Category Archives: nonprofit

Philanthropy's influence on State Education Policy – Bold Ideas or More Tinkering: The Case of Ohio

Last year, the trustees of  foundation I work for provided a grant of $10,000 to support Ohio Grantmakers Forum (OGF) initiative on education for the state of Ohio.  The grant provided funding that convened   education leaders from across the State to develop policy recommendations  for Governor Ted Strickland.  The recommendations were to inform his vision for creating a school system that was ready to teach 21st Century skills.

The process of sharing ideas and knowledge from a variety of perspectives was an intellectual gift.   Some of my previous posts address parts of that experience.    The result of the year-long process were released last week by the OGF.  The day after its release, Governor Ted Strickland announced his long-awaited plan to improve education in the State of the State address on January 29, 2009.

Mr. Strickland’s address has been followed with a budget that is confusing to media pundits who admit they  do not  understand how many of his proposals will be paid for given the State’s enormous budget deficit.    What is clear however is that, two-years into his first tenure, Mr. Strickland ‘s plan is his launch of his campaign for a second term.  Curiously, the day after the budget was released, a city councilman from another part of the state  announced he would be a candidate to run against Mr. Strickland in 2010.

So the philanthropic collaboration to focus on making profound change in education in Ohio has been tempered by the frustrating realities of politics and negotiation.  Our document maps out a series of recommendations with two time horizons.  The first is a very short horizon that would address  ways to change immediate obstacles to managing  a complex organizational structure.  The issues in the short term –  changes to teacher tenure rules, teacher residency requirements, a change in the tests to determine assessment, and lengthening the school year by 20 days, enable the Governor to  garner political attention around an issue which registers high on the interest levels among residents in the state.  These changes do absolutely nothing to focus on the longer-range  need to disrupt the old way of doing education in the state.  Although the governor talks about the need and urgency to change the way education takes place in Ohio if we are to prepare students for the next century, his list of priorities focus on short -term changes that will tinker with the current system as we know it.  The longer-term need to introduce technology to innovate and improve student learning is pushed off to what I suspect could be an agenda for a second political term.  In the meantime the State will offer no clear and decisive map to guide the disruption that is urgently needed if we are to really transform teaching and learning in Ohio.

The hope that the report engendered related to truly bold programs and initiatives and investigate new approaches to learning and technology were eclipsed by political ballet that will reshuffle state dollars for the funding formula, palaver about firing teachers for just cause and finally changing the Ohio Graduation Test to an ACT test.

In my disappointment I actually saw this image running through my mind as I heard the Governor speak:

I am frustrated that the governor failed to convey the sense of urgency that is needed introduce innovation into education.  In my opinion,   pushing our recommendations to explore innovation to a back burner, demonstrates a failure of leadership.  If I had a chance to have coffee with him, I would suggest that as a leader he can and should focus on finding ways to engage the entire citizenry to understand the role of  technology and how it is transforming networks of  learning for students and the people who teach them. That means harnessing the media, universities, businesses and teachers in an effort to seek out disruptive technologies that will provide solutions to the complex task of creating new learning environments.

My participation in the drafting the OGF document gave me a new appreciation for the daunting complexity of this thing we call public education.  All would admit there is a profoundly urgent need  to  articulate a clear plan to create a technology infrastructure that will support the promise that things like cloud computing can and will have on curriculum development.  I am disappointed with the governor’s adoption of our recommendations because the speech reveals a tacit admission of not  having a clue about innovation in learning that is already underway and ready to bring to scale.   Any hope of innovation (which typically occurs with a free exchange of ideas) has been relegated to a department within the Ohio Department of Education (ODE).  It would be a miracle if anything truly innovative came out of that department unless they were willing to take the bold step of opening collaboration to people outside the ODE  who not only know but practice innovation.  One can only hope that the directors of that department embrace some of the philosophy of collaboration described by authors Phil Evans and Bob Wolf in the July – August 2005 edition of Harvard Business  Review in an article entitled Collaboration Rules.

Extraordinary group efforts don’t have to be miraculous or accidental.  An environment designed to produce cheap, plentiful transactions unleashes collaborations that break through organizational barriers.

