Social Innovation in Education Delivery

Sector Study: Social Innovation in Education Delivery

Alex Hiam

There is a flood of news, year after year, about new models and initiatives. In fact, we love stories about underperforming (usually inner city) schools that are turned around in a few years. First it was the tough love, ex marine drill sergeant principal, with his baseball bat in one hand and high expectations in the other, who, by dint of heroic persistence, bullied and cajoled his students to A-plus performance. The answer, of course: Find more leaders like him! (The I-believe-in-you coach who turns around the looser team is a residual variant on this character; each is often celebrated in unlikely-hero B movies from Hollywood; but neither has actually transformed education on a widespread level.)

From Get Tough to Get Smart?

After the get-tough-leadership model came and went (a few lawsuits helped nail its coffin shut), there was the halcyon period of industrial engineering, in which total quality management engineers were hired from industry to show schools how to reduce variation. The idea being, if Detroit can learn to make cars with fewer defects, so can Detroit’s schools. However, while every F-150 pickup truck ought to be identical, student’s clearly aren’t, and trying to get rid of human variation proved a relatively unrewarding task.

The measurement and testing ethos dovetailed into into the next fad, championed by the second Bush white-house, and we now have educational testing to the core curriculum as our legacy; a sort of sledge hammer approach to normative performance that wouldn’t do an industrial production line much good, and seems positively destructive to excellent teaching; but it may help identify the worst pockets of performance and encourage investment in them (I’m trying to find something positive to say about this model, since it seems to be here to stay...).

If You Can’t Fix It, Abandon Ship and Launch Another (and Another, and...)

The charter school movement introduced another dramatic wave of innovation. In my own little community, here in the Connecticut River Valley, we have charter schools that teach entirely in Chinese, schools that cater to families living in more remote hill towns, and schools that specialize in the performing arts. Elsewhere in the country, science charter schools are springing up (among many others).

Or Put a Corporate CEO and His Shareholders In Charge? Really?

Privatization swept public school innovation some years ago, but (at least in the headlines) appears to be dying down. The idea that, simply by making a school into a for-profit, it will be run better and thus teach better, proved (as far as I can see) to be wholly based on some simplistic, almost religious, faith in Adam Smith’s invisible hand, which, while it may make economies tick, didn’t improve the clockworks at schools to any great or permanent degree.

Out of the Inner City Ashes Arises Great Publicity (if not Great Success)

Currently, a wave of inner-city reinvestment is producing new success models that the media coverage likes to paint as the final solution. An exemplar of this approach is the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), Michigan’s school improvement district, which some years ago took over a dozen Detroit schools. As reported in Education Week  by Tom Vander Ark, the innovative model produced several years of improved test scores (which is termed ‘student growth’). Vander Ark quotes Deputy Chancellor Mary Esselmen as saying, “The kids get the system now—it will be like two extra months of school.” The biggest part of this innovation, then, is adding more school time to remedy the off-pace test scores. But, hey, if Education Week, the premier news source for the sector, blesses it with such positive coverage, maybe this really is the ultimate solution.

Or not? Dig just a few clickable links deeper, and you learn that the journalist covering the story, Mr. Vander Ark, is not so much a journalist as his own firm’s best publicist: His day job CEO of company/s that sell the model he writes about. Here is his self-styled mini-bio from a company-hosted blog: “Tom Vander Ark is founder and CEO of Getting Smart. He is also a partner in Learn Capital and a director of iNACOL, Digital Learning Institute, Imagination Foundation, Charter Board Partners, Strive for College, and Bloomboard.”

Is It A Real Innovation, a Sales Pitch, or Something even more Insidious?

I may be overly cynical. Michigan’s Governor Snyder lauded the innovative Detroit program for another, potentially quite compelling reason: It used software, specifically a learning platform from School Improvement Network called BUZZ (later, perhaps to sidestep bad press, renamed GAGE) to provide students with an on-line learning experience that (according to promoters) would customize learning to each individual. BUZZ had originated in a similar corporate-government-school collaboration in Kansas City, where it had not been a grand success. Recent exposés (i.e., by www.eclectablog.com) show that these school districts were being used, often at considerable expense, as lab rats for testing and development of software. I don’t need to rehash the whole sordid story here, but I can’t resist quoting from one email a journalist dug out, from someone on the corporate side to school administrator Mary Esselmen, that included the following rather pithy paragraph: “The attached invoice, totaling $1,009,660, includes $408,500 for four “coaches”; and $271,000 for high-tech cameras (used in large measure to video classroom and teacher activity that is uploaded onto PD360, SINET’s professional development product); and $80,000 for BrainHoney/Buzz.”

