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Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > March > 09 > Entry
Can you fix education with $2 billion?
Eli Broad and Bill Gates
It appears the short answer is no. But you can make a difference if you invest your money carefully.
The New York Times has been on a run of good education related stories lately. This Sunday, they took a novel approach. As part of a Sunday magazine package on philanthropy, reporter Paul Tough gathered five diverse education experts and presented them with an enviable scenario:
Advise a hypothetical billionaire how to spend $2 billion he wants to contribute toward improving education in the U.S.
The conversation revealed a huge shift in the way education philanthropists give to the cause, and what they expect to see in terms of results. Billionaires like Eli Broad and Bill Gates have changed the game, both by making education a major focus of a huge amount of giving and by taking an entrepreneurial approach the way they spend their foundation money.
The consensus? Well, there were a lot of ideas about how to use the money. But the one everyone seemed to buy into was to identify good leaders, be they with school districts or or charter schools or wherever, and bet on them with real cash.
So let’s take that back here to Dayton. Who are the education leaders we would bet on? Superintendent Percy Mack? What could he do with a meaningful influx of real cash? How about Ann Higdon, the innovative founder of the ISUS charter schools for dropouts? She’s already demonstrated the ability to succeed with money from philanthropic sources. Or maybe Mike McCormick, superintendent of the generally well-respected Richard Allen charter schools?
Let’s extend this scenario to Dayton. You are advising the big money giver. Where do you advise him to place his big bets?
UPDATE: This Week in Education’s Alexander Russo was pretty unimpressed by the discussion in the Times Magazine. His comments are worth checking out.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Urban School Issues
Comments
By aguyindayton
March 14, 2008 7:39 PM | Link to this
I watched with interest today as Rep Henry Waxman and other members of his U.S. House Committee interrogated the leaders of several of the prominent financial institutions (Citicorp and others) regarding CEO salaries and bonus packages. Much of the questioning involved the �lack of knowledge� of the institutions regarding the inability of the barrowers to justify their ability to meet the demands of the loans they were accepting (sub prime mortgages). This made me wonder if our educational establishments (high schools) are not doing the same thing. We have students passed from grade to grade with no or limited ability to read and write. I have worked with students for several years, in class and preparing for OGT�s. It is amazing the inabilities encountered. Some of the students have no desire or motivation to learn. There is minimal parental involvement. We try to create �other� options through any number of alternative/vocational educational programs supplemented by career counselors, intervention counselors, clinical counselors, school psychologists, and a plethora of �special units� including a �special school� for students that �don�t fit�. Some students violate rules including schedules, time, dress codes, language (the proverbial �f-bomb� is freely used as a noun, verb, adjective …). These students don�t like school; the regimentation, being told what to do and when to do it. Yet, without an education they are destined to remain or fall below the entitlement line and lose the freedom of selection of home location, job selection, and many of the other freedom of choice we Americans strive to obtain. IEP�s are often used as excuses, but there are no IEP�s in the real world. We are part of a global economy, the greatest nation in the world, but not leading the academic parade.By Laura
March 10, 2008 10:21 PM | Link to this
Sorry, Calvin, there are teachers and administrators in DPS that expect discipline and strive very hard to enforce it. Unfortunately, the parents who scream the loudest that they want discipline in the schools, are the very ones who scream loudest when it comes to disciplining their child. It isn’t the educators who need to raise their expections, it is the parents. The first thing I would spend money on in DPS would be for social workers and parenting coaches and demand that any identified parent(s) participate. (Don’t ask me how I would enforce it, I haven’t figured that out yet.) I just believe that would be a huge step forward to improving the schools. Without the influx of money, one way to improve things would be to stop pandering to parents. DPS is so scared of losing students to charter and parocial schools that principals and teachers are told to keep the parents happy at any cost.By Oldprof
March 10, 2008 9:23 PM | Link to this
Well well. TRS and Calvin must have slept through U.S. history, or they’d acknowledge that education in Dayton, and in the nation generally, was quite good back when there was NO competition and the funding was generous. Thing is, we could probably find an extra $2 billion per year for education if our legislators would quit siphoning so much of it for over-testing, administrative mandates, and other byzantine systems of micromanagement. OK, maybe not nearly $2 billion for any single school district, but certainly hundreds of thousands. And BTW, Calvin, other states have county-wide districts; they are LESS bureaucracy because you no longer have seven elected officials plus a superintendent and an administrative office running the schools in every little Enon or Bradford, and the overall quality of education is higher.By James