The authors point to the open-source tool Linux to serve as the example of how to structure collaborative rules.

Corporate (and political) leaders seeking growth, learning and innovation may find the answer in a surprising place: the open-source software community.  Unknowingly, perhaps, the folks who brought you Linux are virtuoso practitioners of new work principals that produce energized teams and lower costs.  Nor are they alone.”

I find it curious that the Governor’s speech occurred on the same day in which, fifty-years earlier Pope John XXIII announced to the world his intention to convene a Vatican Council.  He used the term aggiornamiento which was a call to open the windows and bring the church up to date.  As a lapsed catholic with a nostalgic streak, I had placed some expectation that the governors speech might be an exciting call for an educational aggiornamiento or opening of the windows in which the ODE’s tradition as a closed, conservative, controlling and hierarchical structure serving the state might take place.   The ODE is not a place to expect miracles!

The list of recommendations in the report … Beyond Tinkering: Creating Real Opportunities for Today’s Learners and for Generations of Ohioans to Come urges Ohio’s leaders to …

  • Restructure the traditional model of teaching and learning.
  • Refine the state’s academic standards.
  • Create an assessment system that allows students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in different ways.
  • Ensure that we have the best teachers and principals working in all of our schools.
  • Ohio Grantmakers Forum and its partners are saying that we can no longer defend or tolerate an industrial-age school model that is out of step with the demands of the 21st century in which jobs, careers and workplaces are learning-intensive and where people often have many jobs over their lifetimes.

The recommendations reflect these realities …

  • 164 Ohio young people drop out of school every day.
  • Just 24% of Ohio high school students take a rigorous course of study, which is the best predicator of success in college.
  • Ohio colleges and universities report that more than 40% of first year students need remedial courses in mathematics and/or English.
  • And Ohio’s higher education attainment rates are among the lowest in the nation.-We’re 38th out of 50 states.

The findings are not intended meant to suggest that Ohio has ignored its education challenges. But it underscores the reality that incremental changes are not getting the job done. It challenges the Governor and policy makers to take Bolder steps and to accelerate the pace of improvement are required.

Here are some of the bold steps OGF and its partners have urged Ohio’s leaders to take:

  • Accelerate the pace of innovation by restructuring the traditional, industrial model of teaching and learning.
  • Create Ohio Innovation Zones and fund promising school and instructional models.
  • Develop a statewide plan for transforming the state’s lowest performing schools.
  • Develop a statewide strategy for making better use of technology and its applications.
  • Ensure that the state’s expectations for what all students should know and be able to do are aligned with college- and career-ready expectations.
  • Benchmark them against international standards and make sure they include 21st century skills.
  • Create a balanced assessment system that allows students to demonstrate their  knowledge and skills in different ways, informs teaching strategies and improves learning, and provides a complete picture of how schools are doing against a consistent set of expectations.
  • Refine Ohio’s academic standards and restructure the state’s assessment system
  • Ensure that Ohio has the best teachers and principals working in all of its classrooms and schools.
  • Strengthen standards and evaluation for teachers and principals, and create model hiring and evaluation protocols based on the standards.
  • Provide financial incentives for schools and districts to improve teaching and learning environments.
  • Strengthen the awarding of tenure.
  • Develop new compensation models that improve the connections among teaching excellence, student achievement and compensation.
  • These are tough times … and they call for tough choices.
  • The extreme fiscal challenges facing the state of Ohio today provide a great opportunity, if not a mandate, to look at how Ohio invests its current education resources.

Many of these recommended actions do not require new funding. Yet, some may necessitate a re-allocation of existing resources, while still others may demand new investments.  Re-allocating existing resources is a political hot-potato but one that is desperately needed.  (More on that in a future blog-post).

As a member of the community I sought reaction from teachers on the Governor’s speech.  The more than one of the teachers I spoke with had two immediate reactions: 1.  “Well, if they extend the school year by 20 days, he’d better pay me.” and 2.  Thank god they are using the ACT rather than the OGT.   That is hardly the vision I would have wanted were I in a position of taking bold moves to change education across the state.

