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Shooting for the Moon: A Joint Venture

Ohanian Comment: The U. S. Department of Education wants "all hands on deck." The don't acknowledge where they keep teachers--in steerage.


The Department wants to work with philanthropic actors across the country and at every level, to catalyze engagement in a whole new way.

Philanthropic actors?

Metaphors abound here. When they bring up nautical allusions, the Titanic comes to mind. But read on: the metaphors get worse.

Here's what the U. S. Department is really saying: Let Bill decide.

The moment has come for government to work with the philanthropic sector to identify what is working and take it to scale

It's already happening. Just look at the deformations in school structure, curriculum, etc. that are taking place in districts that think they have a chance to get millions from Gates. Give high schoolers an 8-period day, departmentalize first graders. . . anything took look rigorous.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has set aside $500 million to study what makes an effective teacher, create ways to develop more of them and set up meaningful rewards, which could include merit pay.--The Commercial Appeal, Memphis.

Gates is handing out additional buckets of money to influence how the federal government distributes $5 billion in grants for Race to the Top initiative.

And Arne thinks this is great: "The more all of us are in the game of reform, the more all of us are pushing for dramatic improvement, the better," Duncan said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Oh, and it's just a coincidence, of course, that Arne's Duncan's inner circle includes two former Gates employees Margot Rogers and James Shelton.

We are told that

The Department has truly embraced the foundation community by creating a position within the Office of the Secretary for the Director of Philanthropic Engagement.

Wouldn't it be great if the Secretary saw fit to establish a position within his Office: Director of Teacher Engagement, showing that he truly embraced the teacher community? I'd like to see a Director of Student Engagement, too.

by Staff

"We are on the cusp of a new era of innovation and entrepreneurship in education that was almost unimaginable a decade ago. I am convinced that every problem in education has been solved before, somewhere--and often with philanthropic support."

With these words, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan both praised philanthropy and ushered in a challenge to a room of more than 500 foundation leaders at the Grantmakers for Education Conference earlier this month.

The Secretary was pushing the foundation community to highlight its solutions and help take them to scale, and to continue to invest in the innovations outside of the status quo that have now become such a key part of the Administration's education reform agenda.

The Obama Administration has created the environment for education reform's moon shot--a chance to dramatically change the playing field for children and parents in this country. And this means that it is truly a moment for an "all hands on deck" approach.

Past administrations have surely said that government can't do it alone. This Administration, perhaps louder and clearer than ever before, has made it a priority to work strategically with the private sector to jointly leverage each other's resources. In the field of American education, the unprecedented funding through ARRA demands no less.

"All Hands" Includes Philanthropies

The Department wants to work with philanthropic actors across the country and at every level, to catalyze engagement in a whole new way. Community, family, corporate, and institutional foundations each have a unique role to play in the ecosystem. In order to do the truly transformative-- and not merely incremental-- work that the Department is setting out to do in a very short period of time, everyone needs to be at the table. Foundations of course bring essential financial resources in this time of contraction across all sectors. Perhaps more importantly, education funders can offer informed out-of-the-box thinking, along with the capacity to convene, advocate, and share intellectual capital.

If the Department is successful in meeting the President's goal of becoming once again the world leader on an economic scale, the country must follow his plan to "educate our way to economic recovery." The President's goal means we must graduate 60 percent of our college students by 2020. In order to get there, the Department has taken bold steps to change the way educators do business by changing the incentives for transformation and achievement in school systems at the local and state level.

This is difficult work. It requires a herculean effort of collaboration, strategic planning, resource allocation, and tough choices about priorities. Foundations need to be a part of this strategy because they are uniquely positioned in many instances to provide flexible funding and access to new tools for decision-making and strategy-building, often bringing nontraditional partners to the table.

At the Department, philanthropic engagement means providing an open door to foundations to become a part of the educational reform conversation at the highest level. Just as teachers, students, administrators, community organizations, and others are considered key stakeholders in this transformative work, foundations are now at the table, too. Because of this, the Department is challenging funders to act differently along with the rest of the education sector. All stakeholders must be innovative in order to rise above the status quo of reform. Secretary Duncan is asking everyone to think and act differently. Not only teachers and students, but universities, parents, unions, school boards, government--and now philanthropists, too.

The Benefits of Alignment--Past and Present

The Foundation Center estimates that U.S. foundations provided more than $8 billion for education in 2008. With ARRA funding as a one-time investment for recovery, government can't afford to act alone. If both sectors seize the opportunity to align their multibillion dollar investments, they can help avoid a funding cliff after the ARRA funds are allocated. The Department can co-invest with philanthropy in transformative strategies that will help make education more cost-effective and equitable.

The Department has truly embraced the foundation community by creating a position within the Office of the Secretary for the Director of Philanthropic Engagement. This dedicated role within the Secretary's Office signals to the philanthropic world that the Department is "open for business."

