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What if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had met and been wooed not by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, as reportedly happened this July in Idaho, setting the stage for Zuckerberg’s dramatic $100 million gift, but by our own Joel Klein? A hawk-eyed reader alerted us to the counterintuitive advice Klein might have given him.

The clue lies in a March 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine in which Paul Tough led a roundtable discussion of education leaders about educational philanthropy. Tough proposed a hypothetical: A “high-tech entrepreneur” has just taken his company public, and now he has $2 billion to give away. He wants to improve public education. What should the billionaire spend his money on?

The key excerpt:

Tough: Joel, you run the country’s biggest school system. What if this money was simply added to New York City’s regular education budget for next year? Would you be able to make a difference with it?

Klein: Well, I agree with Vanessa [Kirsch, founder of New Profit] that philanthropists should think strategically, and what you’re suggesting would be about as nonstrategic an investment as you could make. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t like an additional billion dollars next year. But I think our billionaire should think about this entirely differently.

Klein suggested spending the money to create a national policy group to do “serious research” to fill the many knowledge gaps in education. He also suggested investing in a handful of individual superintendents, like Michelle Rhee, with the goal of helping them demonstrate how to turn around a poorly performing school district.

The Gates Foundation’s thousands of grantees told the foundation it’s not easy to work with in a survey, the foundation’s CEO, Jeff Raikes, reported in a letter yesterday.

The foundation did receive good marks on improving “knowledge, policy, and practice” in its funding areas. But pretty much everything else was bleak — and even bleaker than the average response that the group administering the survey, the Center for Effective Philanthropy, usually sees.

Reports Raikes:

Many of our grantee partners said we are not clear about our goals and strategies, and they think we don’t understand their goals and strategies.

They are confused by our decision-making and grantmaking processes.

Because of staff turnovers, many of our grantee partners have had to manage multiple Program Officer transitions during the course of their grant, which creates more work.

Finally, they say we are inconsistent in our communications, and often unresponsive.

Raikes also said the foundation plans to make changes in response to the feedback, which came from about two-thirds of more than a thousand grantees.

I don’t need to remind our readers that the Gates Foundation is a ginormous giver to education causes, investing more than $4 billion in the last decade. Anecdotal reports suggest the foundation is also one of the major producers of grumbling nonprofit heads and development directors, which may or may not be correlated.

Two years ago, I wrote about the foundation’s decision to rethink its education giving strategy, shifting from small schools to teaching quality.

Two New York City-based charter school networks, Uncommon Schools and Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network, are splitting $2.5 million in grants meant to help them expand in size speedily. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation doled out the money and made its announcement today.

The full press release is below. The most interesting part that I see is the disclosure that the Uncommon Schools network plans to expand to operate 33 schools by 2014, 20 of them in New York City. The network now has nine charter schools in the city, by my count.

The Success network’s plan, which has been reported before, is to expand its current crop of four schools to 40 in the next 10 years.

Only Uncommon Schools is said to be planning to use the money to invest in facilities.

The full press release: (more…)

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the philanthropist Eli Broad at an inauguration party thrown by Broad. (Via Flickr)

The education philanthropist Eli Broad is based in Los Angeles, but at an event this week in Manhattan he painted a vivid picture of the unique influence he’s exerted in the New York City schools.

Broad said that his foundation has given money to the two charter schools the union president here, Randi Weingarten, opened; has trained seven or eight of the top officials in Chancellor Joel Klein’s Department of Education; and was a player in Klein and Weingarten’s merit-based pay deal.

The remarks came at an event at the 92nd Street Y Monday, where the writer Matthew Bishop of the Economist interviewed Broad on a small stage. Broad said the close relationship began as soon as Klein took the job. “From the first day Joel took office, literally, we met with him,” he said. He is close with other education leaders, too.

In Washington, D.C., the Broad Foundation has met repeatedly with superintendent Michelle Rhee and is believed to be one of the groups that would fund Rhee’s plan to give teachers more money in exchange for giving up tenure rights. Broad said on Monday that several of his staff members are taking jobs in Arne Duncan’s U.S. Department of Education.

The relationships are part of the Broad Foundation’s aggressive education agenda, which includes opening many charter schools, adopting corporate models for school leadership, and changing the way teachers are compensated. Because they are not beholden to public opinion, philanthropies can be “far more aggressive” in their goals than most politicians, Broad said. “We don’t mind taking risks. We don’t mind being criticized, at times even being hung in effigy,” he said. (more…)

Two former New York City schoolteachers have taken to heart Teach for America’s intention to create innovators who maintain a commitment to educational equity even after they leave the classroom — they’ve started a nonprofit organization designed to facilitate individual giving to public schools.

Jessica Rauch and Eli Savit, who now live in Michigan, recently won $10,000 in start-up funds in the August competition on IdeaBlob.com, which pits new business ideas against each other in public voting. Their initiative, The Generation Project, aims to “revolutionize educational philanthropy” by facilitating connections between schools and individuals who want to donate to them.

From 2005 to 2007, Rauch taught English language learners at PS 86 in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx; Savit taught 8th-grade social studies at IS 339 in the South Bronx. “As a new teacher, my time was very limited; between lesson planning, after-school tutoring, and graduate school, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to find individualized opportunities for all of my students,” wrote Rauch in an email to GothamSchools. “Although my administration was great and tried hard to expose students to various enrichment activities, I wished there was an easy way to further expand my students’ horizons.” For example, Rauch wrote, one of Savit’s students who had developed an interest in domestic affairs could have attended a program in Washington, D.C., if Savit could easily have found a way to pay for it.

Motivated by their own experiences, Rauch and Savit are working to create a database of prepaid gifts, “shaped by [funders'] own passions and priorities,” that schools and teachers can apply to receive. This approach represents an inversion of the one taken by the popular website DonorsChoose.org, where potential donors browse funding requests from teachers who have identified particular needs for their classroom.

“DonorsChoose is awesome, but it serves a different role for under-resourced schools than we propose,” Rauch wrote. (more…)