As far a non-teachers, their concern is that they do not understand the changes in the school funding formula.  Clearly this is an important topic since the issues has been a plague on the Ohio educational system since the famous DeRolf decision declared it unconstitutional. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer,

Strickland’s primary pledge was that the state would eliminate a phenomenon dubbed “phantom revenue”– a ghost in the state’s funding machine that assumes school districts receive local education dollars they never actually see…Strickland said his plan would eventually result in the state picking up 59 percent of the tab for education — a level he said would make Ohio’s school-funding system meet the “thorough and efficient” constitutional standard that the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled four times the state has not achieved.

At the end of the day few people really think this formula will change much of anything in terms of quality of teaching and learning in schools.  Today’s Plain Dealer reports,

Of the 97 districts in Northeast Ohio, 48 would see no change in the amount they get from the state next year, and 49 would see an increase (no more than 15 percent.)

The second year, 52 would see a decrease (no more than 2 percent) and 45 would see some increase.

The second major issue addresses how to deal with the union stranglehold on employment in the State.  The governor did adopt the OGF policy which would allow principals and superintendents to fire under-performing teachers for “just cause.”  The governor did assume enormous political risk by standing up to union leadership saying,

Right now, it’s harder to dismiss a teacher than any other public employee. Under my plan, we will give administrators the power to dismiss teachers for good cause, the same standard applied to other public employees,” Strickland said to applause from Republican lawmakers as Democrats held back.

This is an important issue for any Governor to take on.  Earlier in January, the Cleveland Plain Dealer did a lengthy report on the fact that looming budget cuts surely meant that  some of the most innovative and successful schools in Cleveland would have to lay-off teachers.  Most at risk were the promising charter-like academies and magnet schools because firings would go on the old union patronage system of last hired first, fired.  Here is how the story reported it,

High School, one of Cleveland's 10 new niche schools. Classes are at the Great Lakes Science Center until a permanent home at GE's Nela Park campus in East Cleveland is renovated.

High School, one of Cleveland's 10 new niche schools. Classes are at the Great Lakes Science Center until a permanent home at GE's Nela Park campus in East Cleveland is renovated.

Just as Cleveland’s new niche schools show signs of leading the district to reform, layoffs may sweep some of their handpicked teachers out the door.

Schools chief Eugene Sanders says the district will have to lay off hundreds of workers if the financially strapped state slashes deeply into aid that accounts for 60 percent of the Cleveland schools’ budget. Big buzz centers on how that would affect 10 single-gender and other specialty schools that have turned in good test scores and won over parents during the last three years.

With union consent, the so-called “schools of choice” select their own teachers, reaching outside the system in some cases. But cuts would follow the contract: Last hired, first fired.

Sanders said he will ask the teachers union to help limit layoffs at the niche schools. But union President David Quolke does not expect to scrap the seniority policy.  “All that would do for a union is pit member against member,” Quolke said. “To agree to something that says one member is more important than another member is not something I’d be willing to do.

I suppose  this effort by philanthropy to partner with stakeholders to inform a governor can be considered a success.   I only wish he had not cherry-picked the policies with the short time horizon to do his plan. Given the mess of dealing with teachers unions, budgetary shortfalls and an assessment system that is strangling students and discouraging teachers to be creative, I suppose he did what he needed to do in the short-term.  Despite my personal disappointment, the success can me marked by the fact that it was the first time the Ohio Department of Education and the Ohio Federation of Teachers sat at the same table at length – ever!  They worked out issues jointly and even agreed on several recommendations.  I  believe that only philanthropy could have made that happen and kept them coming to the table.

It is by now quite evident that I harbor  frustration at the seeming inability of the state government to do what is necessary to stimulate and sustain  true innovation in learning by encouraging innovation in schools.  My assessment is the governor may have stepped only a small length “beyond tinkering,” but I am learning that a politician can only go so far with bold moves, especially in education.  If I had my way, I would have wanted the Governor introduce the first recommendation in the report – the creation of innovation districts throughout the state.  These schools would be center for innovation in teaching and learning, freed from constraints of labor negotiations and the constraints imposed by  the “tech guys” who block more access to the internet in the name of “protecting” children.  These would be places where social media experts, educational researchers, higher ed teachers , creators of Multi-user virtual environments and the likes of the  New Media Consortium would collaborate with students and teachers to test new media with curriculum.  This is a distinct where each student would have an electronic portfolio that would serve as  a platform for him or her to demonstrate their learning and understanding of the standards.   This district would foster a cadre of  teachers who would be able to develop means of assessing that learning into meaningful feedback.

