Social Entrepreneurs Step Up

Who Can Save the Public Schools?

What do Bill and Melinda Gates, Caroline Kennedy, Michael Bloomberg have in common? Beyond wealth, it's their concern about educating our kids.

By: Jane Ciabattari | Source: NRTA Live & Learn | November 23, 2005

IN OCTOBER 2002, NEW YORK CITY SCHOOLS Chancellor Joel Klein made the bold move of naming Caroline Kennedy his chief fundraiser, thus putting the most private of Kennedys in the limelight. There was no doubt that the city could benefit from the aura of the Kennedy name and Caroline Kennedy’s expertise as a lawyer and head of Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, as well as her friendships within the philanthropic community. But why would she take on this unusually public role? The answer is now clear: because of the importance of rescuing New York City’s public schools, yes, but also the feasibility of bold, new business-based approaches to problems long thought intractable.

When elected mayor in 2001, the billionaire founder of Bloomberg L.P. and political novice, Michael Bloomberg, set reforming public schools as a top priority. The new $1-a-year mayor, who had attended public schools in Boston, had a vision of the dismal future for the country if public schools did not prepare American workers to be competitive in the global marketplace.

Billionaire School Critic.  As Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has been saying in his series of scorching speeches to governors and other leaders, “American high schools are obsolete….Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.” He warns that if American workers are not educated better, he can’t give them jobs.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York, Bloomberg faced a $5 billion budget shortfall. Still, he set about “restructuring” the school system. After six months in office, he became the first mayor in New York City history to hold centralized control over the school system. In July 2002, he named Joel Klein, the former assistant attorney general who had led the U.S. Department of Justice’s anti-trust case against Microsoft, as his schools chancellor. Klein’s mission: to rethink public education, using a private-sector emphasis on efficiency, results, and accountability, and to tap private funds. A son of a postal worker and publicly educated himself, Klein grasped the urgency: “Other than global security, I don’t think there’s a more important issue facing our nation,” he told chief executives at a recent roundtable discussion.

A Surprising Choice. For the critical fundraising job, Caroline Kennedy was an inspired choice. Who wouldn’t come to the phone when it’s Caroline Kennedy calling? She mobilized support from other high-profile New Yorkers in business and entertainment. And she did more: She showed up. With flair and energy, she became the public face for the school-revitalization mission, visiting outer borough schools, making public appearances, spearheading innovative events, building momentum.

“We have raised awareness of the value of public schools and encouraged every New Yorker to do what they can to support the schools and students of New York City,” Kennedy told NRTA Live & Learn in October. She first came aboard as head of the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Strategic Partnership, and now is Vice Chair of the DOE’s revitalized Fund for Public Schools. “We have reached out to all New Yorkers with citywide events like Get Organized New York, the AOL Concert for the Schools, and Shop 4 Class, our retail promotion,” she explained. [See “Fundraising Ideas Your School Can Use”]. “Over the past two years, the Fund for Public Schools has really strengthened the connection between New York City’s public schools and the broader city community.”

Kennedy and her visible commitment also helped attract the crucial big funders. In the past two years, the Fund for Public Schools raised more than $109 million. The emphasis is on system-wide reforms—reaching into every school in the city so that the greatest number of students will be affected. “These funds,” Kennedy noted, “have allowed us to train [future and current] school principals to be great school leaders through the New York City Leadership Academy, to provide new comprehensive arts education opportunities for thousands of students, to improve public school libraries and support many other system-wide education reforms.”

Accountability vs. ‘The Black Hole.’ Leslie Koch, a former Microsoft marketing executive whose mother was a New York public school teacher, worked as Kennedy’s hands-on partner from the beginning, first as consultant, then CEO of the city’s Fund for Public Schools. Kennedy praises Koch for her “energy and vision.”

What’s more, Koch speaks the goal-setting, results-oriented language of funders like Bill and Melinda Gates or Michael and Susan Dell, whose foundations have been coaxed into investing in the New York City schools.

“When we started out, we would hear people say, ‘Why should I give to public education? It’s a black hole. It’s just a drop in the bucket, I’ll never see that money again,’” Koch says. Hauling in a huge donation—$51 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in September 2003, to support extending the “small schools” effort into high school—served to jump-start the Fund’s efforts. The key to attracting entrepreneurial philanthropists like the Gateses and the Dells is to have a focused approach to the way gifts are used and to demonstrate you can get results, says Koch.

“They’re not interested in commission reports or onesy-twosy projects, they want to make a big change and measure that,” Koch says. “When any corporation makes an investment in public education, whether a major grant to our Leadership Academy or a small amount to an individual school, we use the metaphor that they are investing in a company. This is venture capital. They want a return on the investment.