Whatever exactly all that refers to, it doesn’t sound like students are getting more of what they need, it sounds like software developers are getting what they need; and that can be rather expensive.

A further revelation about the Detroit experiment: Young Teach For America staff were used to develop curricula for the software—not quite the stated purpose for sending them into inner city school districts. Education reform is often not as philanthropic or sincere as it presents itself to be. That’s a problem that may be somewhat widespread in social innovation; I’ll get to it in a future blog.

Comprehending Comprehensive Reform

A more sincere and potentially beneficial reform movement is known by the rubric ‘comprehensive school reform’, and is receiving funding from the (seemingly ubiquitous) Gates Foundation, along with The Lloyd A. Fry Foundation through a 2014 grant of $39,200 to Association of Illinois Middle-Grade Schools for the Chicago School Transformation Network (Source: www.fryfoundation.org/grants), plus additional grants for training teachers and students. 

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has also been quite helpful. It gave $470,800 between 1997 and 2000 to the Michigan Coalition of Essential Schools to “support continuous improvements in school culture, faculty practice, and student learning by creating a professional development model with and for principals and teachers in middle-grades schools.” There were other funders and grants, but I don’t know that listing all of them clarifies much, except that one can spend a lot of money retraining teachers and administrators in pursuit of comprehensive reform.

I am interested to read, on the Fry Foundation’s Web site (in a foundation news post dated Feb. 15, 2013, just about two years ago now), that, “The Foundation has decided to take a hiatus from funding in the Teacher Professional Development area.” I don’t see follow-up funding since then. Perhaps this means the foundation’s board decided the initiative was unsuccessful or too fraught with “uncertainties” to quote one explanation given in the news release. If so, I don’t think we should find fault with them for that. It takes courage to put support behind an educational experiment, and perhaps more courage to turn off the support tap when the evidence doesn’t come back looking as positive as hoped. But that’s all part and parcel of investing in social innovation, and the hope is that it’s a learning experience, and not just an endless cycle of hopping on the latest bandwagon until it, too, crashes and we have to jump off.

Is It Feasible to Experiment on Schools?

I think there are some misconceptions about social innovation in general, and educational innovation in particular, that fuel the invest-and-crash cycles:

Misconception #1: That your bright new idea is on the cutting edge. Everyone thinks that, having warmed seats in many a classroom, we are potential experts on education and how to reform it. Every school board is made up of concerned amateurs. Education is a remarkably participatory sport. And yet, it’s a highly complex and sophisticated activity, and unless you’ve trained to design curricula (for example), you probably aren’t quite ready to transform the entire system based on an ah-hah moment you had in the shower this morning. There are experts studying what does and doesn’t work (just like there are experts on, say, how to send space ships to Mars), and it might be wiser to invest in ways of getting them more engaged in innovation.

Misconception #2: The idea that you can “experiment” on a school without being inhumane and nonscientific. It’s inhumane because you owe it to the students to do your level best for them, not to spin the experimental roulette wheel with their futures at stake. Pushing some half-baked software into Detroit public schools runs the risk of mucking up an entire cohort’s education. Oops. And let’s say you do that little experiment (like the Governor did a few years ago). I bet it’s not actually set up carefully enough, with double blind experimental structure and an eye to provability, to be able to say anything decisive after the experiment. Sure, scores went up during an experiment in which hundreds of additional teachers, administrators and consultants descended upon a handful of schools, but was it because of the added attention and manpower, or the model itself? Usually it’s the added attention, which cannot be sustained once the initial excitement, and the outside funding, goes away.

Misconception #3: That one can promote a new idea at the same time one tests it. There's no excuse for jumping the finish tape and declaring to the media that yours is the winning new model, long before you’ve even implemented it to the point of stability and long-term replicability. And yet that’s what we see, time and again: Each new idea is touted as the ultimate solution, long before it’s even been tested and studied for long enough to verify the initial claims.

Misconception #4: That we really can invent new approaches in established schools. I’m not so sure that the next breakthrough in education will come from someone’s brand new program. I ideas keep getting rolled out within the very old and rather rigid structure of our current public school model. Curricula have to be designed to the common core and the tests built on it. Classes have to be taught by current staff, in current classrooms, etc. etc. We work with what we have. That may be hampering true innovation to a far greater degree than anyone quite realizes. What if, for example, it would be much better to educate elementary and middle schoolers in very small neighborhood schools, with mixed-age groups, friendly, almost family-style administration, and high teacher-student ratios? It might be a better model, but we aren’t going to be able to test it in current schools, because they are set up to take advantage of the economies of scale by putting hundreds of children under one roof, rather than a few dozen children.

