Chapter 20
Education: Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste
For one difficult year, I was an assistant professor at the Detroit Institute of Technology. It was a year after I graduated from MSU and started my fledgling accounting practice. I taught all the unglamorous night courses that no one else wanted, such as drugstore accounting. I scoured lesson plans, textbooks, and teachers’ guides and tried as hard as I could to keep the attention of my 40 students each evening. A lot of them were older than I was, worked two or more jobs, or had just come back from fighting in Korea. Public speaking made me nervous back then, and some of my students fell asleep on me. I can’t say I blame them. It was incredibly challenging work that left me with a lifelong respect for teachers.
Now, nearly 60 years later, that early experience has become all the more important because of our philanthropic work in education. One of our family’s greatest priorities is to transform urban school districts by putting in place the leadership, innovations, policies, and institutions that enable students and teachers to succeed.
Given the scale of the problem, working to fix public education is the most unreasonable mission I’ve ever taken on.
The World Is Moving Forward, but American Education Is Stagnant
I am old enough to remember when America’s K–12 public schools were the best in the world. I am a proud graduate of them, and I credit much of my success to what I learned in Detroit Public Schools and at Michigan State University. When I was in high school, not long after World War II, the United States had the top graduation rate. Since then, we have dropped behind 20 other industrialized nations. In less time than you just spent reading the last few paragraphs, another American student has dropped out of school. American students today rank 31st in the world in mathematics and 23rd in science. If the academic rankings of our most precious resource—our young people—were the rankings of our Olympic athletes, it would be a source of major national embarrassment.
The most shameful part of the picture—the one that, by my count, is the civil rights issue of our time—is the dramatically lower graduation rates for poor and minority students. These students are far less likely to have access to the best teachers.
By any measure, America’s schools are in the grip of a profound crisis.
Frankly, I’m not sure how far I would get if I attended public school today. It’s not just that public schools aren’t producing the results we want—it’s that we’re not giving them what they need to help students achieve at high levels. K–12 education in the United States is deeply antiquated. Most schools still have a three-month summer vacation, a practice that dates back to our agrarian past, when most Americans lived on farms and children were required to help tend and harvest crops. Most classrooms are still physically set up the way they were then, with a teacher facing rows of students. Children of many different backgrounds and learning styles are expected to learn the same lesson taught in the same way. School district policies and practices have not kept pace with student and teacher needs.
Although classrooms have stayed largely the same on the inside, the world around them has changed radically. The sheer pace of economic and societal forces as a result of the digital revolution, for example, far exceeds the capacity of our schools, as they are currently structured, to keep up. How absurd that our students tuck their cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPods into their backpacks when they enter a classroom and pull out a tattered textbook. Technological advances, such as iPads and iPhones, have personalized every arena of our lives, but very little has been done to harness the same power to personalize learning for students with different needs.
Classrooms in China, India, Japan, and South Korea, meanwhile, have advanced by leaps and bounds. They have elevated the teaching profession, insisted on longer school days and years, promoted education as a key value, created national ministries empowered to set priorities and standards, and built school cultures designed to help teachers uphold these high standards. They do all of this with far less money than the United States spends on education. In the past few decades, American taxpayer spending in real dollars has more than doubled with no associated increase in student achievement. Efforts to spend more money may be well intentioned, but money alone won’t fix our schools.
The American middle class, once bolstered by well-paying jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors that didn’t require a higher education, now runs on service and technology sector jobs that require a significantly greater level of educational attainment. But too few young people are making it to college. Even when they do, the monumental cost of higher education and their unfortunate lack of sound K–12 preparation make the university track not just difficult, but also, in the eyes of an increasing number, undesirable. Without a sound education, these young people face higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and crime. Lifetime income, taxes, productivity, and health indicators all decline.
These are the kind of problems—lack of opportunity now and cynicism about the future—that contribute toward frustrations behind movements like Occupy Wall Street. They are right. We must do better.
If There’s a Crisis, Get Involved and Make a Change
In the 1970s I began my philanthropic career by serving on the boards of Pitzer College and the California State University system. Higher education is where Edye and I made our first eight-figure gifts back in 1991: $10 million for Pitzer to add buildings on campus, the first such expansion since the college’s founding, and $20 million to my alma mater, Michigan State University, to create a graduate school of management and a full-time Master of Business Administration program.
Through these roles, I quickly learned that the larger systemic issues in education were not, in fact, within higher education, but rather began at the primary and secondary levels. That’s why students weren’t making it to college or doing as well as they could.
When we started to invest more deeply in education philanthropy after merging SunAmerica with AIG, infusing our foundation with more than $1 billion, we immediately knew where we wanted to focus: on the biggest urban K–12 school systems in the country, the ones that largely educated the poor or minority students most in need.
Entering this area was, of course, an enormous risk. Many talented and intelligent men and women have attempted to reform education, and many have quit the effort because of the enormity of the problem, the lack of progress, and the system’s resistance to change. Still, as you know, I never shy from an unreasonable goal. And as President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel once smartly told the New York Times, “Rule One: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”
I think that’s a good rule for everyone to keep in mind, no matter the type of crisis you find yourself confronting—be it a big new task or a bad year for your business, a shake-up in a field you want to enter, or a philanthropic cause you’re about to tackle. When external forces are changing your world, think about what you can do to move with them, rather than reflexively hunkering down and refusing to change. Use crises as chances to rethink everything, question your assumptions, and start afresh. That’s what we’re trying to do in public education.
