Reconnecting Education and Foundations: Turning Good Intentions into Educational Capital (review)

This volume was published as part of the centennial celebration of the founding of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Many volumes are published for such ceremonial occasions; but more often than not, they fail dismally to rise to the significance of the events they are written to memorialize. This book is a clarion exception to that pattern. It is an important and, indeed, significant book because the editors and contributing authors raise many of the most vital questions about the relationships between large foundations and education and offer their answers. These questions are often not explored anywhere else with a degree of credibility equal to that of these editors and chapter authors.

Moreover, those responsible for creating this book are hardly fainthearted scholars who mince words. Rather these authors do the unusual by daring to tell foundations not only why they should be more supportive of K–16 education, but also how they might be most effective in doing so. In making their case, however, they neither start nor stop with rhetoric, but provide quantitative, qualitative, and evaluative data on the kinds of initiatives that foundations have supported in education; and they offer carefully analyzed, evidence-based arguments for the thoughtful, frequently revolutionary, but always well-reasoned proposals they make.

Both of the editors, as well as Lee Shulman, who wrote the foreword, and most of the chapter contributors, have had extensive experience not only in the field of education but also in foundations; and all of them bring to bear rich experience from both realms that therefore illuminates the education-foundation relationship more powerfully than if they were experienced in one realm only. The contributors can therefore analyze and propose as "we's" rather than as "us and them." And that is exactly what they do, with vision, clarity, and passion.

For the sake of the readers of this review who are interested in a bit of the substance of the recommendations, I will risk over-simplifying the richness of the analysis and recommendations in highlighting a few of the major points the authors and editors make. Their primary plea is that, in shaping strategies for grants to education, foundations should make their goal the building of "educational capital"—that is, the generation and culmination of knowledge about how best to solve the problems with which they are grappling. Moreover, they strongly urge that such strategies be developed jointly by individual foundations in partnership and/or collaboration with other foundations and with groups of beneficiary educational institutions. They make a persuasive case that, in order to do so, foundations must first become "relentless learning organizations," by continuously studying their own impact and the processes that produce it. Moreover, they correctly point out that foundations cannot become "learning organizations" without becoming more public, visible, and transparent about their work, without subjecting it to critical review and discussion, and without building on their own and on others' learning in guiding future practice in the field.

Anyone familiar with foundation practice will instantly recognize that these recommendations are as ideal as they are difficult to realize in practice, but that is hardly a reason for not proposing them. In an ideal world, foundations would partner and otherwise collaborate with other foundations. To do so, however, usually requires that the partners and collaborators give up, or at least share, the final say on the making of grants pursuant to the strategy. That level of cooperation has proven, even with good will and best intentions on all sides at the beginning, to be a troublesome reef on which well-intentioned partnerships have foundered.

Foundations are both wary and very selective about engaging in partnerships with other foundations and grantees. The editors and authors do acknowledge such obstacles to partnership, but readers would likely welcome some more extensive analysis not only of those obstacles but also of a range of creative tactics for overcoming...