Looking Beyond Conventional Schools

There are some apparently successful alternative models that operate on the margins of the education system by charging tuition instead of qualifying for school board funding. For example, the Montessori model, well known as a high standard in preschools, has been implemented right up through the high school level in some places around the country, but not in large numbers of schools because it does not really work in a standard public school with its emphasis on normative testing and same-grade classrooms. Academically, the Montessori approach is a lot like having every single kid on their own IEP, or individualized education plan, something only provided for those with significant disabilities in the public school setting. In a Montessori classroom, each student starts the day by drafting an agenda for themselves, selecting learning activities, and deciding when and how to do them during the day. They also decide what help they need, going to peers, computers, bookshelves, break and snack areas, or the teacher, as they see the need. The end result seems to be quite startlingly advanced and self-sufficient students who go on to success in higher education and their careers.

I’m excited about the Montessori model, and plan to study it further, but I think it will take the effort of a great many experts to work out what lessons can be learned from it and transferred to public schools. Whatever the ultimate direction of school reform (and I do suspect it will come from outside of the current public school model), it’s going to take a lot of careful, thoughtful work to develop it, and I hope that work can be funded and pursued far from the caustic taint of corporate publicity and self-promotion.

Rethinking the Foundation's Role in Social Innovation

Rethinking the Foundation’s Role in Social Innovation

Alex Hiam

Social innovation is the pursuit of new and better solutions for society’s needs, and is in theory going on in the nonprofit sector, just as it does in the for-profit sector. However, there is apparently a great deal less innovation on the social (or charitable) side than the for-profit side. A recent review of the topic finds that, “Surprisingly little is known about social innovation compared to the vast amount of research into innovation in business and science.” (Geoff Mulgan, Social Innovation: What It Is, Why It Matters and How It Can Be Accelerated, Oxford SAID Business School, 2007, The Young Foundation). The big picture is, quite simply, that business as usual, using traditional models and methods, won’t solve all our problems, and that we need to encourage new and better ideas and approaches.

As a foundation trustee who votes for and against grant proposals regularly, I have been thinking about what role foundations play in stimulating productive social innovation. I think, by and large, that giving tends to be conservative in nature, and not innovative.

‘Safe’ Giving: But Is It Smart?

Both individuals and foundations feel good about ‘safe’ gifts in which they know the organization is established and has a clear history of success. Organizations that have done the same thing, more or less, for many years, and have a long track record of above-board financial management and a reputable list of trustees and donors, look like safe bets. Many, if not most, foundations actually have policies preventing them from ‘investing’ in early stage nonprofits. For example, at my foundation, we have a long-standing policy of not wanting to provide more than 10% of the annual budget, which means we are blocked from seed funding for new organizations, unless we decide to make a rare exception to our policy. Other foundations may have policies requiring several years worth of demonstration of a program or model before they fund it.

What if 100% Success is a Sign of Failure?

I can say with some certainty that foundation trustees are nearly opposite to venture capitalists in their approach. We trustees do not want to invest in a portfolio of grants where only one or two in ten succeed, and the rest are failures. I’m not even sure we could maintain our IRS tax status if we routinely gave grants to startup nonprofits, the bulk of which then went out of business. But that is precisely what VC does. Innovative business plans are highly risky, and most new businesses will stumble and die in a ditch within the first five years of life. I cannot think of a single instance in which my foundation made a grant to an organization that then went out of business. It would be seen as a major embarrassment and a grant-making failure, that’s for sure! And yet, innovation requires risk. If we don’t make grants to risky ventures, we won’t be wrong, but neither will we ever be right about innovative new models that might benefit society were we to fund them. I am going to raise the question, at our next board meeting, of whether we ought to be pursuing, say, a 90% success rate, rather than 100%, in order to allow us to make some riskier, more innovative, grants.

Should We Break Out Our Grantmaking In New Ways?

Quickly, now, what percent of charitable giving goes to innovations, versus more established, on-going, or (to be honest) non-innovative charities and programs? Is it 1%? 10% What should it be? Actually, I don’t believe anyone really knows. I’m not even sure  what the percentage is for the foundation where I serve as trustee. The reason I don’t know is that we’ve never sliced the grant deck that way. We, like, well, every foundation and almost every report on philanthropy every published, break out giving by sector or type of organization. Nationally, for example, we know that about a third to a half of philanthropic dollars (and volunteer hours) go to religious organizations. Education comes in a distant second, at about 16%, followed by human services at 12% (stats are from a 2013 report by the National Philanthropic Trust; an older study by Boston College gave these stats for 2002: Religion 53%, education 10%, human services 8%, youth development 6%, health 6%, arts & culture 3%, environment and animal welfare 3%). The details are hard to nail down nationally and vary depending on source and method, but generally speaking, there is agreement that religion gets the biggest slice of the philanthropic pie, followed by education and human services.