On the first day of class, I would call an assembly and invite Scott Anthony, co-author of “The Innovator’s Guide to Growth” be the convocation speaker and introduce the concept of “disruptive innovation” to establish the framework for the collaborative teams effort to  move forward.

I am not a politician and I am not an education bureaucrat. I admit that I do not always appreciate the difficult balancing act these people need to do to survive. I respect and admire their ability to navigate the turbulent waters of managing many people. To accomplish the longer-range goals of transforming education to better serve the needs of individual students – no matter how old they are, philanthropy will need to make investments to support institutional psycho-therapy to help the educational infrastructure overcome its  get over Fear 2.0 which is crippling it from really serving students. The soothing words of Dr. Clayton Christensen might be a good start – light a candle, pour a glass of wine and listen carefully.

Listen carefully to the podcast with Clayton Christensen on his book, Disrupting Class….

Hopefully one day we will get there and I think foundations will continue to play a key role in holding out that vision to policymakers who, at the end of the day probably want to see it happen too.    Maybe someone will make a video of it so someone 60 years from now might embed it in his or her own blog!

Collaboration in times of economic downturn – challenges for foundations, business and the public sector

I spoke about the foundation’s response to economic downturn in a previous post.  My colleagues from other foundations have been talking about the fact that the economic downturn and scarce resources will create an urgency for nonprofits to “figure out ways” to merge and collaborate better.  On January 13th Cleveland’s WCPN public radio show called, The Sound of Ideas held great conversation on a topic called When Charities Can’t Afford to be Charitable.

The concept is great and I support my respected colleagues comments.  I once heard it said, “Everyone wants collaboration, but no one wants to be collaborated on.”   In my work at this foundation,  I have seen redundancy in programs in both nonprofit and public sectors,  many of which have received grants from us.    I see an awful lot of waste in private and taxpayer dollars, but I must be careful not to appear the perennial town crier.  I, like many foundations and their board members,  like to consider ourselves social innovators on the lookout to support like-minded  social innovators and social entrepreneurs.  After all, that’s what the philanthropy industry is supposed to promote.  The  fall 2008 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review an article called Rediscovering Social Innovation by James A. Phillis, Jr.; Kriss Deigelmeier, & Dale T. Miller describe what many foundation directors, program officers and their boards hope to be in their service to the  community,

The underlying objective of virtually everyone in the fields of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise is to create social value (a term we define later).  People have embraced these fields because they are new ways of achieving these larger ends.  But they are not the only, and certainly not always the best, ways to achieve these goals.  Social entrepreneurs are, of course, important because they see new patterns and possibilities for innovation and are willing to bring these new ways of doing things to fruition even when established organizations are unwilling to try them.  And enterprises are important because they deliver innovation.  But ultimately, innovation is what creates social value.  Innovation can emerge in places and from people outside the scope of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise.  In particular, large, established nonprofits, businesses, and even governments are producing social innovations.” p. 89

I can think of one crisis in particular our foundation has taken on and has asking for community leaders  to explore innovative ways to better serve the needs of the medically uninsured and under insured in our community.  I have discovered that is a huge task and one wrought with landmines.

In 2008 the foundation provided funds to facilitate conversations and strategies to address the growing number  of uninsured and under-insured people in the county.  The foundation paid a consultant to assemble representatives of “established nonprofits, businesses, and even government” with the purpose of providing an “idea mart” to see if we could come up with innovative solutions to the crisis at-hand.  The conversations continue but I observe a decrease in interest and engagement especially when the conversation gets a little too close for comfort.

img_0347img_0354

You see, I think we at foundations do a good job of convening meetings and encouraging people to submit themselves to be collaborated on!   It is clear to me however that convening people who represent long-standing institutions often with a history of relative financial stability,  go into protective mode very quickly when it becomes clear their entity is being critiqued.  Too often, the jobs in public health institutions, federally funded agencies and nonprofit organizations develop around an administrative personality.  In these cases, I have found very often that critique of the organization and perhaps a questioning of its relevance is interpreted as a criticism.  The individual in charge of that agency becomes defensive; feeling vulnerable to the exposure that peer-to-peer conversation can produce.

