At first glance, it looks as if all is well with the state of elementary and secondary education giving. The Foundation Center reports that K-12 education received more than $844 million in 1999, a 9 percent increase from the previous year. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone gave more than $3.8 million to various elementary and secondary schools, the first phase of its $350 million pledge to aid elementary education.
Well, take a deeper look, because despite the river of charitable money pouring into our elementary and high schools, the entire field of education giving remains bewitched and bewildered. For example, an independent 60-page appraisal commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (on whose board I sit) found that Walter Annenberg’s massive $500 million gift to improve K-12 schools “left only small footprints on the urban school systems it set out to reform.” The field is replete with examples of well-intentioned but misdirected grants that barely ease the challenges facing our elementary and secondary schools, especially those in the inner city.
For their giving to be effective, donors need to ask themselves fundamental questions about the nature of schools and their place within the community, and whether reform best proceeds from inside the system or outside it. At first glance, such questions seem pretty far afield of your average grant request for a reading program or private scholarship fund. But answering them can help donors develop a giving strategy that’s consistent with their core beliefs about education.
The past 150 years have seen a tectonic shift in our vision of what schools should be like and to whom they should be accountable. In the 1840s and 1850s, state governments began to take direct responsibility for running schools from local communities. That process was accelerated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Progressive reformers worked to make schools more “professional.”
The 1960s saw a further expansion of government’s role in education, with the creation of federally-funded programs for special needs (so-called “at-risk” kids). These programs brought new money to education, but also encouraged the creation of education interest groups and increased government regulation. The judiciary, too, got into the act with mandates on such issues as racial desegregation and bussing. Occasionally there was even outright judicial management of school systems—what David Armor, a fellow at the Institute for Public Policy, calls “forced justice.”
All this (and more) contributed to the typical characteristics of today’s government-run school system—schools centrally managed by a superintendent and school board, staffed by public employees, and operated within a public sector bureaucracy.
To be sure, something was gained from these efforts to professionalize schools, to boost their efficiency by creating bureaucracies, and to expand access across racial and economic lines. But something was lost: an understanding of the school as the responsibility of a community and its families.
The result is what education researcher David Tyack has called the “one best system” of public education—a centralized, top-down, bureaucracy-ridden approach that has become increasingly inflexible in its approach and structures. It is now remote from citizens and losing legitimacy in their eyes. As Kettering Foundation president and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare David Mathews says, “Americans today are halfway out the schoolhouse door.”
But this is changing, especially because of a rekindling of interest in civil society, which in turn has engendered a lively debate about the health of our civil society. The debate rages on, but everyone agrees on the need to reconnect the public with its schools. The effort to reestablish links between the public and schools has many voices—radical, liberal, and conservative—as reformers criticize the “one best system” and call instead for “open schools,” “free schools,” “alternative schools,” “schools of choice,” even for “deschooling” society.
Some of this is romantic nonsense, but it nonetheless points to an important truth: schools need to be more responsive to families and their kids, so that people have a sense of ownership in them. This is nearly impossible to achieve in a “one best system.”
Today, education manifests this silent revolution in two primary ways. First, there are private and public voucher programs for kids stuck in failing schools. Families can use these scholarships to send their children to the school of their choice. Second, there are charter schools and their many cousins in the K-12 family. These schools are (more or less) independent, mission-focused public schools of choice, freed from rules, yet still accountable for results. Within this context, a “public” school is true to its name: it is open to the public, paid for by the public, and held accountable by public authorities. But unlike the “one best system,” these schools need not be run by the government. Nearly any group of educators, parents, or community organizations can create and operate one of these schools.
These largely autonomous, community-based schools are not only institutions for teaching and learning. They are instruments of civil society and wellsprings of community rebirth, tapping into America’s propensity for civic engagement and channeling that impulse into education reform. Marking a middle path between the impersonal agencies of government and the private affairs of individuals, these schools are institutions that help create healthy communities. They represent, to borrow from Peter Drucker, “not the collectivism of organized governmental action from above . . . [but] the collectivism of voluntary group action from below.”
What’s a Donor to Do?
To get the most bang for his education buck, a donor has to decide which understanding of the nature of schools best approximates his own. If a donor subscribes to the “one best system” approach, he is likely to give money to projects intent on reforming that system from within. The hope is that added resources will lead to smaller schools or class sizes, better-trained teachers, and an influx of more advanced learning tools like computers. Paul Hill calls this approach, which assumes the system can be improved with a strategic investment in one of its important parts, a “block upgrade philosophy.” Underlying this view is a belief that the “experts” (or producers) inside the system know best how to improve it and fix whatever problems exist.
Other donors would like K-12 schools to be an instrument of families and communities—of civil society. Within this context, donors are more likely to give money to reform efforts that originate outside the system. Rather than support the producers of education who control and run the system, these donors will support the efforts of consumers to change the system. They believe that something is wrong with the fundamental assumptions and power relationships of the “one best system” and hope to spur fundamental structural reforms.
Today, donors with this view can be found supporting charter schools, voucher programs, and the creation of a wide array of activities and programs that advance different kinds of autonomous community schools, especially those that promote school choice. This support can include grants for a range of efforts: private scholarship funds, capital campaigns to acquire or build facilities for private or charter schools, and technical and legal help for groups working to create new schools. It could even include support for presently existing public school districts that support this approach to school reform.
Underlying these two approaches to supporting K-12 education are two different views on accountability. An “inside the system” approach is likely to see accountability as based on “inputs” and compliance with rules—the centralized micromanagement of schools through internal oversight systems and desk-based enforcers. Those who want to reform schools from the outside prefer accountability measures that are performance-driven and market-oriented. In this second approach, schools are seen as accountable in two directions: to the public entity that issues their charter or contract, and to their clients and customers, who can vote with their feet and leave a school if they’re not satisfied.
To be a truly effective donor, you have to know your own mind and be aware of the many competing approaches to education that are out there. Think of it this way: through your giving, you’ll be buying into one of these approaches, either by choice or default. Isn’t it better to make your giving a matter of choice?
Bruno V. Manno is a senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.