I recently read a post by Delores Ann Woods about her interaction with the Boston Foundation. The Boston Foundation declined to help fund a program for ELL and special needs students. Woods writes : “When BPS canceled many buses all over the city, it destroyed West Roxbury Academy’s successful after-school tutoring program to help struggling students, ESL students, and special education students–anyone who wanted extra help to restore grades or to pass their tests.” http://bluemassgroup.com/2014/10/we-are-being-asked-to-raise-test-scores-at-the-same-time-we-are-being-deprived-of-our-best-hope-for-doing-so/
When Dolores asked TBF for help they told her that they do not fund that sort of thing. She was asked if BPS had any emergency funds set aside. I’ll answer that question: BPS is operating on emergency funds. Charter schools are not. Many charter schools and foundations have millions$ in the bank, yet seek to siphon more and more Chapter 70 funds that should go to BPS. According to James Vasnis of the Boston Globe BPS Superintendent “McDonough said he can envision a day when all Chapter 70 money will end up at charter schools if more of them continue to open in the city. Charter school advocates are lobbying for unfettered growth of charter schools in Boston.” http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/01/21/boston-school-department-contends-with-shrinking-state-aid/57vvJ1wnLURr0MD34WdgmO/story.html
My question to TBF, and in particular TBF CEO Paul Grogan, is why, exactly, do you not fund “this type of thing”? Grogan, who makes about $600,000 http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2009/10/05/story10.html?page=all , and who also is very interested in how much Boston Public School teachers are compensated https://www.tbf.org/~/media/TBFOrg/Files/Reports/Real%20Cost_Digital.pdf ,should give Dolores an answer. She is entitled to one. The push to expand charter schools, led in no small way by Grogan, has cost West Roxbury a much needed after school program because transportation has been axed. If Grogan truly wants to put kids first, here is his opportunity to make things right. We could call it the “Reparations Movement”. I’m sure philanthropists would buy into that advertisement model.
Regardless, TBF has 1.63 MILLION dollars in discretionary grants that it will be awarding this quarter: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/10/16/the-boston-foundation-allocates-nearly-for-study-childhood-health-interventions/3xHWJlWSKBRqjQEonNzmKM/story.html#comments Don’t you think the kids at Westie High deserve an explanation? I also wonder if TBF would be interested in funding an eyeglasses program that I would like to pilot. If the TBF talked to teachers, rather than rail against us, maybe we could actually start closing achievement gaps. I look forward to a response. I won’t hold my breath – I don’t work at a charter school.
Colum Whyte
Joseph Lee K-8
Dorchester, MA
I laughed out loud reading Larry Harmon dismissing a smart savvy campaign by parents and education advocates for strong adequately funded public schools. Such a silly man to assume that Senator Chang Diaz is uniformed and panders to her constituents.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2014/10/17/roadblock-for-charter-schools/Dz1K54wBrlEIhdHXC6ki8J/story.html
Educator advocates or community based organizations especially those fighting for special needs or English Languge learners applying to The Boston Foundation should not expect to be funded.
After years of internal discussions among their private funders they have establish clear education priorities that include promoting charter schools and breaking teachers unions.
I’ll post TBF Education site in a following comment.
The Boston Foundation is a private Community Foundation and they are allowed to lobby under IRS rules.
Disclaimer: Organizations I have worked
for have been funded regularly by TBF for almost25 years, including under the leadership of Paul Grogan. He’s a good man on a mission supported by his funders.
The Boston Foundation is deeply committed to strengthening the city and region’s education pipeline—from K-12 education in Boston’s public schools through college completion and into the adult workforce—which is crucial to Greater Boston’s competitiveness in the global economy.
Through its civic leadership and grantmaking, the Boston Foundation focuses on accelerating structural reform and promoting autonomies in Boston’s public schools. It is also dedicated to raising the college graduation rates for low-income, minority and first-generation college students from public schools in Boston—and promoting career advancement and economic security for low-income adults.
View a video clip provided by WWLP News 22 of the State House hearing on the Race to the Top Coalition’s legislation An Act to Further Narrow the Achievement Gap.
Longer school days part of education pitch
In support of K-12 education in Boston, the Foundation has made many major, strategic grants including one to Unlocking Potential to open the UP Academy, a Horace Mann, in-district charter school, and a multi-year grant to NewSchools Venture Fund to support the replication of high-performing charter schools. In 2008, the Boston Foundation convened the statewide Race to the Top Coalition, which played a key role in passing education reform and attracting $250 million in federal funds to the state. Now, the Coalition is monitoring improvements and in 2011, released the first progress report on the success of Race to the Top funding, titled Toward Closing the Achievement Gap. – See more at:
http://www.tbf.org/understanding-boston/education#sthash.gxO6L2LO.dpuf
American children already spend more time in school over the course of a given year than students in virtually all industrialized nations. But, you know, that’s just data. Perhaps in ten year the millionaires will file this next to small schools in the “ideas that were obviously bad to anyone familiar with public education” bin.