I have learned that making collaboration work depends in  great measure to sustaining urgency.  Urgency is fueled by passion – a passion that derives from visiting places like the Lorain Free Clinic or, emergency rooms at the charity hospitals.  It is a passion that derives from knowing people for whom the economic downturn is proving not just a misfortune but a disaster.  Any healthy human being to wants to “do-something” when one touches that level of suffering.

A person with a sense of social entrepreneurship and the funding to support innovation, will by nature want to ask, why the system seem to not be working well and how can a constituency be served better.  The response  means more than just convening the meetings.  The convener must have  the expertise (in-house or external) to keep the conversation and going and to keep the participants focused on the passion and urgency.   Foundations typically hire consultants to take on that task.  Although consultants do their jobs very well, it is my experience that “hiring” the consultant removes the foundation one step from the center of the activity.  If the foundation convenes the meeting to address and urgent problem, then it is my opinion that the foundation  (or collaborative of foundations) should try to maintain a visible role and presence in the conversations.  If not, the sense of urgency may dissipate.  I believe fully that foundations can serve to keep passion buoyant in rational civic discourse.

Too often, people come to meetings, agree on the urgency of the problem and are sincere in their desire to find solutions.  They come willing to contribute and discuss.   Few come prepared to really think about giving up they way they have been doing things.

The public health disaster in our county is a good example.  The county which is 25 miles west of Cleveland has a population of  280,000.   There are three separate public health entities – two city agencies Lorain City Health Department and the Elyria City  Health Department as well as the  Lorain County Health District.    These entities were created in the 19th century when the cities of Elyria and Lorain were rapidly increasing in population due to the need for labor in the steel industry, auto industry, shipbuilding and manufacturing.  Immigrant labor poured into the region.  Public health agencies were created to address the reality of contagious diseases.  The hospitals, (primarily charity hospitals run by orders of Catholic religious women) were created to deal with chronic disease and tertiary care.

Today, the cities are emptying out as the industries that sustained families have left the area.  The second and third generation of the immigrant families have left town, or move to subdivisions that were once farms outside the towns.  The cities now have families and elderly who live at or below the federal poverty level.

As we explore ways to reinvent health care delivery in the county, one of our questions has been, “In an age of technology and rapid information exchange, are three separate public health offices really necessary and relevant?”  We agree, they continue to serve medically indigent populations in very specific state funded programs, but in most cases they deal with people suffering chronic disease – something public health agencies were never really created or equipped to do.  Also what is the role of a public health agency when down the street, Walgreens (“America’s Online Pharmacy”) offers patients in-store clinics.  If you can come up with enough cash, you can be seen and treated by a health-care affiliate and given a prescription for your illness and pick it up at the in-house pharmacy conveniently located next to the health clinic.

Walgreens clinic

In the case of the health care coalition the foundation convened, the catalyst was the sense of urgency around the news that the Lorain County Health and Dentistry – which provides significant health care to medically uninsured or underinsured – did not recieve a $700,000 operating grant from the Federal Government.  The charity hospitals gave compelling evidence of the number of patients flooding their emergency rooms to treat the uninsured.  The Nord Mental Health Center, which treat patients with mental and behavioral diseases. reports a steady increase in the number of new patients requireing services, attirbuted in some measure to sresses associated with the economic depression.

The health situation is in crisis but after a year of conversation, it was difficult to get people to really change the way they did business.  In particular, it was hard to have the public health agencies roll-up sleeves  with the charity hospitals to explore possible innovations in combining  services.  Perhaps this can be attributed to the realization that such a move would constitute the elimination of the public health service system as it is currently structured.  Similarly, the Nord Behavioral Health Center, which is a nonprofit agency with almost 85% of its revenue channeled through the Lorain County Board of Mental Health has undergone convulsive administrative challenges with board members spending tax dollars to sue each other.  Conversations to explore how the charitable hospitals could take over many of the emergency services and need for in-patient beds is too threatening for people to contemplate.  So, after the initial good-faith effort to talk, the parties go into protective mode.  The desire to collaborate is threatening when one realizes one is about to be collaborated on!  Meanwhile people that need the services are hampered by services that are difficult to access which is why people still flood the emergency rooms when they need health care.

