The district recently reignited its dormant nonprofit, the , hiring a new executive director to court dollars from corporations and foundations. The effort has brought in some $26 million so far, including from well-known players in L.A. entertainment and business, on its way to a $100 million goal for the foundation’s first five years. 

A renewed focus on raising private money for school districts across the country comes as student needs are growing and leaders worry about shifting federal policy, education philanthropy officials said. 

“What’s occurring right now is that those that don’t have them are forming foundations, or reforming them if they’ve gone dormant,” said Mike Taylor, head of the National Association of Education Foundations, who said he’s been fielding calls since the summer from school districts looking to navigate the uncertainty around federal funding and leverage community resources.

In Los Angeles, the initial fundraising push has helped families impacted by last year’s wildfires and supported the district’s neediest schools.

“I want to level the playing field,” said Sadie Stockdale Jefferson, who came in to lead the LAUSD foundation this summer after serving in a similar role for Chicago Public Schools and running a University of Chicago think tank focused on public education. “We’re taking the best of what we know works to improve education and ensuring those initiatives reach the schools and classrooms that need them the most.”

A major initial focus of the foundation will be on what LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho calls “priority schools,” with lagging academic performance and the highest student needs in a district that educates everyone from the wealthy elite to families experiencing homelessness or poverty.

Jefferson recently saw a breakdown of private support to district schools by region and said she realized: “The disparity is shocking,” adding she wants foundation money to primarily support campuses without their own parent-run fundraising efforts. 

The philanthropic money is still a drop in the bucket in the district’s more than . But it represents a potential new revenue stream at a time when LAUSD continues to shed students and run a deficit. 

Carvalho is looking to the foundation to support students in ways the district can’t, like sending homeless students off to college with a new laptop, or providing emergency cash to families impacted by the wildfires. “Sometimes the need is acute,” Carvalho said, with foundation money typically being deployed quickly and with less bureaucracy. 

Many of the needs Carvalho ticked off as foundation priorities are those students face outside the classroom. But he said he’s also open to private money supporting the district academically, particularly in the priority schools. District support for priority schools involves teacher coaching, strengthening curriculum and providing tutoring. 

“Government dollars will only go so far, and there are unmet needs that often foundations can address and support,” Carvalho said.  

The foundation has also taken on music education, riding off the popularity of “The Last Repair Shop,” an Oscar-winning short film about the highly skilled team that keeps scores of district-owned instruments working for LAUSD students. Jefferson said she’s hoping to replicate a sponsor-a-school program she ran in Chicago, offering businesses a way to directly help local schools. 

Using private money for public education can be controversial, particularly when funders are seen as exerting too much pressure or pushing for school reforms like charter schools.

Carvalho and others involved in Los Angeles’s fundraising say they’re aiming to avoid that tension as they address critical needs in the district of 400,000 students. 

Of the nation’s 13,000 school districts, around 6,000 have foundations, the majority volunteer-run, Taylor said. The focus of district foundations has evolved, he said, from being thought of as a vehicle to buy extra books or classroom materials. The needs and challenges have deepened since the pandemic. Philanthropic money now goes toward building partnerships for workforce development, supporting teacher retention and addressing student mental-health challenges, Taylor said.

LAUSD’s foundation has recruited board members from local business, education and philanthropic organizations.

Board Chairman Michael Fleming, the president of the David Bohnett Foundation, said he was drawn to the role after hearing Carvalho’s vision for an organization that could move fast and target specific goals, including investing in the priority schools. 

He’s also committed to bridging the divide between public and private funding. “There is this innate distrust sometimes between a government entity and philanthropy, and vice versa,” Fleming said. “They each see the world very differently and say: ‘You don’t understand the way we operate.’ I think that’s false.”

Enthusiasm for private investment in public school districts has fallen in and out of favor over the decades. Initial waves of corporate and foundation money aimed to revolutionize education.  

“When things don’t dramatically get better, the energy and resources and attention ebb,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus at Columbia’s Teachers College who has followed education philanthropy. Many private foundations doubled down on charter schools, which then made school districts wary of partnerships. In Los Angeles, a nonprofit launched by LAUSD leaders in the 2010s later merged with an entity that backed charters, putting it at odds with the district it initially set out to help. 

Henig sees today’s philanthropists more focused on supporting strong school leaders, rather than looking to fundamentally disrupt the way education is delivered. 

That shift makes sense to Erica Lim, a senior program officer at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Broad, along with the foundations of “Two and a Half Men” co-creator Chuck Lorre and L.A. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, to the LAUSD foundation to support its priority schools.

Lim said she was encouraged by the stability Carvalho has brought to LAUSD since he joined in 2022 after a string of short-tenured leaders. The former Miami-Dade Public Schools superintendent now has a contract to keep him in the L.A. job until at least 2030.

“We’re not looking to backfill or solve really systemic budget issues,” Lim said. “That’s for district leaders to solve.” Instead, Broad wants its investments to help kick-start new initiatives or scale programs that show promise. 

Carvalho said the district won’t be turning to philanthropy to fund core areas of the budget. That said, he could see the foundation being used as a stopgap if, for instance, the federal government cut off longstanding funding to support English language learners. “That would be a legitimate support from the foundation,” Carvalho said, “Which could be a likely scenario in the months to come.”

In reviving the foundation, Carvalho changed the bylaws to give himself less power over its board, a move he saw as helping ensure its independence. Jefferson works with the LAUSD Education Foundation board to direct funds, with district input. 

Fleming, the board chair, said he’s looking for the foundation to outlast the many prior attempts and avoid drama. “We simply want to get resources for the schools and for students,” he said. “That’s it.” 

But even as the department is weakened, some of its work has been sustained by other actors. One of its key functions — helping educators learn about and implement promising improvement strategies — has long been supported and even led by a network of local education organizations.  

When they work together, these organizations — everything from local parent-teacher associations and community-based programs to major philanthropies and research-practice partnerships — turn out to be remarkably good at sharing information about effective K-12 practices, helping school and district leaders craft improvement plans, and rallying support behind these efforts.

And these local organizations don’t just influence what happens to schools locally. As I’ve discovered in , many of these organizations have built connections with each other and with school districts over many years. Working under the radar, these organizations have often created an invisible infrastructure to support change and improvement nationally. 

In studying the history of high school dropout prevention systems, I’ve seen how changes emerged from researchers who studied graduation patterns, school coaches who worked with schools to reduce dropout rates, philanthropic managers who funded these initiatives, and community members who advocated for these changes. What then can be learned from this web of local organizations?

First, local organizations learn a lot from each other. In the early 2000s, organizations in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City learned that the problem of dropping out can be predicted by students’ ninth grade performance. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University didn’t just publish their results; they spoke to varied audiences from local high school teachers to policymakers at the nation’s capital. They worked with other researchers who have since studied these “early warning indicators” and with other nonprofits that incorporated these indicators in their work with schools. As local researchers, nonprofits, and schools collaborated, changes slowly emerged on how to address the problem of students dropping out. 

Second, local organizations adapt innovations in and foster trust with schools. In the 2010s, when nonprofits were introducing systems to support students’ high school graduation, they did not just transpose a set of recommendations from one school to another. Rather, many of these education nonprofits spent years working with teachers and gaining the trust of schools and districts, constantly adapting strategies to the needs of their partners. Schools appreciated getting their own data, coming up with tailored solutions, and working alongside their outside-school partners. In the process, seemingly “foreign” changes and initiatives become strangely familiar. 

Third, local organizations provide stability and focus in a field so often changing. When school boards change and new superintendents come in, they tend to bring in new initiatives. That can make it harder to maintain existing programs. Their partner organizations can help with focus and stability. For instance, organizations like the UChicago Consortium on School Research and coaches from the university’s Network for College Success have been focused squarely on keeping ninth graders “on track” to graduate. This focus has paid off with high school graduation rates increasingly dramatically in places like Chicago, which experienced a jump from 50% in the early 2000s to 85% graduation in 2024. That success wouldn’t have been possible without the sustained efforts of local research, data, and coaching organizations working with schools over a 20-year period. 

To be clear, local organizations cannot replace the U.S. Education Department. Our nation needs a federal agency to establish financial aid policies, distribute Title I funds, collect national data, support testing innovations, and promote K-12 programs. But it’s important to recognize that the U.S. boasts a strong infrastructure of networked local organizations, and this network has an important role to play in K-12 improvement.

Some caveats are in order. One is that the most affluent schools and districts could develop the strongest relationships to these organizations, which will only exacerbate existing inequalities. It’s not unusual to see a wealthy suburban district, with its well-connected PTA members, attract a number of research partners, while a rural district on the other side of the state struggles to attract any interest at all from researchers, philanthropists, or community groups.

Another is the risk of creating a shadow bureaucracy that challenges existing education leaders. Nonprofits and philanthropists can sometimes push their own initiatives without any community input or with few guardrails for accountability. At the very least, partner organizations should create a steering committee — composed of district officials, union leaders, teachers, parents, students, community members, and other diverse voices — to help foster democratic deliberation about their school improvement plans. But some organizations neglect to seek out such input. 

On balance, though, these organizations have the potential to support positive changes in a decentralized education system. Given today’s political headwinds, it is easy to feel pessimistic about the future. But as the Department of Education faces possible closure, educators should acknowledge and find ways to support local nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, and researchers that shape not just our local schools but also our national education landscape. 

UChicago Consortium on School Research and Âé¶čŸ«Æ· both receive financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Joyce Foundation.

But she’ll readily tell you, “There’s just not a lot of stuff that’s worth funding.”

Knight is president and executive director of the Siegel Family Endowment, created by computer scientist David Siegel, a co-founder of the embattled, $60 billion quantitative trading firm . A former Google and Two Sigma employee herself, Knight sees her role as helping to bring evidence-backed tools to market — tools “that we can learn something from.” 

That has led her to underwrite small, often experimental undertakings such as , which works with students and teachers to promote , focusing on student needs and inputs. For instance, if students want to improve the quality of school lunches, instead of asking nutritionists or school staff to design menus, a school would turn to kids to study the problem and suggest solutions. 

She also supports , an innovative high school network in Pennsylvania, and the , a nonprofit that promotes instruction paced by students, relying on mastery rather than seat time.

