, there are certainly some who would like the idea of a place-based, integrated, synthesized solution in a single city. But philanthropy is very personal, and each donor is different. We have other investors, more often venture capitalists and people who are used to investing in great entrepreneurs, who just want to know what the next five best inventions are out there and what needs to happen in order to expand them and take them across America. That makes sense to them because that’s what they’ve done with their companies. Every philanthropist has their own motivation, and what they give to has to be tied to that motivation or they’re not going to stay in it. Because the reality is, it’s hard work to give away money. Most of our investors discover it’s harder to give it away than it was to make it.

Joel Klein

Klein: In the last few years, there has been a paradigm shift in the philanthropic community. Increasingly, what matters to donors is outcomes. When Tom was with the Gates Foundation, the first big plan we developed together was a project to take large high schools that weren’t working and break them up into a series of small schools under a single roof. And from our very first meeting, Tom wanted to know about outcomes. He said, O.K., how many more kids will these new schools graduate, compared with the schools they are replacing? And that is a very different approach than you would have seen 10 years ago, when most of the philanthropy that went to education was about inputs.

Tough: What do you mean by inputs?

Kirsch: Historically, when philanthropists would give money to a nonprofit or a school system, they would say, “I want to fund this many kids.” And the next year they could ask the organization they had funded, “Well, did you reach that number?” And if you funded that many kids, the grant was considered a success.

Klein: Donations were measured by how many kids they reached, not by what effect they had on those kids. And, in fact, a lot of the money that goes into education still goes into inputs. I recently had a discussion with a major philanthropy that wanted to invest in some programs in the city, and I asked them, “What are the results you expect this to produce for your investment?” And they had no clue. But increasingly, that’s a rarity. There’s been a shift. I’m sure Steve sees it, too. If he doesn’t produce results, even though everybody loves him, his funders are not going to continue to fund him.

Barr: Listen, you’re only loved if you get results. Every dollar we get is tied to numbers. The bottom line for my funders is that I tell them that when we take over a high school in L.A., we will achieve a 200-point jump in scores on California’s Academic Performance Index, which is measured from 1 to 1,000. If we go under that, funding stops, growth stops. But I like the challenge. I think it’s actually a great thing. Personality will only get you so far. Results are what really matters.

Kirsch: But now that philanthropists are focused on outcomes, things are more complicated for both the givers and the recipients. A lot of programs actually take a few years to have an effect, and sometimes you need to tweak the methods along the way. And so as a philanthropist, you need to look deeper into the operations of an organization. It’s a much more complex process to be a good philanthropist if you’re investing in long-term, system-changing outcomes. But it’s also far more rewarding.

Klein: And when people start to focus on the outputs, it will change the discussion in public education. Right now, any place you go, any city in the country, if there’s a debate about education, the main question is: “How much do you spend on this? How much do you spend on the arts; how much do you spend on science? How much do you spend on class size?” But you cannot get a meaningful public debate going about a more important question: What is the return on your investment? This philanthropic movement that Vanessa is describing is kind of a wedge movement into the way we think about education more generally. If we can shift that discussion, then we may actually start to develop more rational resource allocations. That would be a major change.

Hess: This is a relatively new phenomenon, this notion of the social enterprise as something with defined objectives. Historically, one of the biggest philanthropic projects was Andrew Carnegie’s library initiative in the late 1800s. It was phenomenally successful. It put libraries in about 1,400 communities. But in fact, these were bookless libraries, because Carnegie said: “It’s the community’s job to buy the books. I just want to create the capacity.” There’s a big advantage to that kind of philanthropy: once you give the money, you’re done. You’ve accomplished your goal. You don’t get into all of these complex questions about what kind of impact your money is having. And most of the foundations that were dominant in education until 8 or 10 years ago were attuned to that model.

Klein: But there have been major new entrants into this philanthropic space recently. The Gates Foundation came along less than a decade ago. Eli Broad started investing in education only a half-dozen years ago, and he’s going to continue to invest heavily in it. You’ve got the Dell Foundation, which is reasonably new. Ten years ago, who was in education? Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie all did some good work. But now the list of the biggest funders is completely different. And these new people are highly entrepreneurial. They haven’t become ossified. I think it’s enormously exciting that the richest people in America are taking significant chunks of their fortune and putting it into K-12 philanthropy.

