Originally published in Kappan, April 2011
Some 900 bankers, entrepreneurs, and education policy experts crowded into an Education Innovation Forum in late January to hear U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the director of the White House National Economic Council, the White House chief technology officer, and other speakers talk about “revolutionizing education” and “reimaging learning.” As part of the event, 175 venture capitalists, corporate investors, and foundation officers heard presentations from 19 “investment-ready” start-up companies — such as Better Lesson LLC, School Town, and Drop the Chalk — during a “venture fair” designed to “drive investment dollars into innovative solutions,” where talk turned to “deal flow” and “innovation ecosystems.”
The event was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. But it wasn’t your standard education conference. Following on the heels of President Obama’s State of the Union address, in which he told Congress that “The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation,” the event represented a very different role for the federal government in promoting school improvement and reflected the Obama Administration’s commitment to finding new strategies for leveraging change in the nation’s schools.
A New Strategy When the U.S. Department of Education opened its doors in 1980, Washington’s primary role in public education was to send federal aid to states and school systems. Organizations that represented teachers, school boards, and other stakeholders played the leading roles in the Washington education debate.
But by 1990, that began to change whenPresident George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander seized on entrepreneur Chris Whittle’s idea to establish a New American School Development Corporation to fund a competition for new school models. The Clinton Administration championed the emerging charter school movement. And by the late 1990s, a new, entrepreneurial wave of school reform was gathering momentum, drawing on both major strands of school reform that had emerged over the previous decade: a commitment to school accountability and the rise of school choice and charters.
The movement was led by a new generation of socially conscious entrepreneurs drawn to public education by the opportunity to help the nation’s many disadvantaged students. Freed from school bureaucracies and union contracts by charter school laws and committed to the campaign for greater accountability in education, they sought to create a new, performance-driven brand of public schooling.
A key early leader was John Doerr, a partner in a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm and an investor in Netscape, Amazon, and later Google. In 1998, Doerr, Brook Byers,and Kim Smith, a Stanford business school student, created the NewSchools VentureFund in San Francisco to apply the principles of venture capital investing to education reform.
Financed by such Silicon Valley luminaries as Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and then by a new generation of foundations with living benefactors–including the Walton Family Foundation (WalMart), the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund (The Gap), the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (SunAmerica), and, of course, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation(Microsoft)–NewSchools helped launch New Leaders for New Schools, Teachscape, The New Teacher Project, Academy forUrban School Leadership, Wireless Generation, and a string of high-profile charter school networks such as Uncommon Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and KIPP.
Blending Two Agendas The Obama Administration has sought to both draw on and promote this entrepreneurial wing of school reform. In a video link to hundreds of education entrepreneurs gathered at the NewSchools annual conference in California in 2009, Duncan pledged to bring together “your ideas with our dollars.”
And he followed through. He brought in Joanne Weiss, NewSchools’ chief operating officer, to run the department’s reform-minded $4.35-billion Race to the Top competition, and Weiss has since become his chief of staff. And Duncan tapped James Shelton III, another Stanford business school graduate who worked at NewSchools and the Gates Foundation, to lead the $650-million Investing in Innovation Fund (i3). When winners of the competition were announced last fall, KIPP and Teach for America were among the big winners.
Shelton hosted the January gathering of education entrepreneurs with The Aspen Institute, the highly regarded Washington-based think tank and convener. He framed the Administration’s goal for the event and the larger entrepreneurial movement in school reform in a question to a panel he moderated: “If there’s one thing to disrupt the system, what would it be?”
Aided by the rise of social entrepreneurial programs at Stanford and other leading business schools and by the cache of organizations like Teach for America, the movement has drawn many talented graduates of the nation’s best colleges and universities to public education, a sector that has long lacked status in American life.
And new programs have emerged to nurture this entrepreneurial talent, ranging from the Aspen Institute-NewSchools Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education program to the new Education Ventures Program at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Oakland-based Education Pioneers initiative, and new nonprofits like Startl, which seeks to identify and ramp up education technology innovations.
In the wake of the President’s State of the Union address, the Obama Administration announced plans to establish an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education within the Department of Education to support the developers of new educational technologies, a project modeled on DARPA, the post-Sputnik Department of Defense agency that funded what became the Internet.
There’s also a growing network of advocacy organizations working in support of the new education entrepreneurs and the reforms they’re promoting, groups like Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy and political action organization that supports reform-minded candidates with substantial funding from such wealthy Wall Street financiers as Whitney Tilson and John Petry. Organizations like the New Haven-based ConnCan and StudentsFirst, recently founded by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, have similar missions.
Much of the work of the new education entrepreneurs has been concentrated in major cities. They haven’t yet had much involvement with many parts of the vast public education system. Nor is their long-term impact on the education landscape clear yet. And they may not have all the right answers for reform.But they have brought undeniable talent and drive to public education.
And the movement they’ve launched is gathering momentum. A summit in Washington in February to mark the 20th anniversary of Teach for America attracted 11,000 current and former TFA corps members, many of whom, like Rhee, Kim Smith, and Richard Barth, the chief executive of KIPP, have moved on to influential roles in school reform. Attendees packed sessions on “changing education through social entrepreneurship” and “paving the way to political office.” John Legend, a TFA board member, lent his star power. And just before the conference,founder Wendy Kopp announced that four foundations have pledged $100 million toward a TFA endowment.
The Administration’s enthusiasm for the new education entrepreneurs and their approach to reform is clear. “Thank you,” Duncan told the TFA conference, “Thank you for what you’re doing for American education.”