"Gates foundation focuses on Washington schools, then the nation and the world"
by Jolayne Houtz,
Seattle Times staff reporter
There's no sign on the nondescript tan building to give a hint at the tremendous potential inside.
The sign in the lobby is intentionally hard to read, and the building itself is still in the last stages of remodeling, pocked by exposed plasterboard and unfinished floors.
But from this understated office on Seattle's Eastlake Avenue, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, newly minted as the nation's largest philanthropy with $17.1 billion in assets, is about to embark on an extraordinary project: the transformation of the nation's schools - starting with Washington state.
In the words of one local philanthropy watcher, it is a development that is "breathtakingly exciting."
Somehow, even with the Gates name on the letterhead, the foundation's work in education has been something of a stealth operation, a faint blip on the radar screen of giving, eclipsed by the Gateses' huge donations in their other area of interest, global health.
Now, with Tom Vander Ark, the well-connected former Federal Way schools superintendent 2 months into his new role leading the foundation's education work, the profile and influence of Bill and Melinda Gates in education is about to take a quantum leap.
Washington schools will be the first beneficiaries, a petri dish as the Gateses look for the best ways to help schools improve, and a model for their eventual plans to spark the same kind of improvements nationally and globally.
Just what this will look like - and how much money will be spent here - remain undetermined. And, as other education philanthropists have found, it's not as easy as it looks to give away money to schools and get results you can predict, or even measure.
But the resources available through the Gates Foundation are staggering.
Just to meet federal law, the foundation must give away 5 percent of its assets every year - $855 million yearly at its current level, and likely to quickly exceed $1 billion in gifts per year.
The Gateses have given about $5 billion to their foundations every quarter this year, a general pattern of giving that likely will continue, foundation officials say.
By way of comparison: Washington spends $4.4 billion a year from the general fund on K-12 education.
"It will be a challenge to keep up with the level of their (the Gateses') giving," Vander Ark said.
Much of the giving will be targeted at global-health issues and other causes the Gateses support. But the potential impact on schools remains extraordinary.
"This will be a big deal," Vander Ark said, "a significant investment in this state. But I'm not prepared to talk about the magnitude because I haven't figured it out yet."
He describes his new job as "an awesome responsibility," something he couldn't have dreamed up if he'd tried.
"My imagination," he said, "would have fallen a zero or two short."
Out of the shadows
Until last month, the education initiative was just a piece of the smaller of two foundations launched by the Gateses in the past five years.
The William H. Gates Foundation was the larger one and the focus of more attention, making multi-million-dollar grants for research into AIDS and malaria vaccines, maternal health in developing countries and other health projects.
The Gates Learning Foundation, which started life as the Gates Library Foundation in 1997, focused on putting technology into libraries in impoverished areas. (That project continues as part of the broader Gates initiatives.)
For a time, Bill Gates was criticized for his lack of prominence on the giving scene.
As the Microsoft founder's rate of giving increased, critics said his gifts weren't altruistic, but rather a way to shift the focus from his company's antitrust troubles in Washington, D.C., or to seed the market by giving away computers, software and technology training, creating more demand for Microsoft products.
Foundation officials flatly deny there's any motive for giving other than trying to "bridge the digital divide," putting medical and technological advances into the hands of people who can least afford them.
The Gateses have given a combined total of more than $500 million to date through their foundations. In Washington, the Gates foundations have made grants totaling $9.8 million to K-12 schools or education-related groups in the past two years.
They range from $2,500 to the Zillah PTA - for a computer and printer for the winner of an annual science fair - to the two biggest projects: the $3 million Teacher Leadership Project to train teachers in using technology and the $2 million Smart Tools Academy for principals and superintendents studying technology in the classroom.
But in short order this summer, the education initiative began to ramp up its visibility with Vander Ark's hiring and the merger last month of the two foundations into what is now the second-largest charitable foundation in the world. (The Wellcome Trust in London is the largest, with $19.2 billion in assets, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Teaching, leadership focus
On Friday, Vander Ark held the first of a monthlong series of meetings with educators across the state to show them the first draft of the foundation's plan for charitable giving in Washington schools, from preschool through 12th grade.
He spent the summer talking to more than 200 people involved in education here and nationally - policymakers, superintendents, other foundation leaders, teachers and others - to create the draft.
After gathering reaction this month, Vander Ark will fine-tune the plan, then present it next month to Bill and Melinda Gates - "the benefactors," as they're referred to in the foundation's office.
"They will look at the final plan and ask questions and respond to what resonates with them," said Patty Stonesifer, co-chairwoman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a former Microsoft executive.
It likely will be next year before grants are made and work begins in earnest, she said.
Already, though, Vander Ark has singled out two key themes that emerged again and again in his conversations this summer: school-leadership training for superintendents and principals, and teacher training.
Part of that training likely will involve the use and application of technology in the classroom, an obvious area for the founder of Microsoft to target.