At our foundation, we don’t give to religion, although we occasionally give to religious organizations (i.e., to fund a youth center, or to help rebuild an African American church that was burned down). Our breakout emphasizes categories like medical research, the arts, education, and social services. We give to educational institutions (more often at the college or university level than below), to museums, to research institutes, to local and regional charities targeting at-risk youth, etc. etc.

In 2014, our grants totaled $1,672,500, spread across 69 organizations, for an average gift of $24,239 per organization. The largest grant was $50,000 to the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston (we are Boston based and Mass.-focused). Examples of relatively small, $10,000 grants include Mass. Audubon Society, the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, and Kestrel Land Trust (all three being in the environmental sector, but the first being long-established, and the second and third representing relatively innovative programs that are emerging as new models in the sector, rather than being older and fully established). We are, at under $2 mil/year, a small foundation (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave many individual grants that were larger than our total grants for the year, just to put us into perspective). However, I would hazard an educated guess, based on talking with other trustees over the years and reading annual reports from their foundations, that our reporting practices are very similar to larger foundations, with a general breakout of gifts by sector being the main strategic statistic in most reports.

Rethinking Foundation Reporting & Self-Analysis

If the main challenge of a foundation board is to decide whether they ought to shift more resources from, say, the arts to the environment, then the traditional approach to reporting is great. But what if the goal is to begin making a conscious effort to support social innovation? Then we need another kind of statistic. To help me understand this challenge, I’ve put together some examples of organizations we support at the Edwin S. Webster Foundation, based on whether the grants aim at innovation or not.

Examples of Grants Supporting Ongoing Activity (Non-Innovative):

Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, general operations

Mass. General Hospital, general operations

New York Botanical Garden, general operations

Hospice of North Shore & Greater Boston

The Boston Symphony Orchestra

Examples of Grants Supporting New Activity with Explanations (Innovative):

Establishment of mentoring program for minority students at MIT

Designed to address health and retention problems observed at the college; appears to be a successful new program.

Support for operations of MIT’s CoLab (Community Innovators Lab, run by the  Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning

“CoLab supports the development and use of knowledge from excluded communities” and “facilitates the interchange of knowledge and resources between MIT and community organizations” because “community knowledge can drive powerful innovation and can help make markets an arena for supporting social justice.” [Quotes from colab.mit.edu/about, 2/23/2015]

Support for expansion of Boston Medical’s SPARK Center

SPARK stands for Supporting Parents And Resilient Kids. The organization’s Web site describes it as “a model childcare program offering comprehensive, integrated, state-of-the-art services for children and families whose lives are affected by medical, emotional and/or behavioral challenges.  The program serves Boston's highest-risk children, ages infant through 5 year olds:  those living with complicated medical conditions (including neuro-developmental challenges, failure to thrive and HIV/AIDS); as well as children who are involved with the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families due to significant family and social concerns (including child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, adult substance abuse).  A new group of fragile children now attend SPARK.  These are 'very low birth weight' babies who were born too early and too small, and need our specialized care and attention.” [Quoted from www.bmc.org/pediatrics-sparkcenter.htm, 2/23/2015]

Startup funding for a Research Training Pipeline at Amherst College

Provided funding toward post-doc positions in an advanced chemistry lab, intended for groups underrepresented in STEM in the past. Intent is to help faculty create STEM opportunities that may guide women/minorities into advanced science careers.

In each of these instances, the trustees have decided to support something innovative that seems to address a need in a new way, or to address a new or emerging need (i.e., Kestrel Trust is preserving farmland within driving distance of Boston, a concept that wasn’t on anyone’s agenda until relatively recently). These grants seem to take a lot more discussion time, and to need more research and explanation, as well as to be somewhat difficult to monitor in follow-up, than non-innovative grants. However, they can be rewarding, in the sense that the trustees may feel, in hindsight, that they contributed to the development or spread of a good new approach or idea.

I notice that my foundation’s grants for innovation are, by and large, given to an innovative program nested within a well-established, and less innovative, nonprofit. MIT is a huge institution, and its fundamental business model is conservative and safe. You won’t be criticized for a grant to MIT because it suddenly went out of business and lost the money. In fact, all the above examples of innovative grant-making take advantage of the safety of a large umbrella organization that is not itself new or highly innovative in form. We may be sheltering ourselves unduly from risk by only pursuing innovations that are packaged in the relative safety of mature, well established nonprofits. I would guess that this bias might be found in many foundations and in individual giving as well.

