Education Grant Makers Told How to Learn: Listen to the Public

CONFERENCE NOTEBOOK

If foundations want their grant dollars to improve the performance of the public schools, they need to listen more to parents and the public, Andy Plattner, a communications consultant, told an audience of foundation officers assembled here for the annual fall meeting of Grantmakers for Education.

By recognizing how their own biases and experiences differ from those of the public, foundation officers can better understand the public — and therefore help educators to do a better job at enlisting public support to improve schools.

To draw attention to some of those differences, Mr. Plattner asked the foundation officers to participate in a survey.

The survey’s findings revealed some striking differences:

* Sixty-six per cent of the education grant makers identified themselves as Democrats, while just 2 per cent said they were Republicans. That compares with 36 per cent of the general population who describe themselves as Democrats and 29 per cent as Republicans.

* All the grant makers said they voted in the 1996 Presidential election. In contrast, just 51 per cent of eligible voters did so that year.

* Only 17 per cent said they would support the use of a voucher program that would allow parents to send their children to any school they choose, compared with 51 per cent nationally.

“This group is not necessarily like the general public,” Mr. Plattner said. “That’s why listening is so important.”

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As the grant makers sipped coffee in a meeting room at the Palmer House Hilton, Mr. Plattner asked them a question: “What is public engagement?”

A slide projector flashed the photograph of a smiling woman. Mr. Plattner explained that it was of his wife, Linda, to whom he had proposed on a public beach — making their betrothal a literal “public engagement.”

Amid the laughter of 175 foundation officers, Mr. Plattner used the joke to explain a more serious point: that many people don’t know what “public engagement” really means.

Good public-engagement efforts are more than just public-relations campaigns that produce a cadre of parents who will hold bake sales or vote for the school budget, Mr. Plattner said. Instead, such efforts seek to cultivate well-informed consumers who understand and support their local schools — not simply as cheerleaders, but with a critical eye.

The efforts involve not just parents, but all citizens who have a stake in the future of the schools.

All too often, Mr. Plattner said, the school-improvement efforts supported by foundations and other non-profit groups have been derailed because the public didn’t know about or understand them.

To drive that point home, Mr. Plattner showed a set of video clips of interviews that his company conducted with parents in Philadelphia at a time when a complex school-improvement effort had been under way for three years.

In one clip, an interviewer asks parents what they think of when they hear the words “school reform.”

There is silence for a moment, followed by laughter. “Misguided,” one parent says. “Never,” says another. It is clear that the parents know very little about — or disagree with — the effort’s objectives or accomplishments.

“Often what the public wants is not what the reform movement is delivering,” he said.

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Grantmakers for Education is a relatively new organization, having been formed just four years ago. But in other ways, it’s a new version of an old group.

Its predecessor, the Precollegiate Group, was started in 1980 to bring together foundation officers who shared a common interest in elementary and secondary schools.

Its founding predated the 1983 release of “A Nation at Risk,” the report of a federal panel that is often credited with touching off a wave of school-improvement efforts. At that time, relatively few foundations supported efforts to improve public schools, and the bulk of education grant dollars went to higher education.

But in the 1980s, grant makers began to show more interest in public schools. Not only were grant makers meeting together through the Precollegiate Group — they were also putting their money where their mouths were. The amount of grant dollars going to elementary and secondary schools nearly doubled, jumping from 13.6 per cent in 1980 to more than 25 per cent in the mid-1990s.

But by 1995, after 15 years of work, the Precollegiate Group’s leaders decided the organization’s batteries needed recharging. It was reestablished that year with a new name, Grantmakers for Education, and a broader mission: to focus not just on kindergarten-through-12th-grade education, but also on what came before and after it — preschool and college.

Begun with 55 members, it now counts more than 130 organizations among its members.

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At the meeting, Ray Bacchetti of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Rick Love of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation discussed their efforts to encourage grant makers to collaborate on higher-education issues.

Mr. Love noted that while colleges and universities have typically received the lion’s share of foundation dollars for education, there has never been a tradition of sharing information among grant makers who support higher education.

As a result, he said, most foundations tended to operate in isolation, rarely consulting with one another to determine if the programs they were developing were redundant or if they might complement each other.

Hoping to bring together those foundations, the group offered several sessions on higher-education topics at this year’s conference — a first — and it plans to hold meetings for grant makers at the conferences of several higher-education associations.

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The grant-makers’ conference came on the heels of another major meeting that dealt with ways that private efforts can improve the public schools.

Just days before the meeting, the nation’s governors and President Clinton joined together with corporate executives and educators at what was billed as a national “summit” on education.

Participants at that meeting, held in Palisades, N.J., approved a statement calling on businesses to devote more of their grant dollars to public education — especially to efforts that introduced high academic-performance standards. They also urged businesses to do more to encourage their employees to volunteer in the schools and to match gifts their employees make to help the schools.