What We Know About the Ballmers’ Ed Funding: Charters, Community Schools, Early Ed and More

Rawpixel.com/shutterstock

Inside Philanthropy has been interested in the Ballmers and their giving priorities since Steve Ballmer left his job as Microsoft CEO in 2014. We’re curious because Ballmer and his wife, Connie, have a lot to give away: They are now worth around $100 billion, according to Forbes. And like so many of the ultra-wealthy, the Ballmers just keep getting richer—their worth doubled over the last two years alone. 

So how is the couple spending their fortune? Although Steve Ballmer doesn’t seem interested in joining Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos on their space odysseys, he did take a page from the billionaires’ playbook by buying a sports team, the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, for $2 billion. That’s paid off, as the team’s value has doubled since Ballmer purchased it in 2014, and, as a recent ProPublica investigation outlined, team ownership allows some very generous tax breaks.

Sports teams aside, Steve and Connie Ballmer are highly engaged in philanthropy. Forbes included the couple in its 2021 lineup of “America’s 25 Most Philanthropic Billionaires,” listing their lifetime giving at $1.4 billion. 

Their foundation, the Ballmer Group, backs a number of anti-poverty efforts, giving nationally and in three priority geographies—Los Angeles County, southeast Michigan, and Washington state. Connie Ballmer, in particular, is known for her commitment to young people, especially those in the foster care system, and she and the Ballmer Group were strong advocates for the creation of the Department of Children, Youth and Families in Washington state. Two of its main strategies support K-12 education and early child care.

As IP pointed out in a recent article, the Ballmers’ anti-poverty philanthropy is “quiet but extensive.” In fact, while not totally opaque, for a long time, it was difficult to find many details about their grantmaking. Recently, the couple has pulled back the curtain, including building out their website with a new grants database, something we always like to see. Here’s what we’re learning about the Ballmer Group’s education funding.

K-12 funding for equity

The Ballmer Group has always emphasized education as an important pillar of its anti-poverty work. In September, the foundation brought on Andrea Zayas as national director of K-12 education. Zayas has 20 years of experience in education, most recently in leadership positions at Boston Public Schools.

So what does the Ballmer Group’s education portfolio look like? Scrolling through the grants database reveals a broad range of education strategies. 

Much of the organization’s K-12 funding goes to nonprofits that provide education support for disadvantaged young people. Grantees like The Campaign for College Opportunity, Youth Guidance, and the Springboard Collaborative, as their names imply, deploy multiple approaches to improve student success. The Dave Eggers-founded nonprofit 826LA, another grantee, provides free tutoring and writing mentorship, while BellXcel offers afterschool and summer programs designed to close the achievement gap. 

A commitment to a more diverse and skilled educator pipeline is another throughline in the Ballmer Group’s funding; it supports groups including the Alliance for Education, New Leaders, TNTP’s Black Educator Excellence Cohort and Urban Teachers’ Black Educators Initiative. Teach for America, both nationally and in Washington and Los Angeles, are also on Ballmer’s list of grantees. 

Charter and community schools

A number of charter school networks and the Charter School Growth Fund are Ballmer beneficiaries. This commitment to charters is a little surprising, given that Ballmer has never positioned itself as an ardent charter champion the way the Walton Family Foundation or Mike Bloomberg have. And in recent years, many funders have been pulling back on their support for charter schools, in part because of their mixed record, as well as high-profile charter scandals. While some charter schools show impressive results, particularly for urban students of color, many do not. What is clear is that the charter movement has failed to bring about the transformation in education that many of its backers once counted on.

We reached out to the Ballmer Group to ask it about its education funding priorities and haven’t received a response, but it seems likely the organization supports certain charter schools because it considers them an avenue to success for some students, in line with its equity focus. As Nina Revoyr, Ballmer’s executive director for Los Angeles, told IP in 2019: “We believe quality charters are a significant lever of opportunity and change.” We hope to shed more light on their strategy here in the future.

The grants database also reveals the foundation’s commitment to another education strategy: community schools. Community schools are public schools that work with local organizations to address non-academic needs that impact students and their families, like healthcare, housing and food insecurity. Many educators and education experts believe that community schools represent the best way to tackle poverty and narrow the achievement gap. Ballmer funds the National Center for Community Schools, the Brookings Institute Center for Universal Education and other organizations working “to advance the efficient and effective scaling of high-quality, community schools across the country.”

Beginning at the beginning 

The Ballmer Group is also making significant investments in early childhood, an area that has gained increasing funder support in recent years. Ballmer’s largest overall investments to date have been in Blue Meridian Partners, the philanthropic collaborative that includes many of the biggest names in philanthropy. Blue Meridian is committed to the elimination of poverty—not early childhood per se, but its support for organizations like Healthy Steps and Nurse-Family Partnerships shows that the collaborative grasps the role early childhood interventions play in disrupting the cycle of poverty. 

Other Ballmer grantees in this area include Early Edge California and Start Early, which support early education, and the Alliance for Early Success, which promotes state-level advocacy for early childhood care and education.

One name in the Ballmer portfolio may seem like an unlikely education grantee: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. According to the description, the grant will support “the foundation to develop an early childhood education agenda that benefits families and providers alike, create an advisory board of state and local chambers to inform community priorities, and conduct grassroots mobilization efforts to recruit new business champions for early childhood education.” 

In fact, the Chamber of Commerce has become an increasingly vocal advocate for early childhood education in recent years, as it has recognized the crippling impact that the child care crisis is having on businesses, employees, and state and local governments. 

With so much money to give, the Ballmer Group has the means to tackle poverty from many angles—and it’s clearly doing so. Still, it could be doing even more, as IP pointed out recently. IP singled Ballmer out as “one of the top funders addressing poverty in the U.S. right now,” while urging the foundation to push for more fundamental change. “Still, despite its impressive breadth, the Ballmers’ anti-poverty portfolio doesn’t go as far as it could on tackling the problem’s structural roots.” We look forward to learning more about how this important funder’s approach evolves over time.