I only find one example in recent years or what might be considered a pure investment in social innovation on the part of my foundation. For several years, starting near its founding, we have made grants to Full Frame Initiative (Greenfield MA), which studies government and nonprofit programs in order to find the most effective models and share them. In language from its Web site, “FFI works to break cycles of poverty and violence through systems change.” It’s been an interesting organization to support, partly because we at the foundation often find ourselves a bit puzzled about what it’s doing in its effort to “remove systemic barriers.” It’s simple to say, for instance, that an organization “runs soup kitchens.” It’s harder to assess one that uses new language and concepts to describe its work. But of course that is going to be part and parcel of really innovative organizations, and so we at foundations must be prepared to think harder and be more open minded, even to the extent of acquiring new vocabulary and learning new methodologies in order to understand the grant proposals we receive. 

Here is a new way to slice the deck on our foundation’s giving (with my rough estimates by category).

Category based on Degree of Social Innovation                                 Historic Target

Low: Support for established nonprofits (non-innovative)                       85%          ?

Medium: Support for innovative initiatives in established nonprofits       14%   ?

High: Seed or early stage support for innovative new nonprofits               1%          ?

Setting New Targets

I am going to propose to my fellow trustees that we set some targets to increase our investment in social innovation. Perhaps we could aim for a 50/40/10 pattern over time, for example. If we embraced that goal, how would we go about pursing it?

For one thing, we would need to begin categorizing applications based on their degree of social innovation. That’s not a requisite section in our on-line application form, but it is often addressed in the narrative of an application, where a new initiative and its intended benefits may be described. For us (as perhaps for many smaller foundations, as well as individual donors), there is no research department to analyze the proposal, so we have to take time to do site visits, ask questions, look for comparisons, and so forth, before we feel ready to vote on a proposal.

An innovative program is exciting, but harder to evaluate, and may need a longer lead time for preparation before it can be voted on. What could we as a foundation do to innovate our way around this challenge? One idea would be to ask for innovative proposals at an earlier date, giving us, say, an extra month for their evaluation. Another would be to develop some guidelines for presenting innovations that do some of our homework for us. Applicants could provide references to new terms, methods or models, as well as comps or examples where similar ideas have been rolled out (there may be a benchmark elsewhere in the nation that we, as a regional foundation, are unaware of).

Doing Things Differently

Some foundations have posed of themselves the question, “What major innovation would we like to see someone develop?” Then they put it out to there that they want proposals on the topic. for instance, RTI International (a nonprofit research institute) targeted the toilet as in need of innovation (because flush toilets are impractical in many parts of the world, where the related infrastructure is not present). The Gates Foundation got behind the goal with a $1.2 million grant to help develop a free-standing, flushless toilet design.

We could, at our foundation, put a similar goal out there and request proposals on it. For instance, despite the great work of organizations like Habitat for Humanity, low cost, comfortable residences are very hard to build or buy, and modern building codes (in our state and many others) add to their costs. We could challenge nonprofits to come up with less expensive forms of housing that can realistically be permitted and built in our state. Certainly we cannot expect to receive many proposals on the topic unless we state that we are interested in it.

Kendal Charitable Funds (a Pennsylvania nonprofit that does grant-making) has set up a Promising Innovations Selection Committee whose focus is to make grants in social innovation. To improve its efficiency and effectiveness, the committee selects a topic (otherwise, the committee might feel daunted by the challenge of understanding a diverse range of applications). The 2013-14 grant topic was elder abuse, and a grant of $25,000 was made to Bet Tzedek Legal Services to pilot an elder abuse prevention program within religious communities. Perhaps every foundation, even small and midsized ones, needs a promising innovations committee, made of people who are willing and qualified to "PIC" innovative proposals.

How Much Impact Can Foundations Have?

In the U.S. today, foundations account for only 15% of giving (according to the National Philanthropic Report, 2013), while individuals and households account for 72%, bequests make up 8%, and corporations contribute 5% of total giving. Still, that 15% amounts to $50.28 billion a year, not an insignificant sum. And foundations, by virtue of their structure and practice, are more likely to be able to be thoughtfully analytical in the pursuit, selection, and monitoring of social innovations than individuals or corporations. I think that foundations, with their in-place systems for formal proposal and review, are already reasonably well set up to evaluate innovative proposals. By making some small changes in how we set and track our giving goals, and by innovating to some degree in the ways in which we recruit and evaluate proposals, we could step up to take the lead in stimulating social innovation nationally.

(Alex Hiam is a trustee at the Edwin S. Webster Foundation, Boston, Mass., and a writer and teacher interested innovation and creativity.)