The Fund for Our Economic Future is a collaboration of virtually all the grantmaking institutions in Northeast Ohio.  For more than four years FFEF has gathered regularly to address the need for economic transformation in the Northeast Ohio region.  Aside from is main function which is to pool funds to provide early stage venture capital for organizations that promise to create new businesses for the region, the Fund has hosted several meetings of “stakeholders” to provide a strategy for how the region can move out of its economic stasis.  The first was the incredibly expensive and nominally productive engagement with AmericaSpeaks which evolved into the highly productive and provocative arm of the Fund called Advance Northeast Ohio. Aside from pushing the public to engage in conversations about how to move the economy forward, Advance Northeast Ohio, the fund, as well as several foundations funded the production of a study demonstrating the cost inefficiencies in doing government in NE Ohio.  The document is called, Cost of Government Study for Northeast Ohio.  Subsequent feedback from the larger community in NE Ohio shows that citzens want to see more collaboration among government agencies.   Few know how to get there.   All realized there are too many separately  incorporated towns  and small cities in the region, each with very expensive infrastructure.  These towns developed in the mid 1800’s when transportation and communication infrastructure were primitive and it made good sense to have government pockets serve scattered populations.  Today is makes no sense whatsoever to have separate jurisdictions when collaboration and shared services would probably result in costs savings to taxpayers.

Unfortunately, getting public entities to change their administrative structure (which would mean eliminating some jobs) or, to give up power (probably the MOST guarded treasure for elected officials) is practially an impossible task.

As long as tax dollars and State and Federal monies continue to support these organizations, there is little incentive for people to change.  The reality is that the economic crisis may result in drastic cutbacks that will force agencies to close and services to be eliminated.

As foundations look to encourage collaboration, they might do well to read a great new book by John Kotter, Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Business School.  Dr. Kotter does a great job describing how business loose their sense of urgency.  The same applies to public and private entities when they begin an initiative to make change in society.

In addition to Dr. Kotter’s call for groups to understand the role of Urgency in social interaction, a recent article in the December 2008 edition of the Harvard Business Review, called Which Kind of Collaboration is Right for You by Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti.  This is a great article best described by as side script that says, The new leaders in innovation will be those who figure out the best way to leverage a network of outsiders.”   The authors describe four modes of collaborative innovation which are:

The Elite Circle in which one company selects the participants, defines the problem and chooses the solutions.

The Innovation Mall where one company posts a problem, anyone can propose solutions and the company chooses the solutions it likes best.

The Innovative Community where anybody can propose problems, offer solutions and decide which solutions to use.

The Consortium Which operates like a private club, with participants jointly selecting the problems, deciding how to conduct work and choosing solutions.

Each of these models have correlates in the public sector.  I will end this post with a quote from the article in question.  Although it is directed to companies, I suggest foundations that urge collaboration read it with an eye to their  admonition that non-profits and the public sector figure out ways to merge and collaborate.  It is – no doubt – easier said than done.

All to often firms(foundations?) jump into relationships without considering their structure and organizing principles – what we call the collaborative architecture.  To help senior managers (read public officials and nonprofit leaders?) make better decisions about the kinds of collaboration their companies adopt, we have developed a relatively simple framework.  The product of our 20 years of research and consulting in this area, it focuses on two basic questions.  Given your strategy, how open or closed should your firms network of collaborators be? And who should decide which problems the network will takle and which solutions will be adopted?”   p.80

I am encouraged by the fact that many people I make reference to in this post continue to come to the table to discuss the issue because they do have the best interest of the community at heart.  The fact is this economy is only beginning to reveal the hard choices and sacrifices we face as a community.   People are meeting that challenge overcoming a fear of the unknown.