…but can you expand on why the disconnect between reputation and reality on this one? I’ve long heard that 180 days is among the shortest years in the industrialized world and only the US still adheres to an agricultural calendar. What is the full story here? Also I suspect the question on a lot of people’s minds (including mine) is if we really do spend more time in school here why do we perform so embarassingly compared to other nations.
While 180 days may seem longer, US kids spend more minutes in a given day on pure instruction. A friend of mine takes her son to Seoul every summer, and South Korea’s kids are in school during July, and she told me that ROK school days are drastically shorter (by one or two hours). That’s the anecdote.
Here is some data.
Thus, when Serious People talk about how the school year needs to be longer and the school day needs to be longer, they are focusing on something that the US already does a lot of. This emphasis on “it needs to be longer” is misguided.
Not to mention many students get more than 20 minutes for lunch (sometimes an hour!). And within these numbers, notice that Texas has higher instructional time requirements than New York or Massachusetts.
Doing things poorly but more often doesn’t fix the fact that you’re doing things poorly.
I never received a response to our rebuttal to the TBF for its proposal, along with the Mass. Taxpayers Foundation, for the virtual dismantlement of all state-run care for the intellectually disabled in Massachusetts.
Without belaboring any point about either charter schools in isolation, or the Boston Foundation’s support thereof, this is not a morality play.
From the Globe article linked to above:
The broader argument is about quality education, and both sides have cogent arguments when they’re not talking past each other.
Here’s my concern, that the 1% is quietly withdrawing more than $1.4 billion from the tax base and then asking us why we don’t have emergency funds to help struggling students from poor families after school. These concierge charitable trusts are are taking from the public schools and investing in charter schools, which the 1% will later privatize and profiteer from. Defacto the !% is dictating public policy without being elected by a democracy. AND… the advocates for the poor who would generally object to this sleight of hand cannot do so without risking everything because The Boston Foundation and its like controls the charitable purse strings in town, as well. Shades of owing our souls to the company store!
The Philanthropic Initiative (TBF), “Our approach is to create giving strategies based on your visions, values, and the areas you want to influence.”
You’ve got it right Delores. I remember when the Boston Foundation (TBF) bought the Philanthropic Initiative (TPI). Since then the public has been subject to a daily barrage of commercials by TBF and TPI on WBUR looking for “strategic philanthropic investors.”
I went to the TPI sight to check them out. Who knew that a “philanthropic-consultant industrial complex” existed! Supporting a bunch of philanthropic venture capital donors, who are using their “charitable donations” where they can benefit financially from it with tax breaks, New Market Tax Credits, QZAB’s interest free bonds, and an array of money making financial strategies that “strategically” recycle money back into their foundations at the expense of those they are purporting to help out! These “philanthropic investors” do not carry out the decisions they make, or live every day with the consequences. I felt like I just emerged from a cave!
If TBF/TPI’s “philanthropic investors,” paid their taxes like everyone else, the city would have the money for your student’s late bus and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Public schools shouldn’t have to have bake sales for supplies and field trips, and Teachers shouldn’t have to go around begging the billion-dollar boys club at The Boston Foundation for money for a late bus to transport needy students!
You know the Boston Foundation was founded in the belief that donations would go toward the general benefit of the community and for “special purposes” benefiting the community. Why wasn’t your late bus important enough to come out of TBF’s “discretionary funds” as a special purpose? What does TBF qualify as a “special purpose”…advertizing on WBUR!
TBF and TPI collect fees from the income they generate. Rather than supporting the community, like it is supposed to, it is telling nonprofits, orchestrating really, what nonprofits should be doing. From what I can glean, much of the money TBF and TPI generates goes to re-grantors, researchers, consultants, and advertizing their shameless self-promotion, rather than to on-the-ground, people who actually do the direct service work at nonprofits. We cannot advocate for IRS 990, 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 transparencies and “reform” enough!
Thanks jshore. I really do not understand either why I have to beg for something that should be a right for these students. The MCAS retest is in one week for ESL students who have only been in this country a year. Imagine a teenager reading and writing about excerpts from Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc., after just one year of English! Others will have to take the MCAS in March, May and June.
I had about half the time with this-year’s delayed-testing students than I usually do–because there were no after-school buses. There is no doubt that these students do better on the MCAS if they can stay regularly for an hour of tutoring with me and with other teachers in math and science. The parents won’t let these students stay because without a late school bus we can’t get the kids home at a decent hour. No one will pay the $30,000 for one bus or $60,000 for two. That is not much money for a $1.4 billion foundation! TBF’s refusal does not sound like a foundation that has the interests of the children at heart, as it claims. Is the Foundation setting public schools up to be less successful and then criticizing us for it at the same time? The foundation asked me where were BPS’s emergency funds. They are in the tax-sheltered accounts of The Boston Foundation, being spent to further their privatization interests.