Knight has espoused an approach that she calls “inquiry-driven philanthropy,” searching for schools and startups doing important work — and treating grantmaking “as almost field experimentation” alongside more traditional research she funds. “Everything has an orientation toward, ‘What can we learn from this, success or failure, to give back to the field?’”

She has also said educators and policymakers are missing something in the conversation about classroom technology, reducing it to an “all or nothing” question. “We either have to say ‘No tech’ or ‘Very low tech — lock away the phones, keep the kids disconnected, ban ChatGPT, etc.,’ or it’s ‘We’re all in. Every kid gets an iPad. They’re going to learn on technology all day.’ ”

Accordingly, she has many thoughts on AI, the current panic about phones in schools, and how she separates good ed tech from bad.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Âé¶čŸ«Æ·: You’ve said your goal is to fund “deeply unsexy things” in ed tech to invest in. As someone who gets email pitches every morning about deeply sexy things that I’m very skeptical about, that was a breath of fresh air. What are “deeply unsexy things?” Why is that important?

Katy Knight: Philanthropy can be very much like the private markets and everything else, consumed by . We are just as fallible and just as susceptible to chasing the Next Big Idea, the next sexy thing. And I think that’s fine in some respects. Philanthropy should be risk capital, which means sometimes there’s going to be a sexy thing that will impact the social sector — and we should fund it.

But more often than not, change is happening on the back end. It’s not always something new, and it’s not always using the latest and greatest technology. Sometimes we’re talking about the reality of the digital divide in a place where people want to be talking about generative AI, and that’s not capturing attention. So it’s even more important that we, as a philanthropy with the bully pulpit, are thinking about what are the layers of the bureaucracy that we can tackle to achieve systems change? Even though they’re unsexy from a news perspective or a razzle-dazzle perspective, I think they are actually impactful and interesting.

Let’s talk about some of the things you’re funding, starting with , the non-profit that offers free AI-powered writing, reading comprehension and language skills lessons. What’s your thinking there?

Quill is sexy, in that they’ve got this front-facing technology. Everyone wants to talk about consumer-facing tools. What’s less sexy, I think, is that we’re not talking about how it’s the latest ChatGPT model. This is about years and years of actual teacher feedback. It’s about training something really specific. It’s relatively niche. And those are the kind of AI applications that I think actually have the highest potential: Applying a powerful technology to something niche should have outsized impacts. That kind of thing makes sense to me. I think there’s a lot of opportunities for us to think about, “O.K., if we weren’t just chasing the best, coolest image-generating technology, what might we be doing to actually serve student need and teacher need? It starts from asking questions about what matters, what the actual challenges are, and then you get to something that’s useful — even if it’s not as shiny as some of the other ed tech startup things that are coming across your inbox.

You’re also funding Quill and others to develop a “Responsible AI Playbook.” Say more about that.

Even though the social sector is smaller than the private markets in terms of investment in new ed tech tools, if we have even a small chorus of people thinking about responsible AI and pushing back against this overarching narrative that we just have to let it run amok, that’s net beneficial to the field.

Talk about the small chorus. Who are the other singers? 

The big one is the . The other network we’ve been involved with is the . (based in Zurich, Switzerland) helped found this group of funders, developers and researchers globally who are now thinking together about responsible development, specifically through the lens of “How do we create real-world environments for developers to test their tools and hear feedback from teachers and young people more directly,” rather than just building things that sound like they’ll capture a lot of market share.

Can you say more about the trialing network?

We are funding some of the U.S. work, particularly through our partners at and . Leanlab has been crucial because what they do really at their core is very much aligned with this vision of having real live environments where there’s some co-creation of these tools. We’re funding that work through them. They’ve had two global meetings that I participated in. 

Leanlab Executive Director Katie Boody Adorno has built a very cool, small, nimble organization that’s focused particularly on the notion of the co-design of ed tech tools. They work with startups that are really genuine about wanting to design for impact, not just for investors. And they create relationships with schools to have teachers be paid for their participation and to have teachers actually be testers and provide feedback directly to the designers at these startups. I think it’s just a very cool model for almost an accelerator for impact, rather than an accelerator for marketing.

Do you have thoughts on phone-free schools?

It’s a simple solution to a complex problem. On the one hand, in a vacuum, I might say “Absolutely, we need to be more distraction-free.” And much like when I was in elementary school and they were taking our away, we’ve got to put the phones away. On the other hand, I understand the complex issues of school safety, of child care arrangements in a world where parents have to work. Thinking about what students are in school for — and what we want them to be doing, and how we want them to be learning, and whether or not we want them to feel so attached to these devices — is a really important conversation. But we can’t divorce it from reality: We live in a really uncertain and sometimes dangerous world, and I understand the perspective of parents who might want to be able to reach their kids during the day in the event of an emergency and other things. 

When I was at the last spring, somebody I was with said, “Take a good look around: Half of these guys will be gone by next year.” On the one hand, that seems like a very cynical thing to say. It also seems entirely right. Is it a good thing that companies come and go, that you’re always dealing with somebody who’s got a different vision? Is that a healthy thing for education?

In any private market solution, some cycling of companies and iteration is not a bad thing. I think there’s a mismatch between how the tech startup venture world works and how education products need to work. In the VC-backed startup world, we’re funding a bunch of things with the intention that one or two of them will have 100x, 1,000x returns, and a lot of them will go bust. Those companies are incentivized and encouraged to capture as much market share as possible to achieve that investment return. Whether they are actually impactful to students or not is almost irrelevant in that initial drive to capture market share.

That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be competition and a diverse set of tools that educators can dig into. But if they’re getting served up a shiny new presentation for a new tool that they’re being told they absolutely need every month, that sort of churn is incredibly disruptive. 

How do you separate good ed tech from bad? 

When I hear a startup say that their total addressable market is all 80 million students in the country, I know it’s unlikely that product is worthwhile because there are so few ed tech products — there are so few products in general — that can actually serve every single student in the country. So unless you’ve got a more limited perspective on what the market is, I don’t think you’ve actually aligned what you’re building with the reality of what is needed.

I was heartened to read in journalist Audrey Watters’ last month that she’s returning to writing about ed tech. She wrote that she’s ready to “dutifully remind you that the future of human and machine learning as envisioned by Silicon Valley’s libertarian elite is a pretty shitty one.” Thoughts?

I love that! I mean, look: Not to zoom out too much, but I think as a society we’ve grown somewhat accustomed to being test subjects for tech companies across the board because everything is free. And they say, “Oh, if it’s free, then you’re the product.” And we are. “We’re releasing a new version of this tool. Your email client is going to change tomorrow.” Do you have any say in it? Nope. We’re very used to living in a world where we’re told what to do by tech platform companies and they will manage just how they see fit.

That doesn’t work for education. That doesn’t work when you have no grounding in learning science, pedagogy, or even just being in a classroom. And so I think that is not just an education problem. It impacts the education sector specifically, but I do think it’s a broader societal concern. Our interaction with technology is not one where we have enough agency.

Mike Bloomberg, the media mogul and former New York City mayor, has given Johns Hopkins University for most its current and future medical students, the school and announced on July 8, 2024. The gift will also expand financial aid for students studying several other fields at Bloomberg’s alma mater. He .

In the final episode of the season, Michael and Diane welcome Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., back to the show to discuss the world of education philanthropy. Stacey draws from her previous experience at New Schools Venture Fund and the Gates Foundation to analyze troubling trends in the sector. The three discuss what funders and operators can do to grow philanthropic investment in education and better deploy those funds. 

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. It’s good to see you.

Diane Tavenner: It’s good to see you as well. I think the unofficial start of summer has happened. I know that because I had a big graduation last week. My son graduated from college, which is quite surreal. It’s also the last episode of the season, which I can hardly believe.

Michael Horn: First, congrats to you and to Rhett on the graduation. It’s very exciting news. I can’t believe it’s the end of the season. We’ve had the chance to interview many interesting people, and we’ve particularly enjoyed having one guest back on the show.

Diane Tavenner: That’s true. I’m excited to reintroduce Stacey Childress. Regular listeners will be familiar with her. We originally teamed up for a two-part series on higher education and had so much fun that we decided to do it again for K-12 education. 

Hopefully, folks are enjoying those episodes. During those conversations, we had some off-the-record dialogue about a big topic in education right now, and we decided it was an important conversation to have. So, welcome back, Stacey. We’re thrilled to have you here. We’ve covered your credentials before, but today you’re really in the expert seat, having been involved in multiple aspects of philanthropy, which is the direction we’re going.

Michael Horn: Hi, Stacey. Thank you for joining us again.

Stacey Childress: I am happy to be here. There are two things I’m reflecting on now that this is my fifth episode in a row.

Diane Tavenner: Yes

Stacey Childress: One, never say anything to you guys in an offhand way because it might become a podcast episode. Oh, we ought to do philanthropy, and now here we are. I’ve learned my lesson.

The second thing is, I feel like I’ve moved from guest to long-term guest, almost like we’re in roommate mode.

Changes in Education Philanthropy

Michael Horn: We’ll see. Diane and I are persuasive. Either way, thank you for joining us. We’re excited to dive into this topic of education philanthropy. As you both alluded to, it feels like the water around philanthropy and education is really churning right now. It feels different from how it has in the past. Maybe it’s my imagination, maybe it’s not. There was recently an article in Inside Philanthropy talking about the changing nature of education philanthropy, which struck a chord with us. Many of our listeners are running school networks, starting education nonprofits, or interfacing with donors. We wanted to dive into this important sector of the education reform movement to discuss how it is or isn’t changing and its implications for our sector. Diane, what did I miss before we dive in?

Diane Tavenner: I think you captured it well, Michael. Just a minute more on the philanthropy aspect. The article did a good job of capturing the feeling. The conversations I regularly have with folks in education, whether in nonprofits or school organizations, or anyone in the ecosystem who relies on philanthropy for their initiatives or operations, there’s a real sense of worry, stress, and fear. There’s a belief that there is less philanthropy available, and it’s confusing what is being funded, if it’s going to be there, and if long-term philanthropists will stay in the sector. This is a big conversation happening all around. Stacey, you’re in this a lot. Many people look to you as a whisperer in this space. Is that capturing what you’re experiencing?

