Donors Shy Away From School Gifts That Could Make a Real Difference

Philanthropic “risk capital” is all the rage in education nowadays, with foundations and wealthy donors eagerly financing start-up organizations and projects that promise to “innovate” and “improve” what happens in (and outside) the schools. Some term it “venture philanthropy”—and it echoes in government, too, as in Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s “Investing in Innovation” program.

This approach to giving—and innovating—has much to be said for it. The Bill &and Melinda Gates Foundation has used it to advance the conversations about common standards and teacher quality. The Walton Family Foundation has employed it with major investments in a host of school-choice programs.

Based on our experience at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, however, many other education realms in whichwhere change is urgently needed still cannot attract dollars for research, reinvention, and advocacy. That’s partly because the topics don’t appear as new and sexy, but more because tackling them is apt to raise interest-group eyebrows. Consider these three examples.

Special education now consumes a huge fraction of school-system budgets yet remains all but untouchable, fire-walled from efforts to trim costs and boost effectiveness. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is 35 years old and begs for a major makeover to catch up with an era of flat budgets; thrilling technology; widening school choice in the form of charter schools, vouchers, and home -schooling; and the ascendant view that every child, regardless of ability or disability level, now deserves a customized education program.

Yet philanthropists shun this topic as if it were a melted-down nuclear reactor. (There are, however, ample philanthropic dollars available to push for “more of the same” in special ed.)

One supposes that donors fear being thought insensitive to disabled children and their needs. “Efficiency” is often seen as a dirty word in education, and some fear that focusing on it would return us to the bad old days when the needs of disabled youngsters were largely ignored.

Yet by tackling such a politically “hot” topic—and encouraging analysts, activists, and educators to develop alternatives to the current approach—they could shine needed light on waste and inefficiency in elementary and secondary education’s fastest-growing program area. And maybe help come up with something that would work better for kids with (and without) disabilities.

School construction is another example, not so much politically incorrect as humdrum. But also incredibly expensive. The U.S. has binged on it this past decade, spending hundreds of billions to modernize and replace school facilities, often based on unrealistic (even falsified) enrollment assumptions. Eighty cents out of every dollar in elementary and secondary capital outlays since 1999 has gone to build new facilities. Los Angeles famously spent 600 million scarce dollars on a Taj Mahal campus for a performing- arts high school while laying off teachers to balance its operating budget. Elsewhere, swell new buildings stand half-empty, a testament to heedless spending on bricks and mortar. Much of that money could instead have gone for instructional technology, rewards for effective teachers, tutoring for kids who need it, and better curricular materials. . Yet grant makers don’t go near this topic, either.

No one wants children in drafty, crumbling, overcrowded schools. But in a time of tight budgets, we need to ascertain where building projects have been ill-considered or wasteful and what future policies might lead to smarter spending priorities.

Also spurned by philanthropy, this time surely on grounds of political correctness, is analysis of the dire effects on children’s education wrought by family breakdown. The number of children living in single-parent households has risen almost 20 percent over the past decade. Such youngsters are four times as likely to live in poverty as children of married couples. This is a consequence of plummeting marriage rates across society generally, no longer limited to particular groups or economic backgrounds.

Analysts have linked the country’s widening economic inequality to family decay. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, recently noted that protests against “the 1 percent” have obscured an important point about the sources of this inequality: College graduates have become much more adept at passing down to their children an array of behaviors associated with success—stable marriage included—while the family structures of high- school graduates (and dropouts) have deteriorated along with the economy. Michael Gerson took to the pages of The Washington Post a few months ago to argue that teenage pregnancy and the decline of blue-collar marriage are dampening social mobility.

The likely effect of so many children raised by single parents is obvious when it comes to education: less time spent reading to kids, fewer trips to parks and museums, diminished capacity to supervise homework, to add enrichment activities, and to advocate for a child in our byzantine education bureaucracies. Yes, the schools deserve ample blame for these kids’ weak educational outcomes. But the adults in their home lives aren’t getting the education job done, either.

Interest groups opposed to radical changes in the schools are pleased to finger parents as the root of America’s academic mediocrity. This lets the education system off the hook. At the same time, reformers boast of “miracles” in schools that serve disadvantaged children in part because they are loath to deal with parents’ destructive choices. The result is a tug-of-war with no referee, no “honest broker” conducting research and devising policies and programs to strengthen families as well as schools—and thereby boost kids’ educational outcomes and life prospects.

Touchy topics like these are where private philanthropy is most needed, precisely because politicians and government officials don’t dare touch them. What philanthropy can do uniquely and best is to focus where government fears to tread.

But that’s not what foundations do today. Far from boldly dedicating their scarce resources to innovative thinking on problems that are off-limits to government, too many of them are opting to top up the budgets of government programs now framed as “public-private partnerships.” They fell all over each other to provide matching dollars for Secretary Duncan’s innovation program, for example, and adore the work of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation—and not only in the education realm. They may or may not be wasting their money on such activities, but private money spent at government’s behest is money unavailable to support needed work on issues that government cannot tackle.

Taboo topics ought instead to be at the top of philanthropy’s education agenda. Such work represents private philanthropy at its best—far-sighted, politically independent, and willing to take risks to improve education in the United States.