Daily News Roundup: How Silicon Valley Donors Are Reshaping Education

Tech Titans Pour Money Into Testing School Innovations: Silicon Valley billionaires like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Reed Hastings of Netflix have rapidly gained influence in American education with big donations and investments in experimental, tech-focused approaches such as video-game-style math lessons and personalized-learning software, writes The New York Times.

Supreme Court Sides With Religious Hospitals in Pension Fight: The justices ruled unanimously that, like houses of worship, faith-affiliated medical centers are not subject to federal regulations on funding and insuring employees’ retirement benefits, the Associated Press reports. The decision, arising from a lawsuit filed by workers at hospital chains that adopted pension “church plans,” could affect about a million nonprofit employees.

U.N. Development Goals Help Drive Impact-Investing Boom: The Global Impact Investing Network, which found in a recent study that investors seeking social and environmental as well as financial returns have at least $114 billion under management, says much of the money is invested with an eye on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals the United Nations set in 2015, Fast Company writes. Read a new Chronicle special report on the growth of mission investing.

Opinion: Climate Peril Should Keep Arts Groups From Taking Koch Money: Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott makes a case for cultural institutions to reject Charles and David Koch’s largess, arguing that by financing efforts to sow doubt about climate science, the billionaire brothers “have furthered a worldview — based on unreason and selfishness — that undermines the basic good things we assume the arts promote.”

Opinion: Imagining How to Use $1 Billion for Good: Inspired by Giving Pledge signers’ letters about committing most of their fortunes to charity, New York Times columnist David Brooks imagines what he’d do with $1 billion to give away, focusing on the idea that “the most important task before us is to reweave the social fabric.”

Rapid-Response Ariana Grande Show Raises $12 Million for Manchester Victims: The New York Times details how Sunday’s star-studded benefit for the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund came together in just days after a terrorist attack killed 22 people and injured scores more at Ms. Grande’s concert last month in the English city.

British Charities Decry “Chilling” Effect of Lobbying Law: More than 50 nonprofits signed a letter urging reform of a 2014 measure restricting what organizations can say on political and policy matters in election years, The Guardian reports. Several charities say they have changed fundraising and communications campaigns and kept silent on social issues for fear of transgressing the law in the run-up to this week’s British election.