From Alex’s Desk    

alex.johnston@conncan.org

Filling the Gap with People Power and New Philanthropy

Recently, Education Week’s 2008 “Quality Counts” report found that Connecticut not only has America’s largest achievement gap, but that it increased faster than in any other state since 2003. Facts like these are enough to make some people wonder whether Connecticut’s achievement gap is one of those problems that our state and city governments just can’t solve.

That response is half right. This is a problem that our state and city governments can’t solve alone.

Instead, closing Connecticut’s achievement gap will require a statewide effort that draws upon two new approaches to tackling public problems: “people power” and “new philanthropy.”

As the interview with X PRIZE president Tom Vander Ark makes clear in this edition of the Compass, the “new philanthropy” movement is characterized by an ambitious focus on tackling big public challenges, a strategic approach that targets systemic problems instead of symptoms, and an overriding commitment to making funding decisions based on measurable results. The growing “people power” movement, where networks of individuals connected through new technology tackle complex public challenges, has made its presence felt in everything from the way political campaigns are structured, to the way software is written, to the way news is collected and disseminated.

Here are three ways that the combination of these two movements can make an enormous difference in the effort to close Connecticut’s achievement gap.

1. Supporting new models of success.
One of the biggest challenges in education is simply changing the conversation about what’s possible by proving that schools can actually close the achievement gap. As Tom Vander Ark notes, “… new schools give you the opportunity to create coherent and effective school environments quickly where everything works together for students and teachers.” In the past decade, new philanthropy has played a critical role in helping a number of Connecticut’s highest-performing urban public schools get off the ground. Much more will be needed to meet the demand for new high-performing schools in the coming decade.

At the same time, one of the most common characteristics of Connecticut’s school success stories (www.ctsuccessstories.org), whether new schools or traditional school “turnarounds,” is their “people-powered” approach to raising student achievement. Most often this takes the form of innovative approaches for engaging parents in their children’s education and for distributing leadership to an energized and empowered corps of teachers and staff.

2. Promoting greater transparency and accountability.
Leveraging the power of existing public investments in education requires strong, independent sources of information. Google.org, one of the most recent “new philanthropy” giants, put it this way in announcing their own priorities for giving: “…providing meaningful, easily accessible information to citizens and communities, service providers, and policymakers is a key part of creating homegrown solutions to improve the quality of public services.”

While the Connecticut State Department of Education has a critical role to play in advancing school accountability, the most effective accountability is the “people-powered” kind driven forward by an informed and engaged citizenry. ConnCAN’s letter grades on more than 1,000 public schools in Connecticut (www.ctreportcards.org) are just one in a new generation of tools that hold the potential to expand the transparency and accountability of our schools by empowering Connecticut citizens with the facts.

3. Securing policy changes.
Traditional philanthropy has often shied away from funding advocacy work. New philanthropy embraces it. As Vander Ark told us, “One of the important lessons learned at the Gates Foundation was that in addition to demonstration schools and districts, momentum in the field really needed to be coupled with advocacy work.”
 
Making the most of this new philanthropic commitment to advocacy will require fresh initiatives to help ordinary citizens make their voices heard. ConnCAN’s web-based advocacy tools and parent-centered organizing provide one platform for doing so, and other nonprofit organizations like CT Parent Power and the CT PTA provide additional opportunities to take this effort to scale.

While our public institutions may not be able to close Connecticut’s achievement gap all by themselves, when these existing efforts are leveraged by a growing emphasis on people power and new philanthropy we can indeed jumpstart the systemic changes needed to secure “Great Schools for All.”