‘Grok’: Giving to Schools

Though many wealthy dot-com entrepreneurs say that elementary and secondary education is their top priority, “the discomfiting truth is that this famously risk-hungry bunch has shown only modest interest in confronting the challenge of failing schools,” declares the October issue of Grok, a magazine that covers the technology industry.

According to the article, “surveys show that those who’ve earned their wealth in new-economy industries provide just a small fraction of the roughly $22-billion donated annually to educational programs in this country.” It adds: “Even $22-billion won’t go very far toward building a reform movement for a national education system that costs taxpayers $340-billion a year.” The magazine says that when dot-com entrepreneurs are approached for donations to support elementary and secondary education, “the newly rich express dueling, even self-canceling inclinations.”

Peter Hero, president of Community Foundation Silicon Valley, tells the magazine that such donors “want to give more to education, because education is prevention.”

At the same time, the magazine says, many entrepreneurs are “wary of becoming involved.”

Kim Smith, president of the New Schools Venture Fund, a $20-million effort by technology executives to improve education, says, “People are afraid of the K-12 space because they hate the bureaucracy. That’s enemy No. 1. One donor said to me: ‘I don’t want to throw a bucket of water in the river.’”

When high-tech donors do give to educational causes, “they like to judge programs on familiar business terms,” the magazine says; “they want results fast” and “they want to know how the results can be leveraged.” That can be problematic, the magazine adds, for “teachers and administrators beset by the drama of a real school day, struggling with the quirks and constraints that define life in the classroom.”

Though some technology executives are making big gifts to educational causes, some of those donors have become convinced that philanthropy is not the best channel for improving the schools.

Reed Hastings, who sold a software company for $750-million, has given $5-million in charitable gifts to education causes, but feels that his gifts are not accomplishing enough, says the magazine.

Through his charitable gifts, he says, he can do nothing more than “prove the viability” of innovative experiments. But he says governments have more power to bring about changes, so he is putting another $5-million of his own money, and plenty of his own time, into campaigning against a measure on the California ballot in November that would provide government-financed vouchers to parents so they can send their youngsters to private schools. He is also donating to groups backing a measure that would lower the thresholds for approval of school bonds and make it easier for charter schools to secure public school buildings.

“We’ve got these regional monopolies called school districts and there’s not much incentive for them to change,” he says. “It’s the kids who are getting screwed. If we want a rapidly evolving and improving education system, we have to decentralize it and allow schools to compete for children.”

The article is available at http://www.thestandard.com/grok.