“Public education is not used to that concept,” Koch says, with admirable restraint. (City administrators railed against the old New York Board of Ed’s obstructionist, entrenched bureaucracy for decades; an exasperated Mayor Rudy Giuliani even said that its headquarters at 110 Livingston Street should be “blown up.”) Would such a massive culture change be possible? Yes, and it’s happening, Koch says. “The chancellor [Joel Klein] has attracted others from the private sector who understand outcomes and return on investment, who think in terms of milestones and deliverables,” Koch explains. “We work closely with funders in the design of projects to make sure we can meet all their objectives.”

Measurable Results. So exactly how were New York City’s schools able to win such a huge grant from the Gates Foundation?

“Two reasons,” says Koch. “One, New York City has the largest school system in the country—1,400 schools, 1.1 million students, one-and-a-half times the next largest [Los Angeles]. If you can make it here, you can make it everywhere. Two, this administration has embraced change in high schools aggressively. While Bill has invested a huge amount of money [more than $100 million to date], the school system has invested public funds with similar commitment [$13 billion a year].”

One goal of the Gates Foundation is to increase the number of students in the U.S. who go on to college. Creating small schools (with fewer than 500 students) focused on students who otherwise might not graduate is a priority. This dovetails with the Bloomberg administration’s reform program. The city has created 154 new small schools in the past three years, supported by the Gates Foundation and Dell Foundation, among others. These small schools often exist within the traditional large, factory-model high schools—sharing a building and other facilities, for instance—but are set up to provide more intimate learning settings where adults and students can collaborate more closely and there is more continuity in teacher-student relationships.

The Fund reviews, monitors, and ensures that its projects are meeting expectations. “When we receive money from a donor, we discuss their measurement of success and their requirements for reporting, to make sure we are accountable to the donor,” says Koch. Frequent informal feedback to donors is part of her job, too.

To measure the success of the Leadership Academy, a $75 million training program founded in 2003 to attract and train talented candidates for school principal jobs and to help newly appointed principals grow in leadership skills, the Broad Education Foundation and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation asked the Fund to report how many principals were trained and what the test scores were at the end of the first year in schools with these principals. They also visited the programs and the schools. The Leadership Academy includes on its board GE’s celebrity former chairman Jack Welch (about whom BusinessWeek gushed, “If leadership is an art, then surely Jack Welch has proved himself a master painter”). The program to develop new leaders starts with a six-week intensive summer session, followed by an internship in the schools, with responsibilities analogous to those of assistant principals. After two years there are 150 graduates, a third class in the pipeline; about 80% are working in the school system.

How Are They Doing? Under the Bloomberg/Klein reforms, there is a strong focus on literacy and math throughout the K–12 system, with a single citywide curriculum for the first time. “The teachers are working from the same page,” says Koch. Every student has 90 minutes a day dedicated to reading. Each public school has a literacy and math coach. Each also has a parent-coordinator whose job is encouraging parent volunteers.

In June 2005, the New York Times noted that when the city’s fifth graders showed major test gains—improving 19.5% in reading and 15.2% in math on standardized tests—initially there was loud skepticism from Mayor Bloomberg’s political opponents and doubt among the teachers and parents caught up in the upheaval of changes in the prior three years. The Times report’s verdict is reflected in the headline: “What Lifted Fifth-Grade Scores? Schools Say Lots of Hard Work.”

Then the September 2005 Mayor’s Management Report, covering the three school years from 2001–2002 to 2004–2005, confirmed the positive trends. Progress was also noted in a “report card” on the new small schools issued in late September by New Visions, the DOE’s nonprofit partner.

What’s Next. Turning around a school system doesn’t happen overnight, even with the best private/public partnership. The future for New York City’s schools will be affected by November’s mayoral election.

Caroline Kennedy, a Democrat who took on a yeoman’s task for a Republican mayor, told Live & Learn a few weeks before the election, “I am gratified that over the past few years, we have increased private sector involvement in New York’s public schools. I look forward to continuing my work as vice chair of the Fund to focus on additional system-wide reforms, such as improving school libraries and expanding arts education, and to actively encourage all New Yorkers to support our students.”

The legacy of the past three years, Leslie Koch agrees, is not just the millions from private funds: “New Yorkers are much more involved in education, and there is a sense of optimism, a change in the climate of public opinion. If the city stays this involved, we’ll feel we have turned it around.” The biggest challenge Koch sees? “The enormity of the need.”

Fiction writer and book reviewer as well as journalist, Jane Ciabattari is the author of Stealing the Fire: Stories (www.caniosbooks.com) and often covers education issues and personalities for Live & Learn. This story appeared in the Fall, 2005 Live & Learn.

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