IV. Politics

Tom Vander Ark

Vander Ark: There’s one other arena that I’d recommend that our philanthropist invest in, and that is public policy. By law, a charitable foundation can’t lobby for specific legislation. But you can hire people to inform legislators and build public awareness and build alliances, and all that is critical. Those investments will protect and support the investments that you’re making in urban areas, and they will also create the future where the small demonstration models you’re funding can be taken to scale through good public policy. This part of the work is difficult. It is long-term, and the returns are indirect. But if it’s done well, it can be super-high-leverage.

Hess: The school-choice community has done this very effectively. In Wisconsin, the Bradley Foundation and the Olin Foundation were instrumental in getting the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program passed — the first real voucher model in the country. They were then instrumental in providing political air cover for the program. They found and supported researchers to document it, and they helped promote it nationally. The Walton Foundation has done the same thing with charter schools. Walton has not only directly supported an enormous number of charter schools, but they have also given money to document what’s going on in charter schooling and to support the political constituencies that are advocating for charter schools in states and nationally.

Barr: Philanthropists need to take some time to really learn and understand how the policy world works. If they’re interested in disruption, they need to understand that their disruptions won’t ever really take root unless the whole political ecosystem embraces them. In Los Angeles, we’re trying to figure out how to create political will around the idea that every high school in the city should look like a Green Dot school — not that they should all be charter schools but that they all should be run according to the same kind of principles and they should all achieve the same good outcomes. We decided to create a parents’ union. Everybody’s got a union, right? Everybody but the parents. So we got a group of parents together, some affluent and some nonaffluent, all of whom want the schools to change. And the group has now grown to 4,000 people. There are 15 chapters. If we can get a parent revolt going in Los Angeles, that is the kind of political change that can really move the game.

Klein: But I wonder how much appetite there actually is among philanthropists for this kind of political advocacy. New entrants into the field don’t usually want disruptive strategies. Building new schools and closing old ones, like Gates did in New York, was to some degree controversial. To do a massive 10-year reform piece, which I assure you will be noisy, you don’t do that without a political cost.

Vander Ark: When Bill and Melinda Gates began investing in education in 2000, they were very reluctant to devote any money to policy-related efforts. We did almost none of that for the first two years. But each year thereafter, they became more deeply invested in and sophisticated about public-policy efforts. And by February 2005, Bill was on the stage at the National Governors Association conference, and 35 states signed up for a program to make sure that high schools were preparing students for college and work. That was a big political coalition, and that had a good deal to do with Bill being there. It was an important political moment in the life of the Gates Foundation, but it took us five or six years to build up the confidence in our ability and our sense that it was the appropriate thing to do. And that was only half-controversial, right? Taking on some of these other issues — working conditions, teacher pay, school choice — these are enormously controversial. And people new to education philanthropy are typically going to be very reluctant to step onto the third rail with their very first step.

Hess: But the reality is that these things won’t change without philanthropy. The problems are too complicated and the politics are too dogmatic at this point. We can’t solve it without outside intervention. We’ll need smart people to invest in solutions that can help illuminate the path forward. At its best, that’s what philanthropy can do.

NY Times: Union-Friendly Maverick Leads New Charge for Charter Schools by Sam Dillon...

Union-Friendly Maverick Leads New Charge for Charter Schools - New York Times:

LOS ANGELES — Steve Barr, a major organizer of charter schools, has been waging what often seems like a guerrilla war for control of this city’s chronically failing high schools.

In just seven years, Mr. Barr’s Green Dot Public Schools organization has founded 10 charter high schools and has won approval to open 10 more. Now, in his most aggressive challenge to the public school system, he is fighting to seize control of Locke Senior High, a gang-ridden school in Watts known as one of the worst in the city. A 15-year-old girl was killed by gunfire there in 2005.

