Jeff Bezos and his wife are
promising to set up a foundation that will work on homelessness and
providing preschool to low-income communities.
I can’t speak to what this new effort will or won’t do for
homelessness. That’s an issue where I
have opinions, but no expertise. But I
fear what it will mean to have another deep-pocketed mega-donor step into
education. I’ve seen these efforts from
afar and up close, and I’ve developed a preternatural concern that warns me
that this won’t end well. Maybe the
Bezos family will be the exception, but in my experiences, having deep pockets involved
in education generally isn’t good.
Where to start with the examples? We could look at how the Annenburg
Challenge put a half a billion dollars into schooling in the 90s. Or perhaps a review of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100
million gift to Newark, New Jersey’s schools. Or maybe the Gates Foundation’s investment of
at least $650
million into small schools; or its more recent $575
million on teacher reforms. If you
want to review the sad details of all of those, follow the links. And if you want to see more examples, Diane
Ravitch offered an excellent history and critique in her 2011 blog posting
(including a prescient warning about the current federal Secretary of
Education) at
this link.
What all of these have in common with the Bezos’ gift is
that they come from well-intended wealthy people who have been exposed to some
basic ideas about education. Then they
marshal their excess resources into well-meaning, yet ineffective actions. What they all also have in common is that
they fail.
So what? Somebody
with a lot of money decides to throw their money away. It’s not a significant loss to them. They can still buy another estate in San
Sebastian, or purchase another sports team, or whatever. It is their money, after all, and what harm
comes from sharing their wealth in a way that they feel benefits the world? As things turn out, there’s actually lots of potential
harm.
In the Ravitch posting I note above, she identifies some
specific, politically motivated efforts that undermine public education. She writes more extensively on that topic in
her book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the
Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. These wealthy donors who are pushing agendas
certainly pose a threat to the successes of an education system that has flaws,
but isn’t
failing in the ways that these wealthy “reformers” suggest. It’s important to note, though, that Bezos,
Gates, Annenburg, and others aren’t rabid reformers who preach an anti-public-school
orthodoxy. Yet their failed efforts have
had and will have serious and significant negative impacts.
According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for
Educational Statistics, from the period of 2004 to 2014, the U.S. increased
its K-12 expenditure per student by 3%.
The 2014 U.S. expenditures still place it fourth highest on the list of Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development countries; however, that 3% increase
is among the lowest increases among member organizations. The average increase for other OECD countries
during that period was 15%. The U.S.,
during that decade, did not noticeably increase its investment in education,
and that lack of investment came at a time when, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, a dollar at the start of that period required $1.27 to obtain
the same buying power at the end of it.
Like everything else, schooling runs on money. An increased 3% investment didn’t help the
nation’s education system keep up with costs – especially in poor urban and
rural schools. When schools can’t get
their communities, their state, or their nation to provide resources, they chase
dollars elsewhere. And if mega-donors offer
to give funding for schools that implement their idea, many schools will latch onto
that idea and reach for the dollars that follow. Look at the links to the initiatives I
included above, and you’ll see what that looks like as schools re-formed
themselves around donors’ initiatives.
Oftentimes, the changes meant that the structures that had been in place
prior to the change were eliminated in favor of newer structures. When the experiment failed, the school had
neither the newly failed structure or its older processes to support it. In The
Emperor’s New Clothes, the only one harmed was the king. However, these schools are left, after the
funding is gone, with not only embarrassment, but without the systems they need
to function fully.
You can see where my concerns come from with this latest
announcement. Does this mean that people
with money should just stay away from funding education?
Before I answer, let me emphasize that the problem really
lies in inadequate funding of our educational system, and especially
insufficient funding for schools that serve students in poverty. In my home state, that was the finding of our
state supreme court’s decision in McCleary,
et al. v. Washington State. In 2012,
the court found the state in gross dereliction of its responsibilities in
funding schools equitably. The court even
got to the point where it found the legislature in contempt and fined it
$100,000 a day from 2015 until 2018 because legislators failed to act even
after the court’s ruling. The $1 billion
that the legislature added to its budget in 2018 takes a step toward addressing
a long-standing failure to fund schools equitably. The new funding in Washington state is a
start toward addressing the need – a start.
When we adequately fund schools, then we won’t have a need for
philanthropists’ involvement.
Given that full funding for schools isn’t likely an
immediate outcome, the question remains:
With the failures and pitfalls, should philanthropists invest in
education? Despite my many concerns, I
don’t see a binary “yes” or “no” answer to that.
I have seen philanthropists who do have a positive impact in
education. And what they did is
instructive to others. First of all,
they need to know what they don’t know (and it’s a lot). At best, a philanthropist can only give small
amounts of time to understanding the complex issues of education. I expect that Jeff Bezos knows as much about
education as I do about online retailing.
I understand how it works because I use it, but I wouldn’t be of any use
if someone asked me to manage a division of an online retailer. Anyone offering support, or advice, or
certainly millions of dollars has to have more than a passing knowledge of how
education functions and what communities actually need. If it were as easy as funding preschools,
then Head Start, which
has been one of the most successful and researched federal programs of the past
50 years, would be where the Bezos family can put its money.
