"What did we get for it?"

If you haven't yet listened to Michael Horn , Diane Tavenner and Stacey Childress 's most recent Class Disrupted podcast "Concerning Trends in Philanthropy for Education Reform", you should. Stacey Childress says:

Many [philanthropic] institutions faced a crisis in the first months of the pandemic, realizing that what they'd spent years and billions of dollars on hadn't made the progress needed. For institutional funders, there was a sense of, "What did we get for it?" The principals, whether trustees or living donors, were asking good questions but not getting great answers from teams trying to figure it out and not wanting to be wrong. There was a fear of going back to donors like Bill Gates, Mark and Priscilla, or the Walton family with another failed initiative.

It was the first time I had heard someone, and Stacey Childress no less (HBS, NewSchools, Gates, AERDF), say the quiet part out loud. The $1.5 billion dollars of K-12 philanthropy every year isn't working. It hasn't changed NAEP scores. It hasn't changed the way school districts approach education. It has sustained the impact of a small number of operators at the margins, who have done some amazing things, but haven't moved the needle nationally.

As a result, the podcast warns, big education philanthropy (not PTA donations or corporate drives to buy students backpacks, but big grants in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to effect system change) might just go away. Stacey Childress continues:

The downside is if, after three or five years, [the Gates Foundation] can't achieve what they want in math, then what? We've been through system-wide transformation, charter schools, standards, teacher systems, next-gen schools, and now math. If they keep switching every three to five years, what's next? If the next cycle doesn't work, they might consider an exit...in that institution, now 25 years in, by the time the math cycle ends, they'll be 26 or 27 years in. Now what? People worry the "now what" will be an exit. And Gates isn't the only one. I use them as an example because it illustrates the issue cleanly.

I've questioned the role of big education philanthropy before . As the podcast points out, big education philanthropy equals far less than 1% of federal, state, and local spending on K-12. It's fair to ask whether we'd notice if it disappeared.

If big education philanthropy were bolder, I think we would notice its absence. As Stacey Childress provocatively says earlier in the podcast:

Where's the boldness that created the wealth in the first place?

It's a great question. And I actually think the answer is pretty simple. I think the big education philanthropies should do what all entrepreneurs do: take risks and then de-risk those risks by following the scientific method.

If big education philanthropy wants to move the needle, fund research into education products and services to figure out what works, but do it slightly differently than you've done it before:

1. Don't worry whether your grantee is a non-profit or for-profit. No one's building the next Facebook or Google in K-12 education. You're not going to become Elon Musk regretfully subsidizing the creation of OpenAI. Non-profit and for-profit operators are both in it to have an impact on student learning. If they weren't, they'd choose any other sector of the economy where it is easier to make money. Matthew Gross , who co-founded Newsela , one of the fastest growing education companies ever, put it best just the other day: "here in 2024, in the post-pandemic, fiscal-cliff-swan-dive world of K-12 education, one's chances are utterly dismal," before going on to explain why he's starting another K-12 education company, Grouper Education (grouper.school) . The multi-Grammy-winning artist Donald Glover said the other day, "I'm not 25 anymore, standing in front of a boulder like, 'This has to move." Well in education all of us, startups, teachers, schools, districts, are standing there (until we're well past 25) telling that boulder to move.
2. Look for signals that there is demand for the education product or service that an entrepreneur wants you to fund research into. Forget essay questions about path to scale or go-to-market or even fit with your investment thesis. These grand strategies will dramatically change the moment they confront reality. Find a product or service that's already in a half dozen schools or districts, where the users were so desperate for a solution that they didn't even need to wait for the research, and where the users would be very angry if the solution were taken away.
3. Fund the total cost of the research trial (TCT - Total Cost of Trial). Let's say someone builds some type of software that you think is promising. You could give a couple hundred thousand dollars to a research consultancy to find a district already using the software or one that is open to everything but not invested in anything, randomize a small group of students in the district, crank through the analysis, blame implementation challenges, and wonder whether a modest improvement in test scores is worth reinvesting in. Or, you could start from first principles and say if a piece of software or a product or a program is going to fundamentally change education, how should we study it at the outset, very rigorously, but in an unscalable way to give it the best chance of success? To identify what's possible when the risk of implementation challenges are as small as possible. Y Combinator is a three month crash course in doing unscalable things. And they're not wrong. First, you (the big education philanthropy) would spend several hundred thousand dollars on sales and marketing to find schools or districts that are a perfect fit for this research, that have the desire and the organizational capacity to give it a real shot. Then you'd pay the company or non-profit the full cost of the product or service so that it can be given away freely to the participating district or schools because randomization is painful and creates ethical quagmires and the participating schools or districts should get something in return for educating the field. Then you'd pay another couple hundred thousand dollars for implementation managers to handhold the district or schools through every aspect of the implementation and create marketing videos to share the successes back with the district in a positive feedback loop. Then, and only then, would you pay a couple hundred thousand dollars to collect and analyze the data and publish a report. So yes, you've spent a million dollars on what you previously would have spent $150,000 on, but the reward for that risk is that you might actually uncover something that would change education. Isn't this at some level what Saga Education did to create unprecedented energy and optimism about what is possible with high dosage tutoring? (To be clear I think this approach applies far beyond high dosage tutoring.)

You don't even need to be the first mover. I think Accelerate backed by Arnold Ventures Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Overdeck Family Foundation Walton Family Foundation is doing really impressive work in this regard. They're funding for-profits and non-profits to do rigorous research. They understand that their funding might be used to offset program costs for participating schools/districts and that that's a good and highly leveraged use of philanthropic funding because it brings research 10 years earlier than it would otherwise occur. Accelerate isn't spending a million dollars per research trial because they don't have that level of funding (that's where big philanthropy could really make a difference), but I think they're pointing the field in the right direction. Accelerate is focused on tutoring, but there are so many other aspects of education that big education philanthropy could begin exploring.

Don't give up! Roll up your sleeves!