When we first started researching why progress wasn’t happening in K–12 education in America, we discovered something interesting. A lot of proposals seemed to have merit, such as improving professional development, but the problem was deeper. These efforts alone wouldn’t make enough of a difference because the systems themselves were broken. We needed an unreasonable solution.
Simply put, entrenched bureaucracies, policies, and practices are no longer set up in a way that helps teachers and students progress. Taxpayer resources often don’t make it to the classroom. Teachers are left to fend for themselves without adequate real-time information about how well their students are learning, access to best practices, or time to collaborate. Because their pay and expectations are, in most cases, low, many talented Americans are dissuaded from entering the profession at all. Half of those who become teachers quit within their first five years. Ask any of your friends or family members who are teachers whether their central office is a help or a hindrance to them in the classroom. You can guess what they’ll say.
How did urban school districts get here? I suspect the reason is because too few dared to ask the right “Why not?” question: Why not redesign these districts? It’s a simple matter of reframing basic assumptions. Data show that the greatest positive outcomes for students happen when entire school systems are either redesigned or started anew. But too often school systems seem hesitant to apply or even explore the best practices of other governmental agencies, the nonprofit world, or business. Although the education systems are run by well-meaning people, those leaders’ interests, training, and qualifications don’t always adequately prepare them for managing an organization as enormous and hugely important as an urban school district.
Take my hometown. The budget for the Los Angeles Unified School District is $7 billion, the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company or a large federal government agency. Every decision every day—about how and where funds will be used, how policies will be set, how to run facilities, operations, human resources, and transportation—has an enormous impact. If these decisions are not closely attuned to student needs, too often school systems become preoccupied with jobs for adults rather than the futures of students. To solve the problems we face, entire school systems, including dozens or even hundreds of schools, must be transformed to empower teachers and students to succeed in the classroom.
This is why our foundation’s goal is to help turn a tired government monopoly into a high-performing public enterprise that in fact serves the public. We identified the area where we could be particularly effective: improving management and finding talent. These skills are found in any high-performing organization—nonprofit, government, or private.
In determining how best to leverage our investment in improving America’s public schools, we relied on the essential ingredient in any successful organization: smart people. I realized that if we could help identify or train effective school district leaders, they could give teachers the necessary resources and support. That’s why we decided to focus our philanthropy on training and supporting superintendents—the CEOs of our country’s 14,000-plus school districts—and other education leaders who can help many schools dramatically improve at once.
Nothing we have done to try to create change has been easy. One of the great things about our investments in scientific and medical research is the constant inspiration I derive from the scientific community’s commitment to change. I’ve never met a scientist who didn’t want to knock over the status quo. In education, by contrast, I’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours of effort spent defending and preserving what is clearly a broken system. Making any change requires a lot of unconventional wisdom, long-term thinking, innovation, and an unwavering focus on what matters most: helping America’s students once again be the best in the world.
Big Goals and Big Results
We launched The Broad Superintendents Academy in 2002 to train school district superintendents in how best to support teachers and students. We are proud that as of 2011, our graduates have taken on nearly 90 superintendent positions nationwide. Two-thirds of our graduates who have held their posts for at least three years are outperforming their peers in raising student achievement. We are also pleased that four Broad alumni have been named state superintendent of the year by their peers, and in 2012, one went on to be named the national superintendent of the year.
To help superintendents as they work to improve the basic functions of school systems, we created The Broad Residency to infuse management talent into K–12 public education. The two-year residency recruits successful early-career professionals with master’s degrees and experience in business, law, and other public service sectors to work in public school systems, charter management organizations, or state and federal departments of education. More than 90 percent of Broad Residency alumni remain in public education after their first two years. Many are promoted rapidly and attain high levels of responsibility. Those who return to their original fields take with them a passion for education reform and become advocates for improving public education.
Taking Big Risks Means Getting Big Pushback
If your goals are large and public, you will face criticism. I know I have. I listen to it all, but I change my behavior based only on critiques that are valid. There is no reason to listen to criticism based on bias, resentment, or fear.
As soon as we started working in education, we faced a deluge of attacks, particularly online. Believe it or not, we pay attention. We pay less attention to name-calling and knee-jerk screeds, but we never ignore concerns rooted in logic.
When I’m not getting criticism for getting involved in public education as a concerned private individual, I’m usually being hammered for not doing enough. As venture philanthropists, we take far bigger risks than government organizations or older foundations, even if we share the same goal: To spur and sustain dramatic increases in academic achievement for students of all backgrounds.
As much as we hope our contributions will help catalyze large-scale change, education is a $600 billion industry. The $4 billion that goes into education philanthropy each year is a drop in the bucket. For something as important as the reinvention of our public education systems, entire communities must be accountable. We try to provide policymakers and the public with access to research, data, and best practices in education where we can, and we have supported local efforts where we think they will truly help students and teachers succeed. But elected officials, parents, teachers, taxpayers, and the media must join us to demand change.
The problem is immense. The solution must be big enough to match it. But there is good news. It is possible to challenge the status quo while honoring good teachers and defending public education. It is possible to encourage innovative, creative, and new solutions to tackle the challenges facing our public schools. And it is possible to provide all of our children with equal access to a free, quality public education, not just those lucky enough to live in an area with a great school, like I did 70 years ago.