AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF Bezos is the latest tech giant to splash onto the education philanthropy scene, announcing plans to develop a network of preschools funded through an initial $2 billion commitment.
"The Day 1 Academies Fund will launch an operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos wrote in a letter posted to Twitter on Thursday morning. "We will build an organization to directly operate these preschools."
In doing so, Bezos follows in the footsteps of other tech giants, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell (the widow of Steve Jobs), who have all directed through their foundations hundreds of millions of dollars – billions, in the case of Gates – to various education initiatives.
To be sure, Bezos – who also plans to use some of the money to aid nonprofits that help homeless families – is not new on the education scene. The Bezos Family Foundation, founded in 2000 and run by Bezos' parents, focuses solely on education, and earlier this year Bezos gave $33 million to a scholarship program for children brought to the United States illegally, TheDream.us.
But the uptick in philanthropic giving from such organizations has sparked heated debates about the influence they wield over public education and their overall impact.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been involved in education for nearly two decades and has directed billions of dollars into advancing policies that gave rise to the education reform movement.
Some of the foundation's biggest bets have been in its decision to back the Common Core State Standards – academic benchmarks for what students should know by the end of each grade – and its push to reimagine teacher evaluation and compensation systems based in part on student test scores.
But the foundation has been widely criticized for funneling funding into what some consider silver-bullet policies or the latest education fad.
In May 2016, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Gates Foundation, apologized for the foundation's misread of how ready – or not ready, as it turned out – states were to handle implementation of the Common Core standards. And last year, Gates himself offered somewhat of a mea culpa for the foundation's involvement in teacher evaluation.
In fact, in outlining plans for a new $1.7 billion investment last fall, the Gates Foundation made a U-turn from its typical education reform agenda to instead focus on new initiatives that include building networks of schools.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's education philanthropy hasn't been without criticism either. He was excoriated for his first foray into the space – a $100 million investment in Newark public schools in 2010 – for not taking into consideration the community's wants and needs.
He's since acknowledged "lessons learned," and has more than doubled down on his investments through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
"No effort like this is ever going to be without challenges, mistakes and honest differences among people with good intentions," he wrote on his Facebook page.
Bezos' big bucks will have a narrow focus, which could play in his favor since he'll likely sidestep messy and expensive fights over things like teacher pay and evaluation. And the spotlight on preschool comes at a time when states are struggling to find ways to provide affordable early childhood education programs, especially to low-income families.
"The space of preschool is interesting," says Jeffrey Snyder, assistant professor at Cleveland State University who has studied the impact of education philanthropy. "Other philanthropies have given to it but have not made it their sole focus. I wonder if he's trying to hollow out a space in which he is a big fish."
Also of interest to Snyder is the specific method of schooling Bezos chose, the Montessori model, which focuses self-directed, hands-on activity with only minimal direction from teachers.
"I would be interested to hear about why he settled on that model, and that question is based on lessons we've learned in giving from other granters," Snyder says, noting that one of the most common failures of recent education initiatives is pushing policies onto a community rather than asking what they need.
"Have they learned the lessons of working with the communities to create a reform that has buy-in?"
Laura Bornfreund, director of early and elementary education policy at New America agrees.
"Certainly the big philanthropic collars are really helpful and important, but community buy-in is also important," she says. "Setting some dollars aside for that community engagement and thinking around implementation and how are we going to have long-term impact is just as important as the overall idea of what kind of change can we bring to the style of education to children in low-income communities."
"Where is he thinking about starting this," she continued, "and how is he thinking about the needs in those communities and talking to families to see how familiar they are with a Montessori type of approach and what does he have in mind to help them think about whether that kind of approach is a good fit for their child and for the community."
Bornfreund says the Montessori approach and other high-quality early childhood styles should be more available in low-income neighborhoods but that it's imperative to understand what type of education those children will then matriculate into after preschool and how to ensure a smooth transition into public kindergarten.
My mind jumps to lots of questions about how this will be rolled out," she says. "It's a lot of money, so I think about things like implementation and wanting to start small and see what really works well and then scaling it up in a thoughtful kind of way."
Snyder says he'll also be interested to see in what way Bezos gives the money – through a traditional philanthropic model, for example, or a limited liability company, like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which can often be less transparent about exactly where the money is going.
Bezos offered few details in the announcement and did not say how he plans to choose the low-income communities for the preschools or who he plans to tap to run the effort.
"I'm excited about that because it will give us the opportunity to learn, invent and improve," Bezos wrote. "We'll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer."
Without knowing much more about Bezos' plans for the preschools, many in the education space were simply happy he was shining a spotlight on an issues that's vexxed states for years.
"From where I sit it's so good to see all this additional attention being drawn to the issue," says Sarah Rittling, executive director of the First Five Years Fund.
"If it's high-quality, then that's what we should be doing," she says. "Getting down the model or the specific curriculum or how it's managed or funded or who the partners are – as long as there is a high-quality setting and children are getting everything they possibly need to leave that program prepared and ready, then that's what they should be doing."
No comments:
Post a Comment