In the process, Mr. Barr has fomented a teachers revolt against the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has driven a wedge through the city’s teachers union by welcoming organized labor — in contrast to other charter operators — and signing a contract with an upstart union. And he has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools.

Educators and policy makers from Sacramento to Washington are watching closely because many believe Green Dot’s audacious tactics have the potential to strengthen and expand the charter school movement nationwide.

“He’s got a take-no-prisoners style,” said Jaime Regalado, the director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “He’s channeled the outrage of African-American and Latino parents into the public space in a way that’s new.”

Charter schools are publicly financed but managed by groups separate from school districts. Most other major charter organizations have focused on opening easier-to-run elementary and middle schools, not taking over devastated high schools.

Mr. Barr says, “We want systemic change, not to create oases in a desert.”

And while most charters have nonunion teachers and are often called union busters by opponents, Mr. Barr, a former fund-raiser for the California Democratic Party and co-founder of Rock the Vote, prefers to work with organized labor. Teachers at Green Dot schools have a contract, though one less rigid than at other Los Angeles schools.

Mr. Barr’s posture, as well as promising results at some of his schools, has attracted teachers to his side, even while splitting the larger teachers union, some of whose officials have been fighting him tooth and nail. Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, is working with him to put a Green Dot school in the South Bronx.

That alliance embarrassed United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents some 40,000 teachers. A. J. Duffy, its president, said in an interview that his union had allowed work rule waivers for some Los Angeles schools, but had erred several years ago by ruling out an arrangement with Green Dot.

“We could have and probably should have organized the Green Dot schools,” Mr. Duffy said. “They started with one charter school, now have 10, and in short order they’ll have 20 schools in Los Angeles, with all the teachers paying dues to a different union. And that’s a problem.”

The union representing Green Dot teachers, Association de Maestros Unidos, has a 33-page contract that offers competitive salaries but no tenure, and it allows class schedule and other instructional flexibility outlawed by the 330-page contract governing most Los Angeles schools.

Andrew J. Rotherham, who worked in the Clinton White House and is co-director of Education Sector, a research group in Washington, said, “Green Dot is mobilizing parents in poor neighborhoods and offering an alternative for frustrated teachers, and that’s scrambling the cozy power arrangements between the school district and the union to a degree not seen anywhere else.”

Mr. Barr has not just used his charters to challenge the district. He is also an ally of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat who has also battled the Los Angeles school district, seeking mayoral control.

The district superintendent , David L. Brewer III, met with Mr. Barr several times last spring to discuss his proposals for Locke, but those talks broke down.

“Mr. Brewer has said he continues to be interested in partnering with Green Dot,” said Greg McNair, who leads the district’s charter school division.

Green Dot is part of a new wave of nonprofit, high-performing charter chains that have grown rapidly with philanthropic financing, in Green Dot’s case especially from the Broad and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundations. Others include the Kipp Schools, in 18 states, and Achievement First, with 12 schools in New York and New Haven, said Ted Mitchell, head of the NewSchools Venture Fund, a San Francisco group that works with several chains.

Mr. Mitchell said that only Green Dot was mounting such an aggressive challenge to the local school board. “Many charter organizations try to induce different behavior by providing examples of good new schools,” he said. “But only Green Dot is trying to provoke a school district to behave in radically different ways.”

Some people voice skepticism about Green Dot’s methods. Clint Bolick, a lawyer who has represented many charter schools, said: “If union bosses start patrolling their hallways, that’ll be the death knell of charters, as it has been for public schools. There has to be a genuine perestroika for Green Dot’s approach to work.”

Tactics aside, the chain has had promising results. An early high school that Green Dot founded, Ànimo Inglewood, has raised the percent of students proficient in math by 40 points since 2003, and 79 percent of its students from the class of 2006 went on to college. Green Dot keeps enrollment in its high schools below 525. Incoming freshmen who need it remedial tutoring get it, and thereafter pursue a college-prep curriculum.

Three years ago, Mr. Barr negotiated with district officials about overhauling Jefferson High School, a dropout factory in downtown Los Angeles. When the talks bogged down, Mr. Barr concluded he needed clout.

