A foundation goes to school: Bill and Melinda Gates shift from computers in libraries to reform in high schools

Education Next, Wntr, 2006 by Paul T. Hill

The biggest philanthropy in the world sits in an unmarked building next to an industrial dry dock. It does little to attract attention, but everyone knows it's there. And even though its official address is a post office box, everyone involved in education reform knows that this particular mail slot means a half-billion dollars a year to help fix our public schools.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, P.O. Box 23350, Seattle, Washington, a philanthropy created by the Microsoft founder and his wife in 2000 and now employing more than two hundred people and worth almost $30 billion, more than a billion of which it gives away each year. The foundation has already invested nearly a billion dollars in an effort to redesign the American high school. It supports some 1,500 existing schools; 450 of them are either restructured or brand new. Chicago is opening 100 new schools with the help of Gates Foundation money; New York City, 200. Gates is putting money into high-school redesign in Oakland, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Boston.

Not all of the Gates Foundation money goes to education: thirty-five percent is earmarked for global health initiatives, and a sizable amount stays with social-welfare and civic-improvement programs in the Pacific Northwest. However, enough of it is spent trying to improve the nation's public schools (see Figure 1) that it is worth asking if Bill Gates, a college dropout, knows what he's doing. In fact, when the world's richest man started his philanthropic work, in the mid-1990s, he was handing out computers to public libraries, which seemed a perfectly reasonable endeavor for a former computer geek who runs the world's largest software company.

How did the young mogul (Gates just turned 50) come to the conclusion, as he told the nation's governors at an Education Summit in Washington, D.C. in 2005, that "America's high schools are obsolete"? More important, how did Gates and his giving, through various philanthropic proxies, evolve from rewiring libraries to reinventing the American high school?

One view is that the technology wizard-turned-businessman is simply applying to philanthropy his genius for finding empty market niches. That strategy is easy to understand in international health, buying malaria and AIDS vaccines for destitute African communities and creating new systems for getting them delivered. But if there are miracle education drugs, they haven't emerged yet. And the education delivery systems, though they exist, don't work very well, especially with bold new initiatives, which is what the Gates Foundation is attempting in education.

L'Etat, ce n'est pas Moi!

First, a word from the critics, as a way, perhaps, of explaining what's at stake here and what Gates Foundation money has come to represent in the education-reform business. This particular branch of criticism is worried primarily that Gates is spending his money in the wrong places (see Table 1). The problems of elementary school, for instance, still aren't solved, they say. Promoting small schools, they grumble, is a goal too narrowly focused on raising test scores and too insensitive to the communitarian roots of the preexisting small-schools movement.

Though there are always legitimate grounds for disagreement about priorities, Gates Foundation defenders, me among them, see these criticisms as derived from misplaced expectations. A foundation can create one ingrate and ten disappointed suitors by making just one grant. (It's only right that I should admit to being, at different times, both a happy grantee and a disgruntled rejectee.)

The bottom line is that even the Gates Foundation can't do everything. It is not a government agency. While it is a rich organization by philanthropic standards, it is a very small player in the $435 billion public-education marketplace. (See "The New Philanthropists," features, Fall 2005.) Despite its size, the Gates Foundation needs to pick its shots. As Gene Bottoms of the Southern Regional Education Board commented in an early foundation planning session, "Well, Mr. Gates has got a lot of money, but even he can't pay to solve every problem we can name."

But can Gates solve any problem? Can his foundation make a difference in education? Is $300 million a year too much? Or not enough?

The Early Days

The foundation's focus was not always on high schools, says Tom Vander Ark, MBA, engineer, businessman turned school superintendent (in Federal Way, Washington, an industrial suburb between Seattle and Tacoma), and now head of the Gates Foundation's education work. In fact, in the beginning it wasn't even about schools. Gates entered the philanthropy world in the mid-1990s, before Vander Ark came on the scene, with big investments in libraries, hoping to make Internet access universal, especially for the poor. Technology was something Bill and Melinda Gates and their close collaborators understood. They also believed Internet access would become a precondition for entry to the new economy, and they wanted to make sure poor families and poor communities weren't left out.