How Foundations Can Stimulate Change

To the Editor:

William A. Schambra’s February 9 commentary “7 (Bad) Habits of (In)effective Foundations” could be reduced to a single maxim: It is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish.

Virtually all contemporary education philanthropy, and most education research, consists of either identifying best practices or training some finite number of individuals to apply best practices.

That is equivalent to just handing out fish. It does nothing to increase the likelihood that public schools will, after funding is withdrawn, systematically continue to identify, perpetuate, and disseminate best practices. It does nothing to ensure that, once funding is withdrawn, the system will consistently train future employees to apply best practices, or to ensure that they will continue to implement those practices in the long term.

For most philanthropists, this is a disaster waiting to happen. The most gut-wrenching thing for donors or foundation heads to discover is that their grants had a temporary, isolated effect, but left no lasting mark on the system they sought to transform.

To avoid that torment, they must teach the system how to fish. They must work to change the structure of American education so that it enjoys the necessary combination of freedom and incentives that make excellence self-perpetuating.

Educators must have reliable and compelling incentives to constantly search for more effective ways of serving families. There must be systemic incentives for the best schools to expand — so that their high-quality services can reach a broader audience.

That freedom and those incentives do not exist today. One of the best mathematics teachers of the last quarter-century was Jaime Escalante, an inner-city Los Angeles public schoolteacher who was featured in the 1980s in the film Stand and Deliver.

In a system with well-structured incentives, there would have been a sequel to that film. In the sequel, Mr. Escalante would have been promoted to director of math instruction and teacher training for a national network of schools. He would have trained his peers to use his methods, drafted new curricula, and thereby brought his wonderful services to hundreds of thousands or even millions of American children.

Our current system not only lacked the incentives to make that happen, but also had perverse incentives that caused Mr. Escalante to be seen as a threat by many of his colleagues.

If philanthropists want to change the world for the better by transforming education, they will not succeed by creating more Escalantes only to watch them be ground down by our dysfunctional system. They will succeed by liberating educators to exercise their professional judgment, and by giving them incentives to work innovatively and efficiently through competition with their peers for the privilege of serving students.

Philanthropists will succeed by returning power and responsibility to parents, through educational choice. These are systemic changes. This is teaching the system to fish. Anything else is just a slab of cod.

Andrew J. Coulson
Director
The Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom
Washington

To the Editor:

In calling for an increase in foundation support for “advocacy,” Mr. Schambra defines that word to include only pet conservative causes such as eviscerating public education through the use of school vouchers.

He blithely dismisses any advocacy intended to preserve the existence of government antipoverty programs as nothing more than attempts to preserve the “status quo.”

Given that conservatives working to undermine such programs now control the White House, the Congress, and most federal courts, it is truly laughable to make the argument that underfunded advocates fighting to preserve the scant funding still available for low-income Americans are somehow defending “the system.”

Moreover, this argument diverts attention away from the broader — and far more important — question as to whether past support from foundations for government antipoverty programs worked or not.

Mr. Schambra’s argument seems to assume, as a given, that government antipoverty efforts always fail. That’s simply not the case.

Under the social and economic policies created by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson — and, to a large degree, continued or even expanded by President Nixon — the poverty rate in America was cut in half, decreasing from 20.7 percent in 1960 to 9.7 percent by 1973.

The war on poverty wasn’t lost because it was impossible for government to win it. It was lost because government stopped fighting it. I hope foundations continue funding efforts to re-start that fight.

Joel Berg
Executive Director
New York City Coalition Against Hunger
New York