City Fund Has Become a Major Player in K-12 Philanthropy. Here’s What it Funds and Why

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City Fund burst onto the scene two years ago with ambitious plans and some major financial backing—$200 million in combined investments from Laura and John Arnold and the Hastings Fund. The pass-through grantmaker has since received support from a who’s who of wealthy education funders, including the Ballmer Group, Arthur Rock, the Susan and Michael Dell Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. 

In a brief window of time, City Fund has catapulted into the ranks of the largest K-12 funders in the U.S., having granted about $125 million to nearly 90 local education organizations across the country and made $52 million in grant commitments for 2022. As you can probably guess from the list of backers, the organization is a big supporter of the charter school and school choice movement, focusing heavily on innovation and giving parents a bigger voice in public education. But it’s also trying to steer clear of the heated debate around that movement.

As the group marks the end of its second year, IP caught up with City Fund and some of its grantees to learn more about its work.

Funding innovation

City Fund focuses on cities, education organizations and schools that emphasize flexibility and choice in education. As Neerav Kingsland, the organization’s co-founder and managing partner, explains, “We were founded based on success in cities like Washington, D.C., Denver and New Orleans, where we saw the power of a great teacher and a great school. These cities did a lot to empower educators and families. We were inspired by this success, and we wanted to help them keep on improving.” 

City Fund supports charter schools and charter-like schools that receive public funding but are run by nonprofits (versus traditional school boards). Early reporting, including an article by IP, described the City Fund’s approach as the “portfolio model”—edu-speak for educational governance that gives teachers and school leaders autonomy in running their schools, and gives parents a say in which schools their children attend. But the organization doesn’t describe its work that way, considering the term too narrow, even though many of the cities where it operates use elements of the portfolio model approach. On its website, the organization frames its mission simply: “City Fund partners with local leaders to create innovative public school systems.” 

“Innovation” is a word the City Fund uses a lot. “We need innovative school options to respond to the needs of all students,” Kingsland says. “One kid could thrive in military school, another might thrive in an art school. We focus on cities that have moved away from one-size-fits-all education and showed that different kids thrive in different environments.” 

Equity is another City Fund tenet that defines its focus and even its internal operations. It prioritizes cities and nonprofits that are working to improve educational opportunities for students of color and those from low-income backgrounds. City Fund has also made a commitment that its team and board will be majority Black and Latinx members by 2023, and that it will make the balance of its investments in organizations headed by leaders of color.

Power to the parents

To get a closer look at City Fund’s work, we talked to grantees in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. 

Parents Amplifying Voices in Education (PAVE), based in the nation’s capital, was created to give parents and families a greater role in their children’s education. PAVE has an all-parent governing board and is committed to “creating an environment where the vision for education in D.C. is created with children and families, not for them,” according to the organization’s website. PAVE does this by helping parents develop the knowledge, voice and skills to work with and influence education policymakers. 

“We talk to parents about who is in power and what they support,” says PAVE founder Maya Martin Cadogan. “We explain how a bill becomes a law, how a budget gets baked, and what other cities are doing to solve a particular issue.” 

But it is parents who drive the organization’s agenda and determine which issues it takes on. This year, for example, PAVE parents wanted to get involved in the November election.  “Our parents said, ‘This is a critical election. We need to be engaged,’” Cadogan says. In response, PAVE held candidate forums and organized voter turnout efforts.

“We’re giving parents the tools they need, not just to advocate for their kids’ education, but to advocate for themselves and their families, as well,” Cadogan says. 

Eyes on equity

Education Forward DC, another City Fund grantee, aims to boost access to quality education for all children, including those who face the greatest challenges because of poverty, disability, race and other factors. The group provides grants and advisory support to organizations like PAVE, as well as charter schools like KIPP DC and DC Bilingual Charter School. Education Forward DC’s ambitious five-year goal is to double the number of underserved D.C. students who are college and career ready.  

New Schools for New Orleans, which was founded by City Fund’s Kingsland, was created in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to build back and improve the city’s school system. Today, virtually all the schools in New Orleans are charter schools, and New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) has helped fuel that transition. The organization provides professional development for principals and teachers, works to improve curriculum, crafts communication and policy, and acts as a sounding board for teachers, administrators and families. 

NSNO CEO Patrick Dobard, who grew up in New Orleans and has worked in education there for 30 years, including as superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery School District, sums up his organization’s priorities this way: “We have and have always had an eye on equity—equity and systems that serve the most disadvantaged kids.” 

Focusing on results

The debate over charter schools has grown increasingly polarized in recent years. Opponents argue that charter schools shift much needed funds away from traditional public schools; others believe they undermine teachers unions. This debate often puts philanthropies that champion charter schools—including City Fund and such backers as the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Walton Foundation—in the line of fire from charter critics.

City Fund prefers to sidestep these debates and focus on results, like those in high-poverty cities like Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, for example, where student populations include large numbers of students of color. 

Both cities have shown impressive academic progress. In Washington, D.C., Education Forward’s recent analysis of standardized test results found that students made larger gains over the last decade than students in other large urban cities. As the group’s founder and CEO, Maura Marino, pointed out in an article earlier this year, “In 2011, the District was at or near the bottom of large urban districts across every subject and grade, as measured by NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment. As of the 2019 results, the District has leaped to the upper half of that list, moving 10 places in just eight years.”

Students in New Orleans have also made academic gains in recent years, according to statistics cited on NSNO’s website. For example, 75% of the class of 2019 graduated and 61% went to college, compared to a 54% graduation and 37% college attendance rate for the class of 2004. “We are not aware of any other districts that have made such large improvements in such a short time,” says Doug Harris, founding director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University, who was quoted on the NSNO website. 

Beating the odds

Kingsland, head of City Fund, is hesitant to take credit for results like these. “We’ve only been around for two years, so there hasn’t been enough time to gauge success in terms of the projects we support,” he says. Still, he points out that in the cities where the organization has worked the longest, there’s been a 40-50% decrease in the gap between city and statewide student outcomes.

“We’re happy to see this progress, but these numbers show how deep the odds are stacked against our kids,” Kingsland said. “These odds are grounded in economic mobility, and we’re sober about how much further we have to go. We didn’t get into this work simply to raise test scores. We got into this to help families get out of poverty, to increase wages and opportunities and to see families achieve their dreams.”