Stacey Childress: Yes, it is. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Michael, you asked if these foundations routinely change their strategies every five years or so. Is that what’s going on here? We can talk more about that trend, but this feels different. What I’m hearing from people raising money is not just the uncertainty of where we’ll head next and what priorities givers will coalesce around, but whether they will stay in this field at all or continue funding at the same level. If you were giving $300 million a year, are you going to pause and then go to $100 million instead of $300 million? That shift pulls a significant amount out of the philanthropy market. If you were giving $100 million a year, are you going to reduce that, and what are the new priorities? The feeling is different. I had a concentrated period of fundraising from 2014 to about a year ago, and it didn’t feel like this. We always shaped the priorities of the big givers, knowing they would do a strategy refresh, but we never worried about the money going away. In fact, we were confident we could bring more dollars in. It does feel different now, and I’m glad I’m not a fundraiser at this moment.

Michael Horn: Well, with that context, but also a bit of sobering context, let’s dive into the first question. Diane and I have a bunch of things we want to ask. Can you give an overview of philanthropy in education? What are we talking about in terms of dollars? To the extent you see it shrinking, can you quantify that a little bit so we have a sense of what and who we are talking about?

Overview of Education Philanthropy 

Stacey Childress: I feel a little exposed. You called me an expert, and I have to say two things about that. One, I have an arrangement with McKinsey & Company as a senior advisor. This is not informed by my work with them, nor does it reflect their views. This is Stacey Childress: speaking personally. 

Michael Horn: But let’s put it in context. New Schools Venture Fund, obviously raising dollars and giving, Gates Foundation, you were Next-Gen Stacey, right?

Stacey Childress: Yes, I was Next-Gen Stacey.

Michael Horn: Even with the book that Rick and I did, you wrote that incredible piece around the role of philanthropy in markets. So, you’ve thought a lot about this.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, I have. I just wanted to make sure that I know a lot. So I’m not trying to be falsely modest and say I’m not an expert.

I have expertise in this area, particularly in a very concentrated part of the space. But nothing I say today has anything to do with what McKinsey would say about this stuff. It’s not related.

It’s been a while since I looked rigorously at the shape and size of this part of the philanthropic capital market for education. I can tell you what I know firsthand and how that may or may not have changed over time. When I joined New Schools in 2014, it was the first time I had to raise money after giving it away. I wanted to understand with a lot of specificity what that philanthropic capital market looked like because I wanted to get more of it for New Schools. I wanted to increase our share of that wallet if it wasn’t going to grow.

At the time, education innovation and reform philanthropists were giving a little over a billion dollars a year. So it was about 1.25 billion dollars of philanthropy to things like charter schools, charter school networks, some ed tech stuff, human capital initiatives like Teach for America, new leaders for new schools, and similar projects. There was about a billion plus dollars in philanthropy.

My sense is that it stayed pretty stable the whole time I was at New Schools. Over about an eight or nine-year period, we stayed at about a billion and a quarter as a sector.

I’m talking only K-12 and only the innovation reform wing of funders. Think of Gates, Walton, CZI, Schusterman, Dell, and similar players. There’s a kind of an East Coast, West Coast, and some middle of the country folks. That group stayed at a little over a billion, with some comings and goings within, but overall about the same.

My sense is that that’s still true. It might have ticked down just a little bit, but I could be wrong about that since it’s been three or four years since I’ve taken a firm look. Even with the pandemic shifts, that’s still what we’re talking about here.

Now, it sounds like a lot of money, and I don’t want to diminish it. It is a lot of money, especially once you’re in the billions. The thing is, I learned this the hard way, but it’s something you learn as you go.

A big question for philanthropists, whether you’re in this sector or any individual philanthropist, is that Gates was and I think still is the biggest K-12 funder of this type. They’ve stayed in the 300-350 million dollars a year range. So about a billion plus every three years, just Gates, about 1.2 or so billion, 1.5 billion every three years. But the public funding for K-12 education has grown from about 600 to 800 billion a year over the last few years. That’s 1.8, almost 2 trillion dollars every three years.

So you match up Gates’ billion plus dollars every three years against government funding for schools at over a trillion and a half. It’s vanishingly small.

It’s a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much. The goal is to create the most impact possible in a sector that has enormous funding and is in vast need of improvement. How do you put those dollars to work in a way that, even though they’re small, they have an outsized effect on improving student outcomes, access to opportunity, and those kinds of things?

So it’s a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much. How do you get that wedge of innovation capital in? Diane, it looks like you’ve got…

Diane Tavenner: Well, Stacey, I think this is such an important point for this conversation because I want to make sure people know what specifically we’re talking about. I think you’re really zeroing in on that. This conversation is about philanthropy that isn’t generally funding operational funds. That isn’t to say that philanthropy isn’t out there.

There are a lot of individual donors and people in communities who give money to their favorite nonprofit, schools, charity events, and galas. We’re not talking about any of that money here. We’re talking about a relatively small set of substantial foundations giving specific types of money for specific purposes, not for ongoing operations.

So let’s spend a minute on what those grants look like when that money comes in. What do they not look like, perhaps?

So people can be really clear.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, that’s great. So, yes, that segment of donors we’re talking about funds innovation. Whether it’s startups or existing organizations in this ecosystem, they fund innovation—starting something new, creating something new within an existing structure, or radically changing the way something is done. 

Innovation capital and growth capital help when you’re on to something, have good results, and want to serve more kids, train more teachers, or expand your core business. This kind of capital can help you grow and do more in more places or with more people. The hope is always that this will lead to sustainability without ongoing funding beyond what you receive per pupil if you’re a school or a program that gets money through taxes for serving students, or through earned revenue.

If you’re more of a service-based nonprofit, you need to figure out who and what you’re going to charge to continue operating without a constant philanthropic subsidy.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, we always call it growth capital. We would call them bridges versus piers. You’re not just putting someone in the ocean; you’re building a bridge to something sustainable, hopefully new, better, and scalable.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, exactly. The size and time frame of these grants vary.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, obviously, it depends on what you’re doing, but it’s rare for one donor to fund your whole need. If you’re an operator, you have to think hard about that because you probably don’t want that. It sounds easier to get one big check, but it’s actually good to have a mix of revenue or investment capital with multiple investors. This dilutes the power and governance of any one investor.

Stacey, you’ve raised a lot of money too. I like having several investors because it allows us to do what we committed to our donors without answering to one set of priorities or perspectives.

In this space, you’re usually looking at multiple donors to fund what you and your team want to do, whether it’s innovation or growth. These grants are usually three years.

Diane Tavenner: Sometimes.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, sometimes they stretch to five, but often it’s a year at a time. You do a little bit, get a little more, do a little bit, get a little more, which can be quite dynamic. There are expenses associated with this that aren’t necessarily yearly. You’re usually investing in people.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: To get good work done, so payroll is always a consideration. It’s a good discipline. Three-year grants were common. I had a very small number of five-year grants, which were amazing but hard to get. Very rare. A lot of one and two-year grants.

Diane Tavenner: A lot of ones and twos. If it’s okay, I can put a little shape to this in terms of dollar numbers from my time at New Schools. We launched another fund while I was there. Between 2015 and 2022, I raised 550 million dollars, about half a billion, in seven or eight calendar years. Two hundred million of it was on five-year grants. For New Schools, the other 350 million had nothing longer than three years.

Stacey Childress: But we only raised that from about 15 donors. I had multiple donors, but still very concentrated.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: Any one of them stepping off would have been a risk, but we kept renewing them for almost nine years. The risk was always there that one of our multi-million, multi-year donors would decide we weren’t for them anymore, they were reducing their education spend, or they could do it themselves without needing us. It was a constant process of selling what we were up to and our ideas during the three-year terms because we always wanted to renew.

Diane Tavenner: I think it’s useful to reiterate that you raised all that money to give it away thoughtfully to operators. There are two groups: one raising money to deploy it to operators and another group, like me, raising money from both you and directly from big donors. It’s a lot in the weeds, but hopefully, it’s helpful to understand what we’re talking about. Michael, maybe we should return to you because you’re wondering if this is different from the past.

Michael Horn: I think that’s the question. When I was running the Christensen Institute and raising dollars, the Gates Foundation would change strategies every five years. Is the current moment different from other times in the field when we’ve seen similar shifts, or why are people asking these questions right now?

The Impact of the Pandemic 

Stacey Childress: Yeah, I alluded to this earlier. Let me get more specific about this current moment and the difference as I see it.

Michael Horn: As you perceive it, yeah.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, as I perceive it. Somebody ought to do a really good analysis of this, an actual bottom-up analytic project to sort this out.

But here’s where I think we are. The pandemic was an exogenous shock that threw us all for a loop and put us back on our heels. None of us knew what to do during those early months of the pandemic in 2020, trying to figure out how things would sort out. 

You know me. I’m generally an optimist, a sarcastic optimist if that’s a thing, but I really am an optimist. I always think we’re going to figure this out and things will work out.

During that time, I thought, this will be a wake-up call for all of us in philanthropy in two ways.

One, if we reflect back, are you kidding me that this is really where we are in March, April, May of 2020? We couldn’t even get kids learning at home effectively with decent digital content. I was devastated. I was next-gen Stacey at Gates Foundation, and we envisioned kids learning anytime, anywhere, in deep, rigorous, and engaging ways, and that learning should count even if it’s not in the classroom.

I still believe all that, but here we were, unable to do that on any kind of scale. There are lots of reasons for it, but I thought this would be a wake-up call because maybe we’ll have another pandemic, or at least the mindset shift to anytime, anywhere learning is valuable.

The other thing was, as a philanthropic sector, I hoped it would shake us out of some bad habits, or at least some standard operating procedures that don’t serve children or grantees well.

Michael Horn: Can you give a couple of examples?

Stacey Childress: I was part of two different coalitions of philanthropists that met often on Zoom during 2020, trying to sort out what we should be doing. A lot of energy and good intentions, but no principles, just staff people. Many were heartbroken, stymied, and frozen because their ways of doing business were no match for what was needed. They couldn’t provide the size of grants or the flexibility that operators needed to respond quickly.

Operators needed resources immediately, especially those with a vision for how to respond. Their current budgets didn’t allow for it, or they were doing something new and needed the money right away because kids were stuck at home, not learning.

I had off-the-record conversations where people said they couldn’t move fast enough or weren’t set up to respond quickly. I told them they could, but they had to lead and make the case to their principals or decision-makers. We had to throw standard procedures out the window, at least temporarily, to respond to the crisis.

