In the wake of COVID’s disruption, education philanthropy sits at an important crossroads. Over the last two-and-a-half decades, astounding sums of philanthropic and public dollars were spent on efforts to reform education and improve educational outcomes for students. There was particular attention given to ensuring equitable progress in literacy, math and college enrollment for student subgroups who had historically been underserved by the education system.
While investments in new academic standards, stronger accountability systems and improving educator effectiveness helped raise awareness about inequities in the education system, the overall outcomes have been disappointing, given the billions of dollars invested. Moreover, community advocates and activists charge that many reform efforts doubled down on promoting approaches and definitions of success that perpetuate white dominant cultural values. It stands to reason, then, that many philanthropists are asking themselves whether it is a better idea to put their time, talent and treasure into issues like poverty reduction or healthcare.
A recent study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education indicated that from 2011 to 2018, overall philanthropic giving increased dramatically, growing by 48%; during the same period, the proportion of philanthropic dollars invested for efforts in K-12 education shrank by about 7%. This aligns with the results of Grantmakers for Education’s 2019 benchmarking report, which documented a big growth of investment outside of K-12 education, and a move away from investment in the academic elements of K-12 in favor of areas like socio-emotional learning and whole child efforts. While COVID has revived giving in the education sector, the pre-COVID trends indicate that educational philanthropists may be reconsidering their giving strategies.
As philanthropists find themselves seeking a path forward in an uncertain time, I would encourage them not only to renew their dedication to K-12 funding, but also to commit to transformative efforts that push beyond outdated models and middling reforms, toward the human-centered education system that our students need more than ever.
My career has been spent trying to understand education programs and systems that design themselves around values that stand in contrast to the “industrial model” of school—values such as interdependence, collaboration, community, diversity, and deep, dynamic notions of knowledge and learning. I have come to think about schools falling into three broad educational orientations that capture the most common patterns in teaching and learning: (1) conventional; (2) whole child/innovative reform and (3) human-centered/liberatory.
Schools with a conventional orientation are direct descendants of the industrial-model school in terms of their overall aims, with their theories of learning and practices reflecting very little about human developmental stages and needs. Schools with a whole child/innovative reform orientation recognize the shortcomings of the conventional orientation and attempt to mitigate them by bolting on solutions. This takes the form of a multitude of initiatives and programs aimed at addressing specific gaps such as culturally responsive practices, socio-emotional learning or project-based learning.
Programs with a human-centered/liberatory orientation have been designed intentionally around a different set of values and assumptions about the purpose of education, what young people are capable of, and how learning happens. These are programs that many educational funders have already been inspired to support; they include schools within the Big Picture Learning, Native American Community Academy, Next Generation Learning Challenge, Deeper Learning, Expeditionary and Montessori networks, as well as dozens of one-off programs around the country that have been built in collaboration with communities to serve local needs and contexts. Not only do they better reflect what we know about learning, their intentional focus on belonging and identity formation help mitigate many of the challenges students experience as a result of poverty and inequitable social systems.
My research indicates that reform efforts over the last two decades succeeded in moving many schools from orientation (1) to orientation (2). However, to achieve what we say we want to achieve—ensuring every child is served well by our education system and in ways that allow them to achieve their full potential—we need to go further and transform the education system from orientation (2) to orientation (3). This means we need to identify, examine and discard many assumptions deeply embedded in the mindsets, curriculum, assessments, systems, structures and policies of American education.
This next set of shifts requires us to embrace the process of transformation, which is fundamentally different from the “reform” we have undertaken.
Transformation, especially at a systems level, is not easy. It requires time, space and intentionality to break out of old ways of being and doing things, to co-create something new that is inclusive of diverse voices and perspectives around purpose and outcomes. It is messy, iterative, constantly evolving work. It requires permission to be bold, design, iterate, reflect and try again to build elements of an education system that has never before existed. Those elements include new ways of taking into account the learning that happens inside and outside of school, new ways of assessing what young people know and can do, and new approaches to accountability that reflect the dynamic nature of human growth and learning.
My years at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, early in my career, taught me that a huge part of the power of philanthropy is its capacity to invest in the kinds of things that public systems cannot because public systems do not have the gifts of patient capital, flexibility and an ability to define new metrics for success that value both the process of change and changed outcomes. I learned that philanthropists have more agency when it comes to investing in long-term wins that might entail short-term risk. I appreciated the power of philanthropy to convene stakeholders across lines of politics, sector and ideology in service of building and sustaining those capable of operationalizing lofty visions inside schools, organizations and communities.
If ever there was a need to bring these capabilities to bear, it is now. This is a crossroads moment. We can choose to continue tinkering around the edges of a grossly inadequate system by investing only in reform, or we can commit to improving our existing system. This will require making room for the conversations, the research and the development it will take to build a transformed system, guided by students, educators and advocates that have been working within this space for decades. It is a both/and approach that invites education funders to step thoughtfully into the uncertainty of transformation—investing in and working as partners with communities and stakeholders who already hold a different vision for the future of education.
With that in mind, I would offer three concrete suggestions:
Make sure all education funders and leaders within your foundation understand the distinction between whole child/innovative reform, and human-centered approaches, including what to look for in the latter. Understanding how they are different invites us to think in new ways about building new systems and structures that promote and support human-centered practice.
Convene stakeholders within your network who are already doing human-centered work to learn from them what needs to be supported in order to do their work better, and share it with other educators. Set aside a small portion of your portfolio to invest in work centered on these transformative efforts, and plan to put what you learn into action.
As COVID disruptions continue into the 2021–22 academic year, limiting our ability to track progress through testing and other accountability regimes, fund communities to engage in new conversations about how we can know whether our schools are serving all students well. What kinds of indicators or data were devalued or neglected during our last effort at building better accountability systems and how can these be incorporated now?
As the nation seeks to create equality and inclusion in our institutions and organizations, education is where we must start. We need philanthropists to help support that change.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen is chief program officer at Grantmakers for Education and the author of “The Future of Smart.”