While the Department recognizes that government has no business controlling private sector resources, nor telling private foundations how they should invest their philanthropic dollars, the Department does believe that there is a leadership opportunity at hand. At a minimum, the Department can provide transparency around its own decisions and investments, to assist others in making the most informed choices about how to invest their limited resources. Even better, the Department can provide leadership to the field, and offer guidance as to where gaps in funding, research, and knowledge exist along the spectrum of an overall strategy for comprehensive change.

There is a long history within the social and civic sectors of partnerships to achieve shared goals. And this is not the first time that he Department has worked with foundations. In 1997, the Administration was interested in expanding afterschool and community learning programs, especially in low-income schools and communities. At the time, there was an existing federal $1 million 21st Century Community Learning Center demonstration project, but competing interests within Congress made expansion difficult. Mott Foundation President Bill White seized the opportunity and offered to become the Department's partner by using its philanthropic support to fund the roll out an implementation of an expansion, based on the success of the demonstration project.

The Mott Foundation's initial commitment of $10 million quickly grew to $50 million and then increased to $100 million. Congress was watching; by 2002, the Congressional appropriation for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers grew to almost $1 billion per year. Without a doubt, the initial funding for scalability, along with the convening of stakeholders, advocacy, and sustained investments by the Mott Foundation were critical in building consensus within the Administration for this expansion of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers.

The Department hopes to foster similar long-term, highly leveraged opportunities for scaling what works by working in close collaboration with foundations. Secretary Duncan addresses members of the Grantmakers for Education at their Chicago conference. The gathering's theme, "Make No Small Plans," was in keeping with the Secretary's message.

Building a "Better Rocket"

With respect to broad philanthropic engagement, the Department has two overarching goals that hopefully will not only help change the way that government works with philanthropy, but also help to change the way that the philanthropic sector does business.

If the Department of Education can catalyze a portfolio of investor collaboration tools to allow philanthropy and government to operate from shared platforms to make decisions and investments around shared goals, it will create a much more efficient and effective education sector, which will lead to greater opportunities for children, and easier access to funding for schools and districts.

There are two foundational/fundamental tools for this work. The first is a roadmap that outlines the Department's strategies and goals, and delineates how government funding supports and invests in those particular goals. This will be complemented by an assessment of how current philanthropic investments align with the Department's strategies and funding gaps. This map will provide a comprehensive picture of how public and private dollars are flowing toward education systems and outcomes and will help identify opportunities for new investment.

The goal is to demonstrate where foundations are currently investing, where alignment already exists, and what gaps would best merit the consideration of joint or parallel investment. This concept is comparable to a wedding registry for philanthropists interested in investing in the public education system in America. This would not only help direct dollars in a systemic and strategic manner, but also allow individual grantmakers to view their investments as part of a larger and greater whole. If everyone is working from the same set of blueprints, the rocket ships needed to accomplish the moon shot challenge are far more likely to be within reach.

The second interactive tool that the Department would like to catalyze is a network platform to pool information and expertise, research, data, and evaluation results within the education sector. If someone preparing to make a grant in Ohio to improve third-grade reading knows that she can access the best and latest proven thinking and action on achieving these results in similar communities, she will have wasted fewer resources on the effort to make the grant and have made a more thoughtful and wise investment. This tool would be valuable throughout the Department of Education and the halls of foundation offices around the country, and potentially the globe.

Investing in Innovation and More

With the announcement of the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund and the proposed priorities for grant awards, there is an unprecedented opportunity for organizations to inform government about true innovations in education. The draft priorities (see "What's New") for i3 suggest that government awards will have to be supported by a 20-percent investment of private dollars or in-kind services. This demands that philanthropic sources commit to the most scalable and proven innovations.

In addition, there is a multitude of opportunities for foundations to support i3 beyond the match requirement. As Secretary Duncan announced at the Grantmakers for Education Conference, there are multiple ways that private funders can support innovation in education. The following are just some of his examples:
• Coinvest in intermediaries to complement the i3 awards, providing support for promising, high-risk innovations not funded through the federal program;
• Collaborate in the development of college and career-ready standards;
• Collaborate across states on curriculum, learning tools, technology innovation, and teacher preparation;
• Enable states and districts to make the best use of new federal funds from ARRA by helping states put together great applications for the Race to the Top competition;
• Assist local districts with the complex planning process for school turnarounds; and
• Support rigorous evaluations of education reform. Without compelling research studies, promising innovations rarely get to scale.


Achieving the Dream

The moment has come for government to work with the philanthropic sector to identify what is working and take it to scale-- and for philanthropy to help nurture the next generation of solutions and innovations. The Department's ultimate goal is to create a pipeline of innovation in the education sector that mirrors the best of innovation pipelines in the private sphere, while creating a clarion call to the world that aligning investments in strategic ways is the best and perhaps only way to achieve the dream.

By working together, a high-quality education for every child in this country is within reach.

— The Education Innovator
U. S. Department of Education
2009-10-30
http://edpubs.org/lyris/The_Education_Innovator_No._8.pdf

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