Green Dot organized a parents union, and its members, buttonholing neighbors in supermarkets and churches, collected 10,000 signatures endorsing Jefferson’s division into several smaller charter schools.

Mr. Barr marched from Jefferson High with nearly 1,000 parents to deliver the petition to district headquarters. The authorities refused to relinquish Jefferson, but the school board approved five new charters, which Green Dot inaugurated last fall, all near Jefferson and drawing students from it.

Green Dot’s recent organizing suggests that many teachers are as frustrated as parents.

Locke, designated a failing school for much of a decade, is awaiting its fourth principal in five years. This spring, Mr. Barr drew up a charter plan and began meeting with teachers to explain it. He envisioned using the Locke campus for smaller schools that emphasize college prep and give teachers more decision-making authority.

He invited Frank Wells, Locke’s principal, to tour a Green Dot charter in May, a day on which Education Secretary Margaret Spellings would be visiting. Before parents, teachers and the secretary, Mr. Wells denounced the district as using Locke as a dumping ground for incompetent teachers.

“I went to Locke thinking I could turn it around, but I ran into a brick wall,” Mr. Wells said.

On May 7, teachers began circulating a petition endorsing Green Dot’s plan for Locke, and more than half of Locke’s 73-member tenured staff members signed. Bruce Smith, an English teacher who gathered signatures, said most young teachers were eager to sign; older teachers were reluctant.

“Among the people who opposed us, nobody said, ‘The district is doing a great job here,’ ” Mr. Smith recalled. “It was mostly, ‘What about our job security?’ ”

The district authorities accused Mr. Wells of fomenting the revolt, dispatched guards to escort him from the building, and dismissed him, Mr. Wells said. Binti Harvey, a district spokeswoman, declined to discuss Mr. Wells.

A decision by Locke’s teachers to break with the district would be an embarrassment for the school district and the teachers union. Both began lobbying the teachers. Last month, the district rejected Green Dot’s petition, saying 17 teachers had withdrawn their endorsement, leaving it without the majority necessary to comply with a charter conversion law.

But a newly elected board of education is to reconsider the petition in August.

Mr. Barr says that if he does not win the chance to use the Locke campus for his new charter schools, he will surround it with Green Dot’s next 10 charter schools, which are to open nearby in 2008, supported by a $7.8 million donation from the Gates Foundation.

“If the district doesn’t work with me, I’ll compete with them and take their kids,” Mr. Barr said.

NY Post: 'PS' I Love You: $80M in Gifts Go To Schools by Angela Montefinise...

Read original...

July 15, 2007 -- Public schools are cashing in.

The New York City school system netted about $80 million in private donations in Fiscal Year 2007.

About $34.2 million came in through the Fund for Public Schools, a non-profit organization and the biggest provider of private money to the $15 billion school system.

A variety of grants from non-profit groups accounted for the remaining $46 million, education officials said.

The Fund for Public Schools, which counts Caroline Kennedy as a board member and is chaired by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, generated $11 million less in 2007 than it did the year before. But fund officials said that's because last year's tally was buttressed by an a single extraordinary gift - $15 million from The Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, according to fund CEO Stephanie Dua.

The fund, launched by the city in 1982, has experienced a resurgence in the last few years. In 2000, the fund took in $2.7 million. By 2004, the take was up to $55 million.

In the fiscal year that concluded June 30, the fund received over 700 gifts, including big donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and The Broad Foundation.

It also accepted 577 donations of under $25,000 totaling $1.6 million.

Private donations are key to the system, according to Dua.

"The future of New York City depends heavily on our ability to educate our students to be productive, engaged citizens who are well-prepared for post-secondary education and the workforce of the 21st Century," Dua said. "We cannot deliver on this promise without involvement from all sectors."

angela.montefinise@nypost.com

NY Times: Small Schools Are Ahead in Graduation by Julie Bosman...

Graduation rates at 47 new small public high schools that have opened since 2002 are substantially higher than the citywide average, an indication that the Bloomberg administration’s decision to break up many large failing high schools has achieved some early success.


