We've expended many words??on this blog and??other forums on the role of philanthropies in education. Especially now that they tend to have very specific and well-honed visions for reform that inform their giving strategies, evaluating just how much or how little influence they exercise over the various levels of education governance is a worthwhile endeavor. For example, Checker??lamented how closely Gates was working with the Department of Education, while??others thought it a waste that Ford had funded some more mainstream (status-quo, if you will) outfits like the AFT's Teacher Innovation Fund.
These same questions have been raised over the latest bit of news from LA: a number of high-level LAUSD positions??are being privately funded. Yes, that means the city saves the money that would otherwise be going towards their salaries, some of which top $100,000 per annum (before benefits). But it also means that the funders have some say in the role those individuals play and on a bigger level, district policy as a whole. I don't mean to imply that this influence is a negative thing; to the contrary, the dollars of Eli Broad, for example, which fund the salary of Matt Hill, whose job it is to oversee LAUSD's school turnaround/outsourcing project, have propelled this particular worthy initiative. But other philanthropies have supported less-worthy and less-successful city-level district-run initiatives in other cities such as??New York and??D.C. Arguably, those projects would not have been possible without the outside cash. So on the one hand, we get the benefit of public bureaucracies being subjected to private-sector screening and auditing practices. On the other, we get districts responding to private-sector funding strategies that might or might not be any good, with hardly any outside metric for judging them, and the cash to make them smashing successes or terrible failures. And??we also sometimes get organizations funding both--the good and the bad, the public and the private, the charter schools and the teachers' unions.
So where's the strategy behind all of this? Outfits like Gates seem to literally be funding??everyone. (What would happen if Gates and it's billions suddenly disappeared is an another interesting question we'll save for another day.) I'm sure someone there could explain to me how this strategy fits into their larger plan for education, but on the face of it, I'm not buying the "fund our friends" and "bribe our enemies" gambit. Education is definitely better off from Gates', Ford's, Broad's and other's extraordinary generosity, but how can an organization make objective purposeful decisions about its dollars when it has its hands in so many cookie jars?
