The ConnCAN Interview: Tom Vander Ark

About Tom Vander Ark

Tom Vander Ark is President of the X PRIZE Foundation, an educational non-profit prize institute that offers multi-million dollar awards for breakthrough innovations that benefit humanity. Previously, Vander Ark served as Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where he developed and implemented more than $3.5 billion in scholarship and grant programs. In December, 2006, Newsweek readers voted Vander Ark the most influential baby boomer in education. Prior to his role with the Gates Foundation, Vander Ark served as superintendent of one of Washington State’s larger school districts which has been recognized for narrowing achievement gaps and reducing administrative costs. Beginning his career in energy, Vander Ark has an MBA in Energy Finance from the University of Denver and a BS in Mineral Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.

You’ve followed a non-traditional path in your career with education and philanthropy. For the benefit of our readers, please explain how you got involved in education.

When I became an executive at age 30, the company’s president told me that it was one of my responsibilities to adopt at least one children’s charity where we were headquartered in Colorado, and I picked the Colorado Children’s Campaign—a statewide education and children’s wellness advocacy group. I got quite involved in educational advocacy and helped that organization pass the first charter school bill in Colorado. That experience convinced me that I wanted to work in education full-time—although given my background, I really had no idea how I would do that. Some time later, I was contacted by a friend who was a former superintendent. He was conducting a search for a Washington State school district that was looking for a non-traditional candidate. Mostly as a favor to him, I applied, and to both of our surprise, I got the job and went there three weeks later. During my tenure, we went from having the highest administrative cost of any district in our state to the lowest and improved on all the metrics that we set. My deputy took over after I went to the Gates Foundation eight years ago and is still there doing great work. In the last few years the Education Trust has identified the district as one of the best “gap-zappers” in the state for reducing the achievement gap.

What was your transition like from superintendent to the Gates Foundation?

When I joined the Gates Foundation in the summer of 1999, Bill and Melinda had decided that they wanted to do more in education but hadn’t really determined what that should be. They gave me the wonderful opportunity to spend about six months travelling the country and interviewing people and putting a plan together, which I presented at the end of November 1999. I asked them for $2 billion—which they thought might be a little too much to start with, considering that the foundation had very few assets in the bank at this time. But it is interesting to note that over the course of the next seven years, that is almost exactly what we spent on school improvement, and, in addition, we invested another $2 billion in scholarships. So the family was very generous and supportive of the plans we developed.

What types of investments did you find were most and least effective?

The two most effective investments were for new school development and policy advocacy.

In terms of the least effective, the unfortunate truth is that we still don’t have reliable ways to dramatically improve existing schools. That said, we made the largest percentage of our giving to public school districts. Initially we gave large sums of money to support the plans developed by public school districts. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been surprising, but very few of those grants produced favorable results. And most public school districts didn’t really know what to do and didn’t have the capacity to do it if they did.

Later on we found it much more productive to provide planning assistance to urban districts and as a result brought a large number of consulting firms into the business: Bridgespan, McKinsey, BCG, Parthenon. All of those firms developed pretty good internal capacity to support this kind of work, and we found that it dramatically improved the quality of the proposals and outcomes for students.

What advice would you give Connecticut foundations that are looking to close the state’s achievement gap?
 
One: Support effective charter school networks. This has two objectives: to expand quality choices for families who don’t have them and to expand the number of model schools that are closing the gap.

Two: Support thoughtful district improvement plans, like the one in Hartford. Given the current predominant role that districts have in the United States, this implies that as a philanthropist you have to help school districts that are willing to work aggressively with high goals for all students and a strong accountability system—districts that have a commitment to measurement, transparency, performance, and choice.

Three: In addition to new school development and thoughtful school improvement efforts, investing in policy advocacy is one of the highest-leverage philanthropic activities that you can support because changing state policy can have a very large and long lasting impact for students.

Do philanthropists need to re-imagine their role in reforming public education, or are a lot of these new strategies already in play?

We’re certainly seeing a movement in philanthropy towards performance and impact, and I think that most foundations are working really hard to measure and improve the impact of their grantmaking. I still don’t think that there’s enough philanthropic support for policy research and policy advocacy, but we’re starting to see leading foundations recognize the need for promising and productive advocacy and make significant investments in those organizations.

Connecticut is often viewed in the national philanthropic community as a small state outside of the national education discussion. What excited you about getting involved in Connecticut through ConnCAN’s advisory board?

I mentioned my experience with the Colorado Children’s Campaign, so early on I was convinced that a small, focused advocacy group could improve the lives of children, and I don’t think there’s a better statewide education advocacy organization in the country than ConnCAN. It has already demonstrated impact in the state and serves as a very good example of the power of well-informed policy advocacy.

At the same time, Connecticut is home to schools that are national examples of what’s possible. We need to couple model schools with thoughtful advocacy that really lays out the path moving forward for parents and policymakers, and I think ConnCAN does a great job with that. With the combination of a corps of great schools and a powerful advocacy group, I think there’s a chance to make a big difference.

Finally, Connecticut is also a place where there are persistent achievement gaps, and so while the state has a lot going for it, it is a microcosm of the most difficult issue of our time, and that’s the achievement gap in our elementary and secondary schools.

As you know, under Steven Adamowski, Hartford is implementing an “All Choice” turnaround plan grounded in full parental choice, investments in new high-performing public schools, greater autonomy for principals, and a financial system where money follows the child. Are those the right elements to pursue in seeking to turn around Connecticut’s lowest performing school district?

Yes. I think he’s one of the smartest superintendents in the country, and I very much support his efforts in Hartford. Creating a plan based on accountability and autonomy and then actually implementing it with fidelity is difficult. But this approach has the benefit of making the rules clear for the first time. It needs to be clear that principals are actually responsible for student learning, and then they need to be given the budget and the autonomy to improve student learning.

At each point in your career you appear to have been at the cutting edge in the emergence of new ways to tackle big public challenges. What have you learned from those experiences?

One of my underlying beliefs is that the world is changing faster than government is able to deal with it. The problems that we face grow exponentially more complicated and interrelated, and simultaneously our politics become more partisan and less able to grapple with complexity. To me, this signals a vital need for the third sector—groups like ConnCAN—to first of all identify the problems that we’re dealing with and then to create a solution-oriented dialogue.

The fundamental thing that ties together the last 20 years for me is a commitment to making a contribution, and that’s another thing that I appreciate about ConnCAN and those supporting ConnCAN. It’s a group of people who are all committed to making a contribution, who have a sense of community, and who understand the vital role that public education plays in building a strong state community.

How does your new work as president of the X PRIZE Foundation differ from your work at the Gates Foundation?

Philanthropy, like venture capital, is a push model. It requires you to develop a hypothesis about how a sector will evolve, to identify the most promising participants in that sector, and then to hope that the organization you’ve backed is successful and that the sector evolves as anticipated.

A prize, on the other hand, is a pull mechanism. If you can define a difficult, yet achievable goal and then invite the world to compete, that action can mobilize a disproportionate amount of new resources in the form of money and intellect to attack a problem. I was attracted to the X PRIZE board’s interest in developing new prizes in energy, environment, health, poverty reduction, and in education. We hope to be surprised by the number of approaches that competitors take to solve difficult problems.
 
If people are excited about these projects with the X PRIZE Foundation, how can they get involved?

They could just send me an email at tom@xprize.org. We’re still considering a number of options on the education front. We are trying to determine where to start and how to structure these competitions. We hope in the next few months to lay out what is likely to be a sequence of prizes and hope at that time to be able to identify potential sponsors as well.