Grant Making and School Leadership

Private foundations have been making grants to public schools in increasing numbers. It is too early to judge the depth of commitment that foundation officials or public-school leaders have to their new alliances, but it is not too soon to wonder how grant makers will deal with leadership turnover, especially in large urban districts, and how schools and their governing bodies will respond if changes in leadership put grants in jeopardy.

Making direct investments in public schools did not come easily to private foundations. It was a difficult corner to turn for those that had a longstanding aversion to mixing private and government dollars. But whether the funds are coming from the nation’s most venerable foundations or the very newest, the efforts to date are bold and involve amounts of money that within the foundation world are large enough to make a statement that is hard to ignore. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, for instance, have invested $60-million in efforts to improve high schools in seven years, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has just announced its second five-year commitment to the Kansas City Schools, awarding a total of more than $14-million.

From the school perspective, this new source of support has been welcomed, but no money comes without strings, and grant makers have expectations that are different from the government agencies with whom schools are more familiar. Can schools adapt to these different expectations and be helped by them? Will foundations themselves change as these two very different worlds forge relationships?

So far, private foundations appear to have made some changes. They seem to have accepted the fact that change in the public schools will be slow, requiring a longer time frame than the usual three-year grant cycle. They also seem to have set their sights on a scale that is impressive, focusing mainly on urban districts where the challenges are greatest. All of that bodes well for both schools and foundations.

Turnover in leadership, however, could be a place where grant makers draw a line in the sand.

The presence of stable, effective leadership has been the sine qua non when grant makers support nonprofit groups. Traditionally, few foundations have been willing to support nonprofit institutions that cannot hold on to their leaders or that do a poor job of choosing good ones. In the foundations where I have worked, for example, one of the first discussions in the review process typically begins: “Tell us about the executive director. What’s his or her track record, longevity, capacity for building a broad base of support? How resilient is the person?”

Those questions do not have much traction in large urban school districts where superintendent turnover is rapid, with some reports suggesting that the average tenure is shorter than three years, or basically the length of the first contract. If foundations transfer those same leadership expectations to their investment in schools, then both schools and grant makers will have to deal with some uncomfortable questions.

When a superintendent leaves during that first contract, or right after it ends, what is the impact on the reform plans he or she has put in motion for that district? On the children and parents, the teachers and principals? What were that school board, mayor, and city council thinking when they, in one way or another, either allowed it to happen or helped cause it to happen? And what, if any, should the response be from grant makers that have invested in that district?

When I ask those questions, people who work in the schools say turnover is normal and I should just get used to it. But just because something is normal does not mean that it is right. Nor does it mean that it must continue.

Most organizations tend to exist in the indicative world — the world as it is — and large bureaucracies are especially well designed to maintain that existence. Foundations, on the other hand, can afford to be oriented toward the subjunctive world, what might be or should be, and their money often follows those who have the capacity to imagine beyond what is business as usual. Indeed, a grant maker’s ability to bring a subjunctive sensibility to its grant recipients might be as valuable as its financial support, both of which seem to be in equally short supply in both government and the nonprofit world.

Few of us will ever know the full array of factors that weigh into a person’s decision to change jobs, and the conditions surrounding superintendents and all school leaders are especially trying. It must be nearly impossible to function at the confluence of difficult school boards (elected or appointed), powerful teacher unions, multiple federal and state requirements with too little money to put them in place, mayors, city councils, community groups, taxpayers, unreasonable expectations for improving student scores, and testing and textbook companies that wield enormous authority. And when another district is offering a substantial raise, how many people would turn down such an opportunity? If working conditions for urban superintendents are the same everywhere, it at least must be a relief to change the faces involved and to gain a measure of personal financial stability at the same time.

What we can know is that when a superintendent does leave — for whatever reasons — a lot of players were instrumental in causing that to happen. The best leadership exists and flourishes within a culture that values it, understands it, and, when necessary, challenges it to be even better than it has been. Plans and programs — and the catchy slogans that describe them — come and go. In the end, they all have limited meaning when the leaders are constantly heading for the exit, and when school boards, teachers, parents, and others accept such turnover as an immutable part of the landscape.

Perhaps one response by foundations will be to rethink their practice of making large grants during a new leader’s first contract period. Important things take place during a superintendent’s first two or three years, but the hard work seems to come later when theory gets pitted against reality, inevitably requiring adjustments and course changes that test the mettle of the best leaders. If grant makers believe stable leadership is a reliable predictor of school improvement, then maybe they will decide to be slower to invest in school districts where the leader is fairly new in order to assess the depth of commitment that the leader has to the work and that the school district has to the leader.

Is there a possibility that foundations will and should use the influence of their grants as a way to change this basic condition of urban-district leadership? Do these grants mean enough to the public schools to cause all of the stakeholders to pay more attention to the conditions surrounding leadership in their districts? Those questions reach into the roots of the basic relationship between grant maker and grant recipient and are not easily answered.

As the dollars and the years pile up, harder and harder questions will be raised in foundation boardrooms about how long they should continue their grants to public-school districts. And in other boardrooms the question will be asked whether to get involved in the first place, whether other foundations have achieved significant enough success to justify new investments. Issues of leadership will be central to those discussions, and will probably gain a high profile.

Foundations have long supported organizations that have understood the importance of finding and retaining leaders who have the capacity to imagine things differently, to mobilize their constituencies, and to build a sustaining level of support among all who are affected by an organization’s cause. If foundations apply the same belief when making their investments in public schools, one of the first meaningful results of those investments should be greater leadership stability in our urban districts, where children need and deserve it most.

Ronald Thorpe is senior fellow at the Rhode Island Foundation. A former teacher and administrator, he also is the editor of The First Year as Principal: Real World Stories From America’s Principals (Heinemann, 1995).