Despite occasional high-profile gifts with wide visibility, like the Annenberg Challenge in Houston, local independent foundations typically provide the most substantial gifts and grants, such as in Tyler, Texas, where a local independent foundation donated $2 million to renovate a school intended to become the district's magnet school for art; in Hobbs, New Mexico, where a $2.4 million donation from a local foundation sought to develop an Advanced Placement curriculum; or in Louisiana, where the Rapides Foundation is providing $25,000 annually to schools in 11 parishes to support systemic reform approaches.

Local education funds -- or "foundations" -- (LEFs) are an increasingly popular mechanism as well for local school improvement funding. These are community-based non-profits thatÐin their ideal formÐwork to improve outcomes for students in public schools. (A few organizations travelling under this name still concentrate on new band uniforms and astroturf for the stadium, but that is changing.) Although they take many forms and arise out of a variety of local circumstances, indications are that LEFs appear to enjoy the most success if they are independent of the school districts they serve, are organized with broad community roots, and are focused on improvements of the system as a whole but with special concern for the success of disadvantaged students. (Useem, 1999)

LEFs stand in the middle ground between private grant making organizations (foundations and corporate giving programs) and the fund-raising needs of the local education system. At their best, they convene a wide range of community perspectives and resources to help develop, fund, and implement school improvement strategies appropriate to local needs.

Because of their structure and position outside the system, LEFs can secure donations of services or funds, plan programs, pay vendors and participants, adjust readily to necessary staffing variations, and produce evaluations of program impact faster and more efficiently than public school bureaucracies. Further, when their work is supported by multi-year financing, LEFs are able to provide consistency of focus for school reform initiatives even as school and district leadership changes. Because LEFs are able to take risks, provide leadership, take an impartial view of weaknesses and needs, develop important relationships with grant makers, and evaluate results without the pressures of vested interest, they have a great deal of potential to bring philanthropy and school administrations together in reform agendas. (Useem, 1999) In El Dorado, Arkansas, for example, the LEF was helped by local business leaders to secure corporate funding to create endowed "chairs" for mathematics and science leadership for the district.

In the Southwestern Region LEFs are growing most rapidly in Oklahoma, where they are supported and encouraged by the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence, and they are gaining popularity and some notable successes in Arkansas. In Texas, LEFs appear to have taken initial root in districts where they provide a strategy for circumventing state school funding equalization processes, which places them largely among the more affluent communities and in contact with fewer disadvantaged students. In Louisiana, LEFs are beginning to emerge as a mechanism that allows school improvement initiatives to operate somewhat apart from the hazards of state and local politics.

In general, LEFs in the region have demonstrated only modest and widely variable success in fund-raisingÐgenerally in the most wealthy communities and among those with full-time staffÐyet they show potential beyond a marginal fund-raising emphasis in their ability to help schools assess their needs and consider solutions outside the box of self-interest that can constrain school and district bureaucracies.