But beyond that, Vander Ark also sees an opportunity to reinforce Washington's ongoing work in education reform, with its higher academic standards, new, high-stakes tests and system of rewards and consequences for schools.
He calls this approach to education reform "the most significant change in education in 50 years, and it will mark schools for 50 years to come."
Vander Ark also has identified a few guiding principles for the work that's about to begin.
The foundation will focus on projects that have the potential to impact all schools, not those that just touch a few schools or districts.
And money will go to programs or groups whose ideas already are working or proven successful, spreading those innovations more broadly rather than putting money on a good but untested idea.
Why start in Washington?
The Gateses have made it clear they expect the foundation's education work to benefit private as well as public schools. Vander Ark himself was an active proponent of charter schools in Federal Way. His children attended private schools before moving to Washington.
But the foundation will work in tandem with the state, taking few policy positions of its own, instead acting as a partner with state education officials overseeing education reform and trying to leverage additional money from state and federal sources to broaden its reach.
Confidence in the state's education leadership and reform direction are two key reasons the foundation plans to start its schools-giving in Washington.
"We believe the education-reform work going on here is . . . as well-conceived and being as well administered as any place in the country," Vander Ark said. "We're confident that investments here can accelerate progress that's already been made."
Terry Bergeson, the state superintendent of public instruction, has met with Vander Ark several times this summer, and her input is likely to help shape his final plan.
"We met in June, and he asked me: `What would you do if you had some money?' and I said: `Are you serious? Do you really want to know?' " Bergeson said.
They talked for three hours - about access to technology and a way for schools to keep up with technological advances; about how to use gifts as leverage to push state lawmakers to commit money to education; about creating an information clearinghouse for what's working to improve schools and how to scale it up.
"We never have quite enough money to do it right and do it now. We dibble along and do half of it," Bergeson said. "That kind of partnership is a wonderful dream, and I think it might happen."
Washington also makes sense as a place to start because "this is our home," said Vander Ark, who still lives in Federal Way with his family. His two children attend public schools there.
"We want very much to make a difference here," he said.
Starting here also reduces the risk of mistakes, though Vander Ark and Stonesifer both realize there likely will be some "unintended consequences."
Those early mistakes are important for honing strategy, Stonesifer said. The Gateses "are going to be giving and learning for decades . . . We take seriously the idea that even with the wonderful resources we have, we also have the responsibility that every dollar matters."
A tricky field for giving
The foundation also intends to learn from the work of others.
Vander Ark got an earful this summer from others involved in philanthropy and education about the business - and pitfalls - of giving to schools.
"They've made it clear we need to be really thoughtful in the work that we do and clear about the results we expect," Vander Ark said.
Education is a tricky area in which to give. Good intentions and a generous gift don't always guarantee a predictable or positive outcome.
And there are few examples of education philanthropy at the level that's possible for the Gates Foundation.
Perhaps the closest example of what the Gates Foundation is considering is in Idaho, where the foundation formed by grocery-store magnate Joe Albertson and his wife, Kathryn, launched a major education initiative in Idaho schools two years ago, pledging $110 million over three years.
The foundation has targeted reading, technology, early childhood education, teacher training and preparation and other areas, giving about $50 million annually.
Foundation officials declined to talk about their work, saying they rarely agree to discuss what they do publicly and prefer to operate out of the spotlight.
A similar initiative is the Annenberg Challenge, a national network of school-improvement projects funded in 1993 by a $500 million grant from Walter Annenberg, the publisher and former ambassador to Great Britain.
His gift was meant to spark a revolution of school reform that would reach across the nation. The reality has been more modest.
There have been real successes - perhaps most notably a doubling of the number of small schools in New York City - but they have been highly localized, not the broad, systemwide change that was envisioned.
While $500 million looks like a lot of money, its influence is diluted once it's spread over a number of schools and districts, said Barbara Cervone, the Annenberg Challenge's national coordinator.
"One of the challenges is how do you gain leverage and authority when you don't really have all the money in the world," she said. Schools "have so many programs going, so many masters they feel they are serving - it's a constant struggle for them to focus."
Overcoming old ways of doing business and fierce allegiances to the status quo also slows reform, she said.
Money for teacher training, for example, might run into union practices that dictate the length of the workday, state policies on how many professional-development days teachers can have, parent concerns about instruction time.
Penetrating the system
The trick is to work simultaneously inside and outside the education system, giving educators an incentive to work together as partners while not falling captive to their priorities, said Paul Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington.
Few have solved that dilemma, Hill said, including the Annenberg project, which may have failed to spark widespread reform in part because it worked mostly from the outside and never found a way to bring educators along, too.
Hard bargains must be struck between donors and school systems, making the gift contingent on cooperation and meeting clear conditions, said Hill, who gave the same advice to Vander Ark this summer.
Otherwise, there's a danger of the gift becoming just a replacement for money school officials would have spent anyway, supplanting public funding of education rather than supplementing it.
But others say any attempt to work from the inside is a recipe for failure.