One of the most impressive foundation missions I’ve seen was
a regional foundation that sought to support an increase in the numbers of
teachers of color. The woman who started
the foundation went to school to earn a master’s degree as she and her husband
were starting the foundation so that she could be informed. The result of her gained knowledge was a
thoughtful engagement with colleges of education, with pre-service teachers,
and the regional education community. The
foundation listened and learned and developed an excellent model of how to
impact their intended focus. The mission
that began the organization evolved as they became more immersed in the needs
of the communities they sought to impact, and as they learned how to work with
those communities to serve the need.
What began as an effort to recruit teachers became a movement to support
teachers because the funders learned and evolved.
Secondly, funding should be built on relationships. The best foundation grants I’ve either
received or evaluated are from funders who’ve taken the time to get to know whom
they’re funding and to understand the work that they’re funding through the
people being funded. Whether it’s an
award of $15,000 or $15 million, this relational aspect is critical. Funding done well isn’t organization to
organization; it’s person to person. Of
course, that can lead to cronyism that doesn’t ask questions and blindly doles
out money. But that doesn’t have to be
the outcome. Understanding the work
means understanding who’s doing the work: their skills, their experiences,
their goals. It also means understanding
the people who’ll be impacted by the funds.
By granting money, funders intend to impact lives. It’s antithetical to do that in a vacuum
where the funder neither knows the people being impacted or the people doing
the work.
I once evaluated an afterschool program that intended to
serve a specific group of children. The
funders gave a significant amount of money to two organizations to implement a
specific intervention. The funders had
chosen to fund this intervention because they had seen its impact on their own
children’s learning. Their children, of
course, lived in privilege while the impacted children lived far from
privilege. It was a laudable aim. These funders sought to provide a community
with something that they believed was useful and impactful. However, after four years of the project, the
data that my evaluation team collected showed that the intervention was having
no impact on the participating children.
The intervention was a poor fit to the children it intended to
serve. I recommended that the funder and
the two organizations use the funding elsewhere, and they did.
What went wrong? The
well-intentioned funders had no idea of the needs of the children they sought
to impact. The funders also didn’t know
that the two organizations would need at least two years of working together to
get the project fully operational. The
result was a lot of money that was spent ineffectively. I’ve often thought that the localness of Head
Start is one of the keys to its success.
The one study I completed involving Head Start certainly showed
that. Although it has federal mandates
and benchmarks, it is implemented locally by directors and staff who are
embedded in the communities they serve and each center tends to reflect local
needs through adaptations that are suited to those needs. That’s very different than an external funder
coming with a solution that tries to fit the funder’s perception of needs.
In contrast, I worked with a funder who funded some projects
that I generated as a college dean, and although I’m no longer seeking private funding
for projects, I remain in touch with this funder because we developed a
friendship. This funder got to know me
and through that knowledge provided support to important projects that helped
to complement other funding. Those funds
allowed me to support not only my own unit, but the college as a whole as we
sought to impact college instructional methods.
I still hear from people at that college that they’re using the skills
they developed from that work. The
funder’s role was critical because as they got to know our work, they could see
the arc of that work and its potential.
They also got to know the college and continued the relationship with
the college well after I left. Instead
of seeing programs and operations, that funder sees people and relationships. Through the relationships, they fund people
and their projects. I’ve seen that
funder do that with many people in the region, and they have a resulting major
impact in the region. Instead of their
philanthropy being about the funder’s ideas, they develop relationships that
ensure that their funding supports communities’ ideas.
That’s what’s troubling about mega-donors’ efforts. Their initiatives are never about building
relationships and an understanding of impacts on people. This new Bezos initiative has all the
telltale signs: a big plan where direction
is already set. It assumes that building
Montessori-style preschools will make significant contributions to addressing
the problems of an inequitable school system.
It’s a technical solution when a personal one is required. As Arnold Pacey warned in his 1985 book, The Culture of Technology, we need to
take caution before handing over social challenges to technicians with
technical answers. In announcing the
new initiative, Bezos noted that, “I’m excited about that [building and
operating a network of preschools] because it will give us the opportunity to
learn, invent, and improve. We’ll use
the same set of principles that have driven Amazon.”
This is the technician’s response. Every problem is a matter of engineering a
response that addresses the issue. Social
challenges, however, require relational responses. Realistically, by the nature of mega-donors’
size and distance from the issues they wish to impact, it’s a
getting-the-camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle challenge for them to build the
requisite relationships to support education.
When you’re spending billions of dollars, creating the kind of
organization that knows the people you’re funding and their communities is difficult. However, without that, we see the results in
decades of misspent resources.
While people (both in education and without) are excited that
the Bezos family has become engaged in supporting the planet that gave so much
to it, I’m cautiously pessimistic. Good
for them that they want to do something.
As the record shows, though, the history of these efforts is poor, and
this one has all the marks of being as poor.
The Bezos family evidently decided on this venture when Jeff Bezos
crowdsourced the issue of where to commit funding in 2017 through
his Twitter feed. That’s an
innovative approach, but Twitter isn’t a good medium to develop relations or to
gain the level of knowledge needed. The
family could save itself a lot of wasted resources and time if it replaced its
technical response with a plan to develop the skills, knowledge, and
relationships to succeed in supporting education. Top-down solution solving may be sufficient
to create an online retailer, but it definitely doesn’t work in education.