Some institutions equate time with rigor, thinking a long process means rigor. But often, it means 15 people have to look at something, and it takes months when three people knew everything needed in the first month. Grants could have been made in a month instead of six or eight months.

I’ve seen this as both a fundraiser and inside the world’s largest education funder. Things just take too long, and I don’t see that changing. Some figured it out on an emergency basis but have reverted to standard procedures, possibly with new organizational charts and consultants. It still takes a long time.

With these shifts, Michael, people are getting stuck mid-process and can’t get good information about what happens next. The staff inside these institutions are unsure of what will happen next, trying to respond to their decision hierarchies, leading to stalled processes.

Stacey Childress: I know someone working on a multi-million dollar, multi-year grant that should be a renewal. There’s no unknown about the grantee or the work, but it’s stalled due to internal churn. They need the money last month and thought the first payment would be made then, but now it’s stalled for another six or eight months with no visibility into what’s happening.

I feel like I’m rambling, but there was a moment where we could have shaken off standard operating procedures. It was clear that even with good ideas, we haven’t funded them at sufficient levels, smartly, durably, or for long enough to get where we need to go. Part of that is about how we do business. Could we take this moment to throw out old processes and reinvent them to be more responsive? We’re funding innovation and growth, but this isn’t how innovation and growth investing happens in other sectors of the economy. It’s just not. 

Sorry, I have one more thing to say about the pandemic lessons.

Diane Tavenner: It’s interesting to have this conversation, and it’s surprising to me we haven’t had it before. I’d love to share what I was experiencing at that time. Michael and I started the podcast because, like you, we were optimistic that the pandemic would create an opportunity. We hoped people would see what was wrong not only in philanthropy but in how schools were being operated, offering a moment for change. And here we are, season five.

Reflecting on it as an operator, everything you’re saying is right. People don’t understand how expensive it was to survive during the pandemic as a school system. The amount of money we had to spend on tests, masks, computers, hotspots—everything was immense.

I would argue that Summit was one of the best in the country at getting things up and running effectively, just as you described, Stacey. I had to make some tough decisions, extending ourselves and thinking the money would come in. Interestingly, the money did not come in from philanthropy, as it couldn’t cover the entire system. It came from the government, which moved pretty quickly, I would say.

One of the challenges is, and I’m a pretty savvy fundraiser, I didn’t know what to ask philanthropy for at that moment. We couldn’t innovate; we were just trying to survive. We had a lot of money flowing in from the government.

We did have one amazing funder, Arthur Rock, who came in within weeks, giving generously without a team or staff. His money allowed us to set up a mini-fund to help families in crisis, preventing them from being thrown out on the street, and ensuring they had necessities like a working refrigerator or internet access. It was immediate emergency cash for survival.

Stacey Childress: Yes.

Diane Tavenner: Thank goodness for Arthur enabling everyone who didn’t have internet to have a hotspot within days. But that was it. That was all that came through. Arthur has an interesting way of thinking where he doesn’t believe time will give him more information.

Stacey Childress: And he also trusted you to know the best way to deploy those resources. Arthur trusted me and my team, and that’s another challenge. As foundation staffs get bigger, they hire smart people who become experts lauded for their knowledge. They’re less inclined to just give the money to someone like you and let you do what you need to do.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: Instead, they take nine or twelve months to put you through a process that yields no more information than they had at the beginning. I’m not insulting the people who work in these places. I have many friends and people I respect greatly. But the institutions and the culture create processes that are inefficient.

Diane Tavenner: Same with schools, right?

Stacey Childress: Right. Same with schools.

Michael Horn: I remember this from over ten years ago. Giselle Huff was frustrated that they would hire people like you and not give you the autonomy to move quickly. It’s an organizational issue, not the individuals per se.

The bigger issue I’m hearing is that the pandemic didn’t break these tendencies; it exposed them. It created an existential crisis internally where people questioned their identity and purpose, leading to more pause and churn. This indecision has created a lingering hangover.

Stacey Childress: The hangover is still here. Gates might be an interesting exception, which I’ll come back to. Many institutions faced a crisis in the first months of the pandemic, realizing that what they’d spent years and billions of dollars on hadn’t made the progress needed.

For institutional funders, there was a sense of, “What did we get for it?” The principals, whether trustees or living donors, were asking good questions but not getting great answers from teams trying to figure it out and not wanting to be wrong. There was a fear of going back to donors like Bill Gates, Mark and Priscilla, or the Walton family with another failed initiative.

Giselle went to the president of the Gates Foundation a year after I was there and asked why they hired me but didn’t let me spend my budget freely. I wished she hadn’t done that, but it highlighted the issue. What are we waiting for? Who do we think will come up with a better answer? Where’s the boldness that created the wealth in the first place?

Shifting Strategies 

Michael Horn: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. Let me ask the question this way: I’m hearing from a lot of nonprofits, and I sit on boards of nonprofits, that it’s as bad as it’s ever been. We’ve seen a bunch go out of business or be acquired for virtually nothing.

Maybe that’s what should have happened, I don’t know. But it seems different in many ways.

Another question I have is about the shifting strategies every five years and the churn you’re describing. Education is a space where change isn’t going to happen across the country in five years. This is a big, complicated 50-state country with lots of challenges that interfere with the operations. It’s messy. There’s a huge installed base.

Are we guilty of impatience, not just sticking with a good theory of action? Or is something else going on?

Stacey Childress: Yeah, yes.

Michael Horn: I didn’t mean to ask a one-word question.

Stacey Childress: No, I know. I was recently talking with someone from one of the large institutional donors. This person joined relatively recently, post-pandemic, and had been an outside observer and fundraiser from this institution. They had an insight that rang true for me: we’ve got a theory of change for what should happen in the sector over many years, but it’s not very rigorous or periodically examined with any rigor.

It’s shaped around the personality of the donor and some senior staff preferences. It sounds fine, but then we’re applying a lot of rigor at the individual grant level, creating 47-row outcome trackers for 18-month grants. We spend months creating these, and every quarterly call with the grantee digs into line items.

But there’s no intermediate view of how the ecosystem around these grants is doing because we’re not clear about what those are. We’ve got four or five areas we’re willing to fund, but even then, we’re not looking at the portfolio. We’re not seeing how individual grants add up to those areas.

So, big idea, not a lot of rigor around developing it, and then intense rigor at the grant level. My time at Gates wasn’t quite that loose, but there were features of it, especially the one-at-a-time approach, which isn’t true rigor. It often meant lots of people, lots of rows on a spreadsheet, and many conversations, but that’s not true rigor. 

You spend five years and have three model grantees to show the principal, but you’ve spent $800 million or more. The pandemic opened up good questions for which there aren’t good answers yet. 

Gates narrowed its focus to math, committing $1.2 billion over three years. This isn’t an additional billion; it’s their regular funding but focused mostly on math. This narrowing means if you were funded by Gates before but aren’t focused on math now, you’re out. This has led to many organizations no longer fitting into Gates’ funding categories. 

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: The downside is if, after three or five years, they can’t achieve what they want in math, then what? We’ve been through system-wide transformation, charter schools, standards, teacher systems, next-gen schools, and now math. If they keep switching every three to five years, what’s next? 

Michael Horn: Right.

Stacey Childress: If the next cycle doesn’t work, they might consider an exit.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: I know what I would do, but in that institution, now 25 years in, by the time the math cycle ends, they’ll be 26 or 27 years in. Now what?

Michael Horn: That makes sense.

Stacey Childress: People worry the “now what” will be an exit.

Diane Tavenner:  Yeah, that’s what people are worried about, for sure.

Stacey Childress: And Gates isn’t the only one. I use them as an example because it illustrates the issue cleanly.

How Operators Can Help 

Diane Tavenner: Everything Stacey is saying resonates with me. Michael, what I’m thinking about a lot is our conversations about innovation. If we go back to the top of this conversation, this is philanthropy for innovation.

I won’t go into the long history we’ve had of trying to innovate within a giant, decentralized system because that is a massive challenge. What you’re talking about, Stacey, is how does anyone tackle that? Clearly, no one can tackle that entirely, so we start to narrow our focus and aim to be successful at something specific. 

I’m not going to quibble with focusing on math because, in the work I’m doing now, I see how critically important it is for the future of the workforce and the country. However, that’s probably not going to transform schools in the way the three of us want them to be transformed.

This creates a sense of angst for me because most schools in America are just doing the same old thing. They’re taking federal, state, and local money and running the same schools, with no real prospect of change.

For those of us who believe change should happen, what are the levers? How does this relatively small amount of money create the change we want?

Stacey, as we were talking through this, you mentioned a list of things you want funders to do. I thought of a list of things I want operators to do—those who want to innovate and raise philanthropy to do it. It’s worth spending a moment on that because I think there are two sides to this.

There are things that operators, like myself and my peers, need to do to be compelling and retain capital in our space. If you’re not doing compelling, interesting things, your projects aren’t going to get funded.

First, I’ll call it “getting your conditions in order.” This refers to work done by several people, including folks at the Gates Foundation years ago, and more recently, Transcend has partnered with others to define the conditions of an organization ready to innovate. Michael, you and I talk about this all the time. You need structures and mindsets to be able to innovate. Use the available tools to ensure you have the right conditions. If you’re trying to get innovation money without knowing if your conditions are in order, you’re not primed to raise money.

Second, do you actually have innovations that others aren’t working on that could potentially move the needle? You need to understand the field and what others are doing to ensure your innovation is truly unique and impactful. This requires discipline and hard work.

When you do this, you earn trust and face less scrutiny because it becomes apparent that you’ve done the groundwork. Lastly, I have always tried to see this as a collaborative venture rather than a competitive one. My experience is that many operators fall into a competitive mindset, seeing funding as a zero-sum game. This competitiveness is counterproductive because no one can do this alone. Acting more collaboratively could attract and keep more money in the innovation space and sector.

That would be my wish list for operators.

Changes Funders Can Make

Stacey Childress: That’s very good and definitely rings true. As an operator running a fund and having to raise money, I share your perspective. You mentioned visionary leadership, and both words are important in fundraising—a vision you can articulate clearly and compellingly about what the world should look like if it worked better for young people. Lead on it. Don’t wait for a funder to have a strategy you can fit into. Lead.

Spend time socializing that vision with other operators and donors. Donors will follow a compelling vision and leadership. You and I have both seen it happen and have caused it to happen as leaders.

For the donor side, the first thing I wish they would do is just give away the money.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah.

Stacey Childress: Remember the fundamental purpose of what you’re organized to do and what you’re given significant tax breaks for: to give away the money. You’re not organized to have internal meetings, PowerPoints, memos, politics, reorgs, and conferences. Those things can help your aims but can also distract from them. Give the money away. That’s your whole job, not the coalitions and communities of practice. Those should support moving the money. 

It sounds silly, but it’s frustrating. Your whole job is to give the money away. Increase, not decrease, your giving now. What are you waiting for? If not now, when? There’s not one answer; there are many. Fund them, learn from them. Stop with the 47-row spreadsheet metrics. 

Fund the people doing the work, listen to them, believe them, recognize patterns, and fund lots of things. More gifts, bigger gifts, right now. Go. What are you waiting for? Go. Make decisions faster. 

You’re not going to fund everything. Say yes fast and no faster. As soon as you know it’s a no, tell the operator. You can’t imagine how much time and energy is spent waiting for a yes. 

Diane Tavenner: And say no fast.

Stacey Childress: Say no faster. It’s not the last day of the process that you decide no. As soon as you know it’s no, tell the operator. They spend so much time waiting for your decision, having conversations with their board and other donors, making plans. Time is huge. Tell them no fast. Yes fast, no even faster. If your processes get in the way of that, rip them down.

Diane Tavenner: Yep.

Stacey Childress: Do something different and do it now. One of the reasons this animates me so much, beyond the obvious good of getting the money into the field and letting smart, intelligent, visionary leaders and their people do what they can with it and learn from it, is that for donors who have, say, over a billion dollars in net worth, their fortunes are growing faster than their lifetime philanthropic commitments suggest they will get the money out the door. 

A few years ago, when I was in a fundraising cycle and was counting on a donor to come in at a certain level on a renewal, I got the sad news. I was trying to get tens of millions and got multiple tens of millions, but not as much as I had hoped. It was an enormous grant, something to celebrate, but I was disappointed because I had planned for more. Silicon Valley is like a neighborhood, and the donors all talk to each other. Many of them talk to me, and I knew that this person was at cocktail parties and other gatherings saying they had a billion dollars in their donor-advised fund at a community foundation because they couldn’t find enough good things to fund, including education. And they had just given me multiple tens of millions.

What are you waiting for? When I first joined New Schools and was figuring out the investment footprint before we did a specific strategy, I realized that what we had wasn’t working. It was a quiet secret in the field. The theory had run its course, and New Schools had been struggling to raise money for a couple of years. It was time to rethink it.

Someone who was a contemporary of Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, told me that when he first became a VC, he realized something new was coming from closed network systems. It had to do with packet switching and the internet. He convinced his partners at Kleiner Perkins that they needed to fund everything in these nascent categories because they didn’t know who would win. They backed great teams and more than one in each category. This humble approach, funding lots of things with a vision for how the industry would change, led to massive financial success.

From where I sat at New Schools in 2014, I felt like we were in a similar moment. We had glimpses of what the future could look like for kids, and our strategy was to push everything onto the table for this vision. Rather than trying to find the answer, we should take a broad view of the space and fund every good team and idea.

Stop thinking that you have all the answers inside your foundation. Most of the smartest people don’t work for you. Fund, learn, and fund again. Give the money away.

I wish people would do more with intermediaries. If I were the leader of a foundation with $350 million a year to give away, I would convince my principal to give $300 million to four or five grantees in large chunks, and those would be intermediaries. I would have a staff of no more than 10 people, each managing relationships and helping us learn and adapt. Intermediaries offer leverage, expertise, and nimbleness.

Follow MacKenzie Scott’s example: big gifts, unrestricted, lightweight process, fast decisions, little to no reporting requirements. It’s not perfect, but it gets the money out the door.

Diane Tavenner: It is.

Stacey Childress: Yes, it can be tough to figure out how to get in the pipeline and some transparency issues, but those challenges are far outweighed by getting the money out the door. Let’s do it. Get that money out the door. If not now, when? Be honest with yourself. What are you afraid of from going big and visionary and moving lots of resources quickly to people doing important work?

Michael Horn: Well, Diane, as we wrap up five seasons here with our final episode, I think we finally had our Jerry Maguire moment. It’s no longer “show me the money,” it’s “give away the money.”

Stacey Childress: Give away the money.

Media Recommendations 

Michael Horn: And Stacey, you have nailed it. So with that as a segue, as we wrap up an episode, I’ve learned a lot from both of you. Thank you both. Let’s finish up with some things we are reading, watching, or whatever. Stacey, we’ll call on you first. Hopefully, it’s not Jerry Maguire, but if it is, we understand.

Stacey Childress: It’s not Jerry Maguire. Sadly, I’m still watching and listening to heartbreaking, disappointing Astros baseball, but hope springs eternal. 

A new thing: there’s a relatively old, about 10 years old, documentary on Prime Âé¶čŸ«Æ· called The Wrecking Crew. It’s a deep dive into a loose group of studio musicians in LA in the ’60s and ’70s who backed 60-70% of the big radio hits of that era. They backed artists like the Righteous Brothers, the Mamas and the Papas, Sonny and Cher, and the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys performed live, but The Wrecking Crew played on their studio albums. They were behind so many iconic songs. It’s fascinating.

Diane Tavenner: Well, this is what happens when you have an episode with two of Stacey’s passions: philanthropy and music. It’s so exciting. I agree with everything you’re saying. I hope it happens because I feel like we’re at an early 2010-2011 moment again. I hope people jump on and in. No one else in the world is ahead of us yet in redesigning their education systems. We have an opportunity in America right now, and I’m deeply optimistic.

I’m reading an early advanced copy of 10 to 25, Dr. David Yeager’s new book. I love him. He had such an impact on our work at Summit. He’s an amazing researcher who connects research with actual work in schools. The book talks about a mentoring mindset, a continuation of the growth mindset. It’s incredibly powerful and will be out in August.

Michael Horn: You’re going to have to dig in then. That sounds exciting, Diane. I’m glad you’re reading it. I’ll just wrap up mine. My kids went away for their outdoor nature’s classroom for a few days, so my wife and I went to New York City and saw a couple of shows. We saw Merrily We Roll Along, which I highly recommend, and Enemy of the People. Both were terrific. 

Like you, Stacey, I’ve been watching a lot of sports, but the Celtics are having more success than your Astros. I recently finished Outlive by Peter Attia. It was great, with a few new tips, some things I already knew, and a lot of common sense.

Stacey, thank you for joining us and enlivening the last five episodes. We’ll see where that goes. Diane, as always, thank you for the partnership. For all of you listening, thanks for joining us for five full seasons of Class Disrupted.

It was 2004. A Honduran immigrant who’d arrived with her family in the late 1990s, she secured a slot at a local community college, but reality hit when a counselor revealed her first semester’s tuition: $700, up front.

“I didn’t have that kind of money,” Alvarado said. And her high school offered scant advice on how to pay for it. “So I started working,” first as a daycare assistant, then in a series of manufacturing jobs, all while raising two kids on her own.

Now 37, Alvarado works for , the manufacturer of those ubiquitous plastic Hefty cups.

But this fall, 19 years after she graduated from high school, she’s about to get a second chance at college, compliments of an unusual benefactor: her oldest daughter.

Alvarado’s first-born, Yolany Baltazar, is among the first beneficiaries of , an unusual experiment in college access. Like many “college promise” programs, it essentially offers a free ride to a bachelor’s degree, covering tuition and fees for students who graduate from high school and persist through college.

But in Baltazar’s case, there’s a difference: Once she made it through her first semester, Hope Chicago made the same life-changing offer to her mother.

It’s part of a “two-generation” approach to attacking poverty, said Janice Jackson, Hope Chicago’s CEO. She noted that many college access organizations that support low-income families often “tinker around the edges, instead of going to where we know we need to go: making sure that there is much more of a pathway to the middle class.”

Advocates say research shows that greater access for both groups increases parents’ earnings and encourages kids to stay enrolled long enough to graduate.

‘A different conversation’

If Jackson’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she spent four years, from 2017 to 2021, as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, the fourth-largest district in the U.S.

“The thing about Hope Chicago is [that] when you first hear about it, it almost seems too good to be true,” Jackson said. “And I think that’s the response that a lot of people have.”

Once they sit with the idea a while, she said, many begin to ask why it isn’t true everywhere. “Why don’t we have a system in place so that kids across this country, quite frankly, can continue their education, and that finances are not the biggest barrier to them?”

At the moment, Hope Chicago has agreements with just five city high schools, offering graduates and their parents free access to 28 colleges, most of them Illinois public four-year and community colleges, along with a handful of private institutions.

Students must gain admission based on their own academic achievements — Hope Chicago doesn’t ask colleges to change their admissions criteria. And the program has no GPA cutoff, so students remain eligible to continue as long as they’re enrolled in classes.

But those who drop out also make their parents ineligible — a bit of subtle, intra-family peer pressure to stay in the game.

“Students obviously can go if their parents don’t go, but parents cannot take advantage of this unless their child is enrolled in school full-time,” Jackson said. “So they have an incentive, right? If I’m a parent and I’m in school and things are working out, but my child wants to drop out, that’s a different conversation.”

She said Hope Chicago deliberately chose its five high schools for the greatest possible impact, working in buildings that had seen “decades of chronic disinvestment,” lower achievement levels and graduation rates.

The focus, she said, is on helping the entire school. “It’s really about making a big difference.”

Baltazar, 20, still remembers the day she learned about the program in February 2022, at an assembly at Benito Juarez Community Academy on Chicago’s west side.

She texted her mother to warn her to stay off social media until she could deliver the news herself, Baltazar said. “When she picked me up from school, she was like, ‘What have you got to tell me?’ I’m like, ‘Mom, we get to go to college debt-free!’”

Alvarado was dumbstruck. “I was really happy if she got the opportunity to go [to college], just herself or my kids,” she said. “But for me, it was a little bit hard to process.”

In a few years, Alvarado’s younger son, 16-year-old Adrian, also a Hope Chicago scholar, will be able to attend college for free when he graduates from Benito Juarez.

‘In the center of a tornado’

The program launched in early 2022, with a from two philanthropists, Pete Kadens and Ted Koenig. Jackson wants to raise another $1 billion over the next decade to expand it and make more families eligible.

Recent research shows that these more educated parents will almost certainly earn more money — about $4,000 annually, according to , even though many are already years into their careers. 

But multi-generational college enrollment not only benefits parents. It also has a significant “spill-over effect” on their children. One reason is obvious: Parental education is a strong predictor of whether a student will attend college. 

A recent study by City University of New York economist noted that children whose parents are college graduates are three times as likely to attend college themselves. Investing in multigenerational college-goers, he said, is “economically efficient.” 

When Hope Chicago came to Ajani Cunningham’s school, Johnson College Prep, in spring 2022, it was co-founder Kadens who told an assembly of students they’d be going to college for free. Cunningham’s mother, Yolanda White, was filming the moment with her mobile phone and began crying. But then Jackson, Hope Chicago’s CEO, joined Kadens onstage and told the parents they were also eligible for free college. “And then the uproar was, like, magnified a thousand times,” Cunningham recalled.

“It was almost like 
 what people describe as being in the center of a tornado,” White said. “I think [Kadens] broke my brain because I could not react. I just .”

But stunned as she was, she knew immediately what she would do with her good fortune: finish her culinary education.

The 50-year-old mother of five had earned an associate’s degree at the for-profit Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago in 2014, which closed in 2017, part of a of for-profit closures. 

She studied to be a pastry chef and nutritionist and has spent the past few years running an online bakery called . She also created and teaches a handful of home economics and mentoring courses for Chicago Public Schools. 

White dreams of earning a bachelor’s degree and teaching people how to source and eat higher-quality, locally grown food, especially in so-called urban “food deserts.” She knows these issues firsthand: In the eight-year period when she and her five kids were homeless, White recalled, “I had to make $20 work” for a week’s worth of meals. “And they were never hungry.”

White plans to study at Kendall College’s Culinary Arts School in Chicago, but she’s holding off on enrolling for a year while she figures out how to cut back her hours at the district. She also needs to put the online bakery on hiatus.

“When someone presents the physical manifestation of a lifelong dream to you,” she said, “you kind of have to pay attention to that.”

Meanwhile her son will matriculate this fall at Loyola University Chicago, thanks to Hope Chicago, studying psychology while planning for law school and a career in civil rights law.

‘A different life’

The organization’s efforts unfold as the district faces an odd mixture of crisis and confidence: While Chicago Public Schools in 2022 boasted a record-high graduation rate of 83%, just one-fifth of high school students were reading and doing math at grade level, according to the . And nearly half of students missed at least 18 days of school.

Hope Chicago says its work is already having an impact: An April report by Belfield, the City University scholar, found that college enrollment rates averaged 74% — a 17% increase — in the organization’s first year partnering with the five schools.

The program is looking to expand — at the moment it serves about 4,000 students, and is fund-raising both publicly and privately with hopes of announcing more high schools in the future.

While the two-generation approach is unique, the program operates in the tradition of “college promise” programs that for nearly 20 years have guaranteed tuition-free access to higher education. The movement began in 2005, in , and now counts more than 300 programs in at least 32 states, according to the .

The offers Kalamazoo Public Schools graduates up to 100% of tuition and fees at in-state public universities and community colleges. A found that six years after high school graduation, students in the program had higher rates of college credential attainment — 46%, up from about 36% before 2005. 

While the researchers said making college free won’t necessarily ensure that more students enroll, they found that offering a “simple, universal, and generous scholarship program” can significantly increase educational attainment, especially among low-income students.

Last spring, Baltazar finished her first year at in Normal, Ill., about a two-hour drive south of Chicago. Studying biology and pre-dentistry, she spent much of her freshman year adjusting to dorm life.

Baltazar had the advantage of bunking with a friend she’d known since middle school. She made new friends by simply leaving the dorm room door ajar and playing music.

Meanwhile, her mother is putting the finishing touches on an application to attend , an online program, in August. She plans to study finance while keeping her job at Pactiv Evergreen, and still can’t get over her good fortune — or her daughter’s. 

“I think just the idea of her going to school without any debt, and including myself, is just like 
” She paused for a second. “In four or five years, this is just a different life.”

Approximately 48 team members were impacted by the move, a source told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

CZI spokesperson Raymonde Charles confirmed the layoffs in a statement: “Over the past eight years, we have learned a great deal about how to equip educators with the research, tools, and partners they need to center students’ well-being in support of academic achievement and success. 

“Guided by insights from our grantees, research, and educators, our work in education continues to evolve, and the structure of our teams has changed as a result. We remain committed to helping educators give every student exactly what they need to thrive inside the classroom and beyond.” 

Despite the layoffs, CZI (a financial supporter of Âé¶čŸ«Æ·) remains one of the nation’s largest philanthropies working on education issues. Since 2015, the philanthropy has given grants to nearly 1,000 organizations working to aid teachers in supporting students to thrive in and beyond the classroom. 

Recent CZI efforts have included a first-of-its-kind “connection builder” that facilitates meaningful, one-on-one teacher-student conversations that have proven essential for student engagement and academic success; an initiative to develop evidence-based approaches to boost early literacy that has already reached more than 12,700 children and 14,500 educators; and an effort that partners with schools and districts to create research-based surveys that helps educators better understand students’ aspirations, strengths, and barriers to succeeding in advanced coursework.

All affected employees were offered the same severance details, said a source. The package includes 16 weeks of base pay, continued health insurance and a $10,000 stipend to use as needed to assist with transitional needs. Employees also received a prorated portion of their 2023 bonus. 

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

The United States is in the middle of a seismic shift in its educational landscape. The pandemic accelerated the longstanding need for innovative school models that offer increased flexibility and better serve students and families. Philanthropies, following the intent of ideologically diverse donors, are responding to this shift in a variety of ways. While many donors are placing diversity and equity at the center of their strategies, others are leading with the core values of excellence and agency, believing that high expectations and empowerment lead to improved academic and life outcomes for all Americans.

There is no shortage of vibrant options in K-12 philanthropy to achieve improved education and life outcomes. One way to foster excellence and agency is to focus on building a rich ecosystem of school choice options — whether they be charter schools, microschools or hybrid homeschools. 

Here are some ways that philanthropists around the country are helping to improve education for today’s students and future generations:

 J.A. Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation is encouraging high-quality schools in Idaho through , an initiative designed to support educators willing to take risks in the mission of helping children. This philanthropic partnership has produced an effective organization that empowers education choice for families. Since 2015, Bluum has provided support to 31 schools across 10 counties.

Building school cultures on such time-tested principles as courage, justice, temperance and wisdom, funders including the are supporting schools like New York City’s . This is a first-of-its-kind network of character-based, International Baccalaureate public charter high schools dedicated to equality of opportunity, individual dignity and common humanity — the idea that people have an innate tendency to cooperate and solve problems. This is in sharp contrast to the dominant narrative permeating much of society, which focuses on division and an increasing “us-versus-them” mentality.

Its unique offerings include a “Pathways to Power” class, which teaches students about “,” financial literacy, time management, rĂ©sumĂ© writing and relationship skills, and a “success sequence” that reinforces the rewards of graduating high school, getting a job and getting married — before having children. Founder Ian Rowe says that when he started teaching the success sequence at his former charter network, he got “huge pushback” from staff who said, “We can’t do this. We might be insulting parents.” Actually, Rowe said, what he heard from parents was, “Thank God someone is teaching this.” 

When entrepreneur Jeff Sandefer decided to pursue education philanthropy, he and his wife started , a global network of innovative K-12 schools that encourage students to be “curious, independent, lifelong learners.” The mission of the academy, which has 300 locations in 25 countries, is centered on the idea that . The idea that students ought to be independent and proactive in their daily education is infused in the design of the school itself. Acton operates as a one-room schoolhouse, where there is often only one teacher. Thus, students must help with the teaching; older kids or those who have mastered material more quickly assist others. Peer- and has been found to be quite beneficial, particularly to prepare students for success in workplaces where group-based teams of different ages and backgrounds must collaborate.

The Daniels Fund has taken a regional approach to its reform efforts by pulling together a multi-faceted strategy in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The fund focuses on fostering high-performing charter schools and portable voucher programs that expand access to schools of choice for underserved communities. Over the last two decades, it has distributed roughly $146 million to K-12 education reform, all with the intent of expanding opportunity through the power of education and the dignity of work. Additionally, it runs a scholarship program that focuses on cultivating free and entrepreneurial thinkers who are proud of their community and their country and believe that hard work is the way to improve it.

are using yet another approach, offering more than $20 million in prizes last year, recognizing top-notch educators. Launched during the pandemic, the prizes began by honoring providers who found a way to continue giving students a best-in-class education while other schools closed their doors. Today, the work continues by celebrating problem solvers in communities across the country. The 2022 grand prize winner, , provides unique, individualized learning programs, and its $1 million award will support the creation of a national accelerator for autism-focused charter schools.

As these philanthropies assess the results of their strategies in the years to come, there will no doubt be adjustments along the way. But, at its core, this excellence- and empowerment-based approach to education reform rests on the idea that people are mostly motivated by deeply held values and live — and give —according to them. America, in all its complexity, is a nation that prizes the pursuit of excellence and a commitment to innovation and problem solving. By focusing on creating quality options for families, and by cultivating school cultures that empower and engage students and prepare them for life after school, philanthropy can and will continue to play a crucial role in the future of education reform.

Correction: The Yass Prize launched in 2021 to support high-quality education providers who remained open during the pandemic. Its prize money totaled over $20 million in 2022.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investment marks the beginning of a decade-long strategy to prioritize math gains, particularly for Black, Latino and low-income students, making the subject its primary K-12 investment for the next decade.

The Foundation’s work in math is , but making it their top priority signals a major shift: from roughly 40% of its K-12 budget to 100% through 2026.

“Math helps students make sense of the world. It gives them critical thinking and problem solving skills they can use later as adults,” said Bob Hughes, director of the Gates Foundation’s K-12 program on a press call earlier this week. 

“And even before the pandemic, too many students did not have equitable , advanced coursework, high quality curriculum, tutoring or other resources necessary to master, enjoy and succeed at math.” 

New programming will likely roll out next year, targeted in states with high numbers of Black, Latino and low-income students who disproportionately struggle with math: California, Florida, New York, and Texas.

Nationwide, the latest math scores from suggest the pandemic eliminated two decades of growth and exacerbated gaps along racial lines. 

Such a setback will have long-term impacts on students’ economic and social mobility. Research has long-affirmed students who , for instance, are twice as likely to graduate high school and . 

In efforts to flip the bleak script, the Foundation’s strategy includes focusing on elementary and middle schools and funding teacher preparation; research, along with culturally, socially relevant curricula and materials. In feedback sessions, parents told the Foundation their children want to know why math matters in their lives. To make the connection, Gates will prioritize applied statistics and data science-related math pathways in high school, courses that help students make sense of political polls and health risk assessment amid the pandemic.

To address historically persistent shortages of math teachers, the Foundation is backing alternative models to build up pipelines. Districts that Gates already partners with in western Texas are building residency programs — modeled after medical residencies, providing in-house preparation — for community members and staff to become licensed without the financial barriers of traditional programs. In Baltimore, lead and early career teachers are paired up to support Algebra learning.

“We’re spreading the expertise, but also giving other teachers who might not be at that level the opportunity to come alongside and support in real time,” said Sonja Santileses, CEO of Baltimore City Schools. “…There are ways of inducting folks into mathematics teaching as well as looking at teaching not as just one teacher in front of the classroom anymore, which we’ve been talking about for years.”

Gates officials also anticipate efforts, like improving assessments or professional development, will benefit other subject areas. 

“Improving math isn’t a pipe dream. We can create classrooms and instruction where everyone is good at math. So today is the beginning — much remains to be done,” Hughes said, adding more funding may be on the horizon, to be determined with the next budgeting cycle in 2026. 

For now, financial resources will be shifted away from English language arts — historically about 20% of the K-12 budget — to fund more math initiatives, though the Foundation is working with other philanthropies to ensure funding in the humanities remains. 

“We don’t want the entire field to follow us to math,” Hughes said. “We’re really hoping to go deep to understand what does the professional development need to look like around something as concrete as fractions 
 understand the barriers that young people or teachers face in enacting instructional visions and then use that to inform the entire field.”

The $1.1 billion for math, while comparable to recent funding for teacher effectiveness, is four times the amount dedicated to the Foundation’s . Hughes said the experience reaffirmed the reality that every district has different assets and priorities to consider when adopting new curricula — it can’t be prescribed as a one-size-fits-all. 

“We’re instead saying, we’re going to try to improve materials,” said Hughes, “give you greater insight into what’s effective for different types of students and populations, and work to ensure that you have those tools.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Now that effort has drawn the attention of one of the world’s wealthiest people, who happens to be giving her money away at a rapid clip. 

In March, just over five years after the group’s founding, MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, an unrestricted gift of $3 million. The donation is its biggest gift to date and nearly doubles the group’s revenue, according to recent .

The money, said founder Lakisha Young, will allow the group to “take our work to the next level” and plan for the long-term, which includes pushing to bring more parents and community members into schools in support roles.

The plan for the group is to map out a three-year growth strategy, expanding trainings that allow community members to become literacy tutors and work alongside teachers in the Oakland Unified School District.

“Our work needs to go where most of the students are,” Young said in an interview. 

California regulations restrict who can work as tutors, but she said the group is poised to lobby to tweak those regulations. 

Scott’s gift will also give the group a measure of stability as it pushes to bring in more funders. Having reliable funding, Young said, “allows the work to move just that much faster.” 

The donation was a surprise. Young said she got a call last October letting her know that an anonymous donor wanted to find out more about the organization. Then in March came the email with Scott’s announcement. Even now, Young hasn’t met or talked with Scott, who is known for in multi-billion-dollar flurries with little fanfare and posting notices to her , where she’s known simply as “Mom, writer, advocate.”

The $3 million donation represents a watershed moment for The Oakland REACH, which Young created in 2016, after an eye-opening experience trying to get her eldest daughter into a good public kindergarten. 

Many neighborhood schools at the time were in “school improvement” under No Child Left Behind, which meant they might well close within a few years. Young didn’t want that sort of disruption, so she placed her daughter’s name in a charter school lottery that offered just 11 slots. The lottery drew 93 applicants. 

Luckily, her daughter’s name popped up seventh, but Young said the victory “really sparked something in me” — a realization of how deeply unfair the system was to families of color. If thousands of families are forced to place their children’s futures in a hat and hope for the best, she recalled, “What do you think that kind of message is sending to them about what they have access to?”

Young created The Oakland REACH in December 2016 as a self-described network of “passionate and fearless parents” pushing to improve education in a city where more than 90 percent of students are non-white and nearly 60 percent receive free or reduced-price meals.

The group formed with 50 “unapologetic” parents across about 30 district and charter schools, “moms and grandmamas and daddies and uncles who were raised in Oakland, went to Oakland schools, were served poorly by those schools,” Young said in an interview last fall. As parents and grandparents, now they’re “basically saying, ‘This won’t be my child’s story. This won’t be my grandchild’s story.’”

She recalled how she chose her first members: “I don’t want the PTA parent. I want the parent that, when they come in, pencils move because they’re just coming in totally focused on, ‘What’s happening with my baby, what’s going on?’ They’re just solely focused on their kids.”

Since then, the group has pushed to shine a bright light on achievement in the city: Young last March that just 8.7 percent of Oakland eighth-graders scored proficient in math in fall 2021 — this in a city, according to the group’s December survey, where parents “showed a HUGE demand for math skills.” She noted that 81 percent of parents want “more high-dosage math tutoring. Parents want their kids to read and do math 
 well!”

‘Our families were already losing’

The group’s first big victory came in March 2019, when the city school board unanimously approved a policy change that gave families impacted by school closures and consolidations priority admission to schools they wanted their children to attend.

When COVID-19 hit exactly one year later, Young, with the help of the (CRPE), quickly built the digital Hub. 

Remembering back to the summer of 2020, Young said the group “didn’t have much to lose” by trying something new for online learning. “Our families were already losing. This was, actually, for us, an opportunity because kids were at home with their parents. It was an opportunity to do something really different and move from a ‘struggle’ model to a model of more privilege and abundance.”

In the program’s first five weeks, Young noted, assessments showed that 60 percent of K-2 students rose two or more levels on the district’s reading assessment and 30 percent rose three or more levels. 

“We did that,” she said triumphantly. “And we did that by bringing 
 teachers and a group of folks to the table that were doggedly focused on serving families. No politics, no adult politics, no drama. 
I’m telling you: If we were doing that all the time, our kids would be able to read. Our kids would be good at math.”

Families on their own

In addition to training literacy tutors, the Scott donation will also jumpstart a planned math fellowship this fall that will help caregivers become tutors.

Family members taking control of learning is key in a district awash in news of , and . One need the group hopes to help with: Oakland’s insatiable demand for substitute teachers. Young envisions training “community educators” who don’t simply show up to a new school each day, but who have “an investment in that community” and remain there through multiple assignments.

Nationwide, districts will also soon be figuring out what to do when federal COVID relief in 2024. 

Through it all, Young said, most parents must continue trusting their children to a public education system that’s full of uncertainty. 

“Superintendents leave,” she said. “Principals leave. Teachers leave. Families don’t leave. So they have to have what they need.”

In essence, families must create the solutions the district needs. “We can scream and holler as much as we want about what the system needs to do,” Young said, but “we need to be creating the talent.”

Christina Barnes, a mother of two who works as a family liaison for the organization, recalled helping a grandfather who was taking care of a child but didn’t know how to use email or send text messages. As a result, he missed alerts about school closures and other important information. “He would call and say, ‘I didn’t know school was closed today.’” 

Barnes helped arrange a tech fellowship for the grandfather that gave him the skills he needed to stay informed and to help his grandchild keep up with school.

Guadalupe Canchola, a mother of three young children and a so-called “parent liberator,” works with many Spanish-speaking families who feel unsafe speaking up, mostly because of language barriers or fears about their immigration status. “I love to bridge these gaps between families and the school system, just so they know that no matter their situation, they have rights. Their kids have rights.”

In one recent case, a parent asked Canchola to sit in on her child’s IEP meeting for special education services. But the parent handled it well.

“Honestly, the way I saw her advocate for herself and her son was the biggest surprise and takeaway for me,” she said. In so many cases like these, parents get intimidated “or cornered into a decision that’s not ours.” The more parents know about their rights, she said, the better. “They have to listen to you. They have to meet your needs. That’s just very powerful.” 

Bree Dusseault, a principal with CRPE, said Young’s work to elevate the voices of parents is “getting very clear results” in student achievement, with literacy rates climbing “at a pretty significant pace” for the kids they serve. “She has this very, very deep belief that parents need to be in the driver’s seat — and deserve to be in the driver’s seat — and need to be a part of the larger narrative of what their children are achieving.”

A lot of Young’s success and impact, Dusseault said, is the product of years of work in Oakland — much of that “well underway before the pandemic.”

Giving away money ‘quickly and without much hoopla’

Scott, 52, is one of the richest people in the world — as of May 16, the placed her at No. 35, just above Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. Her net worth stands at $32.9 billion, though Scott has vowed to give away half the fortune in Amazon stock she got in a divorce settlement with Bezos. 

Since 2020, the one-time novelist has given away at least $8 billion, with a heavy emphasis on education, public health, climate change, gender and racial equality, food security, and LGBTQ rights 

In early 2021, she married Dan Jewett, a Seattle science teacher.

The New York Times that Scott hands out money “quickly and without much hoopla,” moving the focus away from herself and onto the beneficiary organizations, which have included historically Black colleges and universities, Habitat for Humanity chapters, community-based education foundations, and many others. Many of these organizations “fly beneath the radar of major foundations,” The Times noted.

Young said the donation will help strengthen families and move people’s focus away from the “the inputs of drama and the inputs of chaos” roiling the Oakland district. “It’s a lot, but the question is: What can we still be doing in this moment to make sure our kids can read and do math? And we believe it’s what we’ve created. Our kids do not miss a beat, regardless of the political hoopla. But how many other kids did miss a beat because of it?”

Camden has long been a place of tremendous need. For decades, the city was ranked as in America, and for years was among the . A range of civic reforms, including housing rehabilitation and a larger, revitalized police force that engages with local community watch groups, have put it on a more , but daunting challenges remain. About 28.6% of Camden residents had an income, which was 68% greater than the poverty level statewide.

There are roughly 15,000 students in public schools in Camden. Academic performance has historically been catastrophically low across many measures, including test scores and dropout rates. In an effort to reverse this chronic pattern, the state intervened in the Camden school district in 2013, and it remains under state control. Reform efforts are, however, starting to make a discernible difference.

One approach to changing the patterns in Camden is to offer parents more choice in where they send their children to school. In addition to its traditional public schools, the city now has five charter networks and three networks of renaissance schools — which have charter-like autonomy but serve neighborhood catchment areas. Both charter and renaissance schools operate independently of the Camden district. In many cities, competition for students and friction among these different types of schools would be a barrier to collaboration. In Camden, however, educators are cooperating to break down institutional divisions and to specifically prioritize improving outcomes for students with disabilities. This effort is being led by CEF, a funder with a commitment to student-focused education reform in Camden. The fund is marshaling its resources to foster the sharing of ideas and promising practices and drive systemic change, through a coordinated suite of elements including:

• Program grants: CEF awarded $1.23 million in grants last year, enabling a range of district, charter and renaissance schools to develop new supports for students with disabilities. For example, KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, a renaissance school, is using fund resources to create a robust job and skills program for high school students with disabilities, including building a model apartment where students can practice independent living skills. Camden’s Promise Charter School is using the funds to provide individualized early literacy instruction to children with disabilities. Camden City School District is using CEF money to develop a farm-to-table culinary arts program among its life skills courses at Woodrow Wilson High School. Students will gain technical and soft skills to prepare for work in the agricultural, culinary and food service industries.
  
• Accelerating Inclusion Institute: CEF created this training program for special educators from the district, charter, and renaissance sectors. In this eight-session series, The institute will lead school teams through three content arcs that build and reinforce the critical skills, beliefs and practices schools need to ensure equity and inclusion for students with disabilities.  The arcs include lesson design in inclusive settings to meet the needs of all learners, data practices that drive instructional decisionmaking and effective resource allocation to meet the needs of all learners. Led by the national Center for Learner Equity, participants meet monthly and receive a stipend. 

• Camden Teacher Pipeline: CEF established a pipeline connecting local universities with Camden schools in need of new teachers. In partnership with Rowan University, Rider University and Relay Graduate School of Education, it is designed to attract new teachers to Camden, provide them with hands-on training and align their student teaching experience with schools that anticipate hiring for the upcoming year. The program has been in place for several years and now also features a special education track, focusing on recruiting special educators from Rowan’s Inclusive Education Program.

• RISE Award for Teacher Excellence: ln 2020, CEF initiated an award program to honor Camden’s Resilient, Inspirational, Solutions-oriented Educators (RISE). It asks principals from the city’s district, charter and renaissance schools to nominate three teachers, at least one of whom must be a special education teacher. Up to six winners are chosen each year for recognition and a $5,000 prize.

These programs foster collaboration and a sort of cross-pollination of ideas and best practices to better serve families and students, including those with disabilities. Taken together, these approaches break important new ground. While political barriers and divisions among different types of schools often preclude these sorts of coordinated citywide reform efforts, the theory of change at work in Camden is replicable in communities across the country. Wherever parents have school choice options, student need is substantial and there is a local funder committed to building bridges by fostering the success of all students, this model can take root. It is crucial work in service of equity and deserves close attention and support.

Paul O’Neill is co-founder of the Center for Learner Equity.

The funding will cultivate career pathways for teachers and district leaders of color.

CZI co-founder and co-CEO Priscilla Chan announced the grants for racial diversity in education during the 49th annual National Alliance of Black School Educators conference late last week. 

“Not only do you help your students learn, but you also help them feel a deep sense of belonging in helping them become the young people who are curious, confident, and caring members of their own communities,” Chan said on Nov. 11.

From pre-service teacher education to professional , grants ranging $175,000 to $2 million will support organizations in preparing and supporting historically excluded populations in K-12 leadership.

Though , nearly half of schools are operating without any teachers of color.

CZI’s funding will also support The Hunt Institute in its policy advocacy to add 1 million teachers of color to schools by 2030 — the Institute will work with gubernatorial candidates on their education platforms and offer its in more regions. The campaign, which launched during the social justice movements of summer 2020, . 

A more diverse teacher workforce could result in for an . Having had a Black teacher, from higher expectations, experience fewer suspensions and graduate high school at higher rates. 

Some grantees will also focus initiatives on helping teachers move into district, board and state leadership, and in turn, be able to support teachers of color implementing change. 

“My experience has been you get a phenomenal principal, or you get a handful of really great teachers or you have an out-of-this-world superintendent, and then when they retire or they move on or for whatever number reason, sometimes those great initiatives fall by the wayside. This is really about creating leader-full communities where, even as people move on 
 the work continues because the whole community is invested,” said Jonathan Santos Silva, executive director of The Liber Institute, which works with rural communities. 

The Institute is receiving $800,000 to train Indigenous students, families and leaders to competitively run for school board and district leadership. Their new programming has encouraged thought partnerships with , the and, soon, tribal colleges and universities.

And for the Equity Institute, a Rhode Island-based nonprofit working with teachers to sustain antiracist learning and teaching environments, their $800,000 CZI grant means long-term growth. They’ll be able to hire more staff, enhance technology, evaluate and spread their work at a time it’s needed most. 

“We’re in a space and time where — because of COVID, because of the high profile incidents of police brutality and deaths at the hands of officers — that we have to be very, very intentional about how we share leadership and invite people to the table, into spaces where they have historically been neglected, isolated, disenfranchised,” Chief Impact Officer and Co-Founder Carlon Howard told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. 

Founded in 2000 and historically utilized for instructional materials that teachers would either have to pay for out of pocket or go without, like auxiliary books, kits, games, and technology, the platform and its district partnership model have enabled teachers to raise over $670,000 in funds for warmth, care, and hunger needs for students since January 2020, according to DonorsChoose’s public relations team.

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New York elementary teacher Laurie Gurdal at P.S. 245 in Brooklyn, for example, wrote a project to for her low-income students. “Our families are facing food shortages at this time,” the project reads, “it is hard to learn when you are hungry.” Two donors donated $1,108 between March 8 and April 5, 2021, fully funding the pantry in under a month.

The New York City Department of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, and Philadelphia City School District joined DonorChoose’s in 2020, which more than 180 districts now participate in, representing over 10,000 schools nationally.

Though individual LAUSD teachers have utilized the platform since about 2005, district partners are offered added support and communication. Principals are notified whenever a new project is started at their school to get a better sense of community need, and when companies offer donation matches for projects. Partners are also provided resources for training teachers to use the platform and data for district leadership.

Austin Buetner, who ended his three-year tenure as superintendent of the country’s second-largest district this June, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that LAUSD’s participation is part of an effort to engage the broader community in schools, particularly as housing and food insecurity becomes more widespread.

“We have to expand the scope of support for public education. There are philanthropists who can write large checks, there are active and engaged individuals who can bring intellectual capital to a school or volunteer their time. And there are others who say well actually I have limited means, but I really want to know what that classroom needs — it turns out, a $10, $20 or $30 donation can make a difference.”

Since March 2020, 34 percent of all projects in have funded technology needed for virtual learning, food, clothing, and hygiene, up from their all-time average of 28 percent. The trend is similar in , where about 32 percent of pandemic-era projects have requested technology, food, clothing, and hygiene resources, up from their 25 percent all-time average.

This month, Philadelphia’s returning teachers will attend DonorsChoose hands-on classes as a part of their professional development training. ​​Michael Sonkowsky, the district’s deputy chief of the Office of Grant Development, says teachers have been requesting support for fundraising platforms for years.

As their small office adapted to a surge of pandemic-related needs — including preparing school buildings for students’ safe return — the formal partnership enabled them to streamline communications with teachers, particularly about company-match opportunities.

“We who work in development have seen a truly inspiring surge in philanthropy — both via crowdfunding platforms and via more traditional avenues — during the pandemic,” Sonkowsky said in an email to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Currently, there are 976 projects on the site within the warmth, care, and hunger category that support classes with majority low-income students. The push to provide young learners with basic needs, from workable laptops to hot meals, was one felt across the country as districts rushed to adapt to hybrid and virtual learning environments and families experienced unemployment and uncertainty.

Economists now refer to the pandemic-era recession as K-shaped: high income families bounced back and, in many cases, have become more wealthy, while low-income families, typically involved in the hard-hit service industry and in-person labor, have experienced devastating economic losses. Teachers like LAUSD’s Diane Yokoyama, who serves predominantly low-income children, have witnessed the recession’s toll on students.

“Many of my parents work two jobs just to make ends meet. My students come to school with the bare minimum,” Yokoyama told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· via email. “I had projects funded for clothes, food, backpacks, umbrellas, shoes 
 things that I could never afford on my own.”

With $120 billion in American Rescue Plan pandemic relief funding heading to schools to ameliorate some of these inequities, states are proposing major investments in mental health, well-being, tutoring and data systems.

With an influx of funds, California will begin the nation’s largest , regardless of family income. But in the months states and districts were planning how to allocate relief dollars, student needs were mounting.

For Yokoyama, DonorsChoose provided a path to meet urgent calls for meals, technology, and pandemic safety protections. In some cases, projects were fulfilled within weeks. Once funded, dry food, clothes, cleaning supplies, and PPE were mailed to her school, where she picked up items and delivered them to students’ homes.

“I wanted to reassure the parents and children that it would be OK to return to school,” she said, reflecting on her efforts to get materials into students’ hands.

Yokoyama has , but the platform offered her “a new way to teach” during hybrid and virtual learning. Donors funded a second monitor and portable whiteboard for her home, making virtual lessons more accessible.

The projects and subsequent data given to district partners has also provided a gauge of where needs are left unmet by pre-existing budgets. Superintendent Buetner dubbed teachers’ projects, “the voice of the classroom, which we can learn from.”

“The best perspective of what students’ needs are comes from the front of the classroom,” he said, “not from some distant central office building.”