"More money has never produced better results," said Fritz Steiger, president of CEO America, a network of business leaders who have donated $275 million since 1991 toward school vouchers for low-income children to attend private schools.
The voucher donors want to goad what they see as failing public schools into changing through competition, Steiger said. "The only way is to bring outside pressure to bear - otherwise the change you get won't be long-term or systemic."
`Social entrepreneurship'
Philanthropy leaders say Bill and Melinda Gates offer an excellent example that will spur other, newly tech-wealthy people in the region to consider their own philanthropy.
"They're doing this thoughtfully, together as a young couple, offering a good model for others to follow," said Jane Carlson Williams, former president of the Northwest Development Officers Association.
Until recent years, Seattle has had few sizeable foundations or endowments - "in fact, we've been rather underendowed," said Anne Farrell, president of The Seattle Foundation, the largest and oldest foundation in the state.
Part of that is because of the relative youth of the population and the area. As other young philanthropists follow the lead of the Gateses, their youth will cause them to be interested in areas that traditionally have not been philanthropic causes - such as K-12 schools.
They also likely will give in a different way, looking at philanthropy more as a form of "social entrepreneurship" than charity. Gates has said he believes in "bringing the discipline of business to the art of giving."
Laser focus applauded
The Gates Foundation has relied on a relatively small staff of about 150, with just a handful of those making decisions about grants; the rest are technology trainers and support staff.
Until the foundation's move to Eastlake two weeks ago, staffers were scattered in several locations, and many of the grant-making decisions were made in the basement of the home of Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates Sr., now co-chairman of the Gates Foundation.
By contrast, the Ford Foundation, now the third largest in the nation, has a staff of more than 300 at its New York headquarters and more than 250 overseas.
Philanthropy and education leaders praise the formula for giving the two Gates foundations followed before they merged: Do the research to know where gifts can have the most impact. Set clear expectations for how the money will be spent. Focus on well-chosen areas and stick to them. Create a way to measure results.
"They have a pretty deep bucket, but it would be easy for them to pour that money into a black hole," said Bill Porter, executive director of the Partnership for Learning, an organization of Washington business and civic leaders backing school reform.
Having a laser-focus on a few key areas makes it easier to say no to other requests with less-certain goals or benefits, he said.
One of the most important lessons for donors is to think ahead about how to sustain successful reforms once private dollars are gone, said Robin Pasquarella, president of the Alliance for Education, a group of Seattle business leaders supporting Seattle public schools.
Otherwise, schools can become dependent on the gift and drain the dollars that could have been spent spreading the successes to other schools.
Measuring results is another tricky area.
"Can we prove that because money paid for more volunteers to read to kids that academic achievement rose? Was it the volunteer time, or did the teachers improve, or did the kids have breakfast that morning?" Pasquarella asked.
"It's a frustration for people used to very black-and-white, direct connections between the investment made and the return on their capital."
But if donors are too intent on proving they got their money's worth, they may pay only for what they can count, Pasquarella said - "and sometimes what you can measure isn't the most important place to put your money."
Creating the report card
Measuring results is a theme underscored repeatedly in Vander Ark's travels this summer, and it was an important element of his work in Federal Way.
He created an annual report card on the district that included two dozen indicators to measure how schools were doing.
Federal Way was small enough "to get a visible, tangible sense of your contributions making a difference. It will be a challenge to know that at the state level," he said.
The foundation certainly will track traditional measures of student achievement - test scores and dropout rates, for example. But Vander Ark also is interested in expanding how people judge education's success or failure.
Good teachers know after spending some time with their students exactly what their strengths and weaknesses are, in ways that often can't be boiled down to a score on a test. Vander Ark wants to look for ways to measure and report that classroom-based evidence.
How? "I don't know. I haven't written that part of the business plan yet," he says with a laugh.
His new job comes with a deep sense of responsibility, he said.
Vander Ark recalls a similar feeling a half-hour after Federal Way officials announced in 1994 that the former corporate vice president and marketing executive would be the district's new superintendent.
Vander Ark and his wife were at SeaTac Mall sitting on a bench when a group of students passed by.
"I suddenly felt the weight of this yoke land on my shoulders, and it hit me - their education is now my responsibility."
Now it weighs even more heavily.
"This is truly a historic opportunity," he said, "coming at the most critical time there's ever been" for schools.
He credits the Gateses for making K-12 education a priority. "There would have been easier roads. It's an area that's very difficult, very complex, very political. They could have just done safe things."
Public education has "another half-dozen years" to get it right, he believes. New forms of schooling - charter schools, vouchers, distance learning, schools run by for-profit companies - are putting new pressure on traditional public schools that have struggled to meet higher demands.
"Now every school in the country is saying, `How are we going to help all these kids reach these high standards?' " Vander Ark said.
"Our goal is going to be to help transform the system - and there's not much time to do that."
Copyright ¸ 1999 Seattle Times Company
Posted at 12:03 a.m. PDT; Sunday, September 12, 1999
seattletimes.com |