Smaller School, Higher Graduation Rates Chart (left)

Most of the schools have made considerable advances over the low-performing large high schools they replaced. Eight schools out of the 47 small schools graduated more than 90 percent of their students. One campus of small schools at the old Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, for example, reported a 92 percent four-year graduation rate this month. In 2002, 40 percent of its students graduated.

The announcement appeared to solidify the first signs of progress in the city’s new small schools that came last year when a group of 15 schools that opened in 2002 graduated their first senior classes.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made small schools a centerpiece of his efforts to overhaul the public education system in the belief that a more close-knit environment — and schools with themes like health, diversity, arts or architecture — will serve students more effectively than the large and often chaotic high schools they replaced.

On average, the 47 small schools reported 73 percent of their students graduating this June, compared with the city’s calculations of an overall 60 percent graduation rate in 2006, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced yesterday.

The city and the state have traditionally disagreed about New York City’s graduation rate, and the state calculated last year’s graduation rate at 50 percent, below what the city reported. Still, both say that there have been jumps in performance. Mr. Klein said that using the state’s method of calculation, the 47 small schools had a slightly lower average graduation rate of 71 percent.

New York City’s results are closely watched because of the size of its experiment. Marie Groark, a spokeswoman for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has put millions of dollars into small schools, said the foundation was encouraged by the data released yesterday.

“I think it demonstrates that this problem is solvable,” she said. “Schools that New York City has taken leadership in developing are a critical element in any city’s strategy in improving high school graduation rates.”

To publicize the results, Mr. Klein went to the Evander Childs High School campus in the Bronx, long one of the city’s most dangerous and dysfunctional schools. It once housed 3,300 students, and in 2002, the four-year graduation rate was just 31 percent. This year, Mr. Klein said that three new small schools in the building graduated 80 percent of their seniors.

Mr. Klein, speaking in the library of Evander Childs, where, he added, his mother was a student 60 years ago, said that while there is much more work to be done, the data showed that the schools are working. “All indications are that we are making enormous progress,” he said. “I believe we’re going to see more and more students graduate.”

Others were more skeptical, pointing out that the small schools enroll few special education students or students with limited English proficiency, who typically drag down graduation rates.

David C. Bloomfield, the president of the citywide parent council on high schools and an education professor at Brooklyn College, said he was reluctant to draw conclusions from the small schools’ graduation data. “These schools are artificial environments,” Mr. Bloomfield said in an interview. Mr. Bloomfield filed a complaint with the United States Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights last year about the policy of allowing small schools to exclude some students during their early years.

Mr. Klein acknowledged that the small schools have fewer students with disabilities and limited English. But he said that in other ways the schools were serving an educationally disadvantaged population. He said that more than 90 percent of the students attending the small schools are either black or Hispanic, compared with the citywide average of 72 percent, and that more of the students in small schools come from poor backgrounds.

Ron Chaluisan, the vice president for programs at New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit group that has helped create more than 30 schools in New York City, said the special education students enrolled in the small schools have had a high rate of success.

“I think that the classes do take on many of the challenges that face high schools,” he said.

The first batch of small schools, which began opening in 2002, were funded by the New Century High Schools project, a $30 million collaboration among the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and the Open Society Institute. The Gates Foundation has pumped more than $100 million into city schools.

Last June, the Department of Education announced results from the first graduating class of those 15 new small high schools that opened in 2002. Those schools posted an average 73 percent graduation rate, with a handful reporting high graduation rates and others having low rates. The graduation rate at those 15 schools was largely unchanged this year, the education department said.

Even as they were cheering the results yesterday, some experts wondered if a high school diploma is enough. The Carnegie Corporation announced at the news conference a $10 million grant to help high school students prepare for college, with the goal of doubling the number of students who enter college.

Michele Cahill, a director at the Carnegie Corporation who had previously been a senior aide to Mr. Klein, said part of the grant will be devoted to tracking graduates for the first two years after high school to see how well they perform.

“We want them not to stop, but to go on to the next phase,” said Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation.