SEDL - Philanthropic Support for Public Education in the Southwest Region

This report examines the relationship between philanthropy and public schools in five states -- Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas -- that comprise the "Southwestern Region" served by Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) under its federal contract as a Regional Educational Laboratory. While begun as a map showing AR, LA, NM, OK, and TX project to build our own understanding and to support institutional planning, this report speaks also to local school leaders, the philanthropy community, and education policy makers. We see a need for shared understanding among all of us if school reform is to realize anything like its full potential. We intend also that this report provide a stimulus for dialogue with each of these groups to help us refine and clarify the insights we have gained from data and anecdote, with the ultimate object of fostering shared understanding.

By "philanthropy" we mean gifts and grants provided by private foundations and business concerns. We are particularly interested in the potential role of philanthropy in comprehensive, or systemic, school reform. Historically, changes in public schools have focused on isolated areas of concern: to raise reading or math scores, for example. In this context, innovations may be developed or adopted by only a few teachers in a school or without regard for the larger picture of activities in the school, often creating crazy quilts of well-intentioned, ineffective experiments. Recent years have seen the evolution of an alternative approach now known as comprehensive school reform, which means taking an integrated or systemic view of schools and the processes in which they are engaged and bringing their elements into alignment with a central, guiding vision. Adapting the ideas of systems thinkers like Peter Senge (1990), the model has more and more come to incorporate the concept of the learning community -- a shared quest among educators and students for continual learning and growth toward an ever-higher standard of performance.

SEDL helps school systems transform low-performing schools into high-performing learning communities. Low-performing schools can be recognized by the unsatisfactory academic performance of many or most of their students, by the fact that the system structures and decisionmaking are not focused on promoting student achievement, by their inadequate capacity for self-sustaining improvement, and by their lack of confidence in their own ability to change the status quo. High-performing learning communities, on the other hand, have:

a shared vision of student success,
a supportive organizational structure,
challenging curriculum and engaged student learning,
a culture of continuous inquiry and improvement,
facilitative leadership, and
a supportive relationship with the surrounding community.

Schools seeking to transform into high-performing learning communities through comprehensive reform strategies must build capacities for data-based decision making, for aligning all of the elements of the system into a coherent whole, for forging relationships that sustain and support the effort, and for promoting innovation and risk taking; and they must do these things at all levels of the system (classroom, school, district, state) and with regard to the myriad components of education, including standards, instruction, assessment, governance, professional development, resource building, and family and community relations. School systems face substantial challenges in securing the necessary financial support to begin and sustain such effort, with the Catch-22 that they need support to begin building the capacity they need to secure the support. Start-up costs loom as a particular problem. Unlike piecemeal improvements of the past, comprehensive reform approaches are more costly in the first year or so than normal school operating budgets can support alone.

The RAND organization has estimated that the first year of a comprehensive reform effort using one of the New American Schools models will typically cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $180,000 for a school of 740 students and 40 teachers (Keltner, 1998). Schools successful in securing $50,000 competitive grants from the federal government's Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program have had a big leg up on meeting this challenge, with the balance accessible largely through the use of federal Title I funds and reallocation of existing school and district budgets. Budget reallocation is easier said than done in the face of on-going commitments, however, and for those schools that missed the CSRD bus and/or do not have substantial Title I funding RAND highlights private sector grants as the next best chance. When CSRD funds are not available, RAND sees an average 7 percent (or $12,600 out of $180,000) of first-year comprehensive reform funds coming from private sector gifts or grants, even when the school has Title I funding and operating budgets are reallocated. RAND's data show most of outside grant support going to design services, materials, and staff-development conferences, which are vital first-year expenditures.

It is one thing to find and secure this necessary 7 percent when comprehensive reform is an experiment among the few, more innovative schools and districts. But as this approach picks up momentum there is reason to question whether sufficient philanthropy exists to support all the schools that seek such assistance, even if foundations and corporations didn't have diverse priorities, philosophies, and restrictions that naturally dilute the amount of funds that could be expected to flow to any single educational purpose.

This simple calculus of supply and demand provides the pivotal theme for what we have learned about philanthropic support of public school reform in the Southwestern Region. Another theme is that we cannot apply systemic solutions to systemic problems without systemic strategies, and that includes the strategy of philanthropic support.

The fact is, too many low-performing schools lack the funds and help they need to build the long-term capacity and infrastructure necessary to implement and sustain systemic reform.

The traditional approach of providing onetime support for an innovative ideaÐlike a reading programÐand then expecting government to provide long-term, multi-year funding to take the idea to scale and integrate it into school cultures is simply not enough. Paul Shoemaker, executive director of Social Venture Partners in Seattle, says that this situation is analogous to eBay securing financing only for its next few auctions, but not having access to the capital necessary to achieve its full potential.

During the past decade, staggering new wealth has been created in this nationÐamounting to literally trillions of dollars. In addition, the inter-generational transfer of wealth that will take place over the next 50 years begins at $40 trillion and heads straight up from there. This presents a providential opportunity to leverage resources in support of systemic school reform and the creation of self-sustaining high-performing learning communities.

True, intractable problems in public education will not be resolved with simply more money. Technical as well as financial support are needed to help those responsible for leading school reform initiatives build the capacity to execute strategies for creating high-performing learning communities. While a gift of $1 million with strings would most likely be welcomed by any school or district, what is needed perhaps more is an infusion of principles and strategies for systemic reform. PartnershipsÐin every sense of the wordÐbetween schools and philanthropic institutions can make this happen.

In reality, philanthropic support for public schools of the type that has brought us to this point is not sufficient to enable schools to achieve the full potential of systemic reform. The emergence of a new generation of philanthropists with unprecedented wealth and ambition has prompted an older generation to revisit such fundamental questions as organizational development, strategy, accountability, and impact. Learning is taking place in both directions. School reform, like new business ventures and new philanthropy, can benefit as well from the entry of new wealth, new partners, and new perspectives.