March 10, 2008 7:38 PM | Link to this
Mary, I respect your important thoughts and opinions on education. I clearly said in my response that we should correct the wrongs and expand upon the successes. We have have far more “rights than wrongs” in public education. Your example of student scholarships is not realisticly reflective of the high quantity and diversity of student achievement. Many of which are also in the areas that you mention as areas of need.By Calvin
March 10, 2008 5:49 PM | Link to this
A county-wide school system? So the city and all its problems can leech even more from the rest of the county residents to waste it away? You’re not in reality. Giving two billion more to the City schools would be another example of money down the drain. They will want to employ the same failing people. They will use the same old no discipline method for parents and students. It’s like the welfare money from the LBJ era; it becomes a bottomless pit. Please don’t try to ruin the rest of the county’s schools. While a few like Jefferson shouldn’t even be operating and should just be merged with Dayton, most schools are doing a good job despite some problems. Nuke the Dayton City Schools offices and start over with completely new people from rural areas who expect discipline—not the same old 30 years of failed experience folk from OEA and DPS!By Mary
March 10, 2008 1:48 PM | Link to this
Hey, James, you need to educate yourself on how we are “high achieving” ourselves into worldwide irrelevance and decay. For example, while our educational system provides say 15 boys and 15 girls who are high achievers in basketball several coaches, special facilities, transportation to games, medical trainers and full ride scholarships to colleges and universities, we do not provide similar attention and investment in resources for students talented in science, math and languages or just regular students. So I consider your comments utterly ignorant and out of touch with what is really going on in our “high achieving” education systems. “High achievers”, my you know what.By James
March 10, 2008 12:06 PM | Link to this
First lets correct the ISUS history. It was developed as a part of Dayton Public Schools under Superintendent Dr. Franklin Smith. After his departure, DPS put more of its money into testing and less into everything else, quality of life elements like health education, music, art, science, athletics including vocational programs at Patterson Coop. and the building program at Grace A. Green, now ISUS. Ann Higton has enhanced the program very successfully since it left DPS in 1999 and became a charter school. Esrati is right on his first two steps, a countywide schools system and solid investment in pre-school. In order to advance the educational agenda for the Dayton area we should use as our model the highly successful educational program in Centerville Schools. Sorry Mary, but all that you mention that should not be a part of the educational program is why those students are so eagerly engaged in the educational process in the high-achieving school districts across the nation. Their schools serve as an anchor to the community and not a “factory” for testing. Good test results are a by product of the investment and the value that they place in the development of their children. We have had enough of the failed “Charter School Experiement” in poor urban communities with our children. We have had nearly 100 years of successes from the public education system in America, and 10 years of failure with charter schools and their innocent victims - the children. It is now past time to seriously invest into the public school system by correcting the wrongs and building on its successes.By TRS
March 10, 2008 10:26 AM | Link to this
The entrepreneurial approach is best - go with the results wherever they might. Mr. Estrati’s approach takes an inefficient buracracy and makes it bigger yet. Competetition will raise up good administrators and educaters - those who get results rather than making excuses.By Mary
March 10, 2008 7:42 AM | Link to this
Ann Higdon seems to be doing a really good job in her special focus area on education. I think that is a key, specializing in certain needs areas and keeping the focus on developing skills and motivating students for the real world like, in her case, home construction or remodeling. The traditional public schools are trying to pasteurize and homogenize and “socialize” all students. That is not working. Many bright students (and parents) are turned off by the rah rah and join a club stuff that dilutes academics and learning and is so prevalent in high schools. Their main purpose seems to be to generate happy little consumers of clothes, prom dresses, hairdos, corsages, cars, uniforms, pizzas, class photos, class rings, yearbooks, etc. Academics and learning other relevant life skills are side dishes.By David Esrati
March 10, 2008 5:36 AM | Link to this
2 Billion in Dayton- first step: a unified school district, county wide. Second step, invest heavily in pre-k education. 3rd step, replace all textbooks with laptops, pervasive internet access, and teacher re-training to understand how to use the technology. Last step: Put David Ponitz in charge: he seems to be the only one who has been able to grow an organization while living within a budget.