 So good afternoon and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildean here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And I'm really delighted to welcome you to this afternoon's special event. So today we have one of our book talks at the Ford School, featuring the Ford School's very own assistant professor, Megan Topkin-Stang, and her recently published book, Policy Patrons. So first of all, I hope you were able to help yourself for lunch as you came in. There is plenty of food out there, and so we invite you to help yourself if you have not done so. My colleague, Barry Raebe, will shortly give a context and a fuller introduction. But it really is my pleasure to congratulate Megan on her really impactful and insightful work that she will be presenting to us today. So for those of you who don't know, Megan is an extremely popular teacher, so I'm not surprised to see many of our students here today. And that's always wonderful for us to do. And Megan, of course, is also well respected by her faculty colleagues. And so it is really a great pleasure for me on behalf of the Ford School faculty to congratulate her on not only her first book, but also on the impact that her work is already having in this policy arena, and that I know it will continue to have. So Megan, congratulations. So with no further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Professor Barry Raebe to the podium. Thank you, Susan. The role of ideas in the public policy process and how those ideas are adopted or not politically are implemented or not through administrative channels has been an enduring question in the social sciences and policy sciences at this university and in the evolution of this school. One thinks of the role of the late Michael Cohen, ideas in the policy process, John Kingdon's classic work on policy streams and ideational contributions to policy. And today, we celebrate the continuation of that great tradition here at Michigan, but with important new directions and twists that are rich for the continued theoretical development of those areas, but with profound importance for the development of policy going forward in education policy and more broadly. This book raises the issue not just what are the ideas good, but who pays for them and who actively promotes them and puts them out there, particularly the context of foundations. Foundations that often are not created through democratic channels, but because an individual or a family has created a unique entity known as a foundation that decides to move into the marketplace of creating and encouraging and promoting ideas. There's an enduring American tradition for this, and yet we know remarkably little about how those decisions are made, how agendas are set, how those dollars are allocated, and particularly at a moment where we largely anticipate a reduction or a retraction of prior commitments by the federal government to funding the business of research, policy research, and idea development. The question of foundations becomes all the more significant. I couldn't help think, reading this wonderful book, not only does this apply to education policy, which it so nicely does, but every arena of policy considered by this school. Meg and I really am looking forward to your sequel on climate, energy, and environmental policy, because where I sit, the questions that you raise for which I don't think there's been any scholarly response yet are just timely, significant, and become growing in relevance through the passing of each month. So that is the larger context here, and yet I must say, building on Susan's comments about the author, how extraordinarily fortunate we are at the Ford School, but all readers of this book are or will be to have a scholar like Megan be the person who put all of this together. For those of you who have worked with Megan, you know that she's an exemplary teacher. She is an exemplary scholar in every sense of that term, and it's been a pleasure and a privilege for me to work with her actually side by side for a number of years now in the public management portion of the curriculum, but also watching how this research project has evolved over a number of years, thinking through careful design of interviews, outreach, case selection, and then developing a framework for this book. This book was in the hands of a very capable and committed scholar, and we here at the Ford School are very, very fortunate on a daily, semesterly basis to be able to call Megan a colleague and friend. I certainly am, and please join me in welcoming the author of Policy Patrons to the stage. Megan. Well, that's a nice way to start. Thank you, Susan and Barry. Can you guys hear me? For that really kind and generous introduction, I'm really the one who's honored to get to be a part of this wonderful community. I also wanted to thank Erin and Cliff and Laura for so beautifully planning this event and for the lovely lunch. I'm really excited to share this book with you. Many of you have sort of seen, again, seen this develop over time in bits and pieces, and my teaching has definitely influenced some of these ideas as well as I've worked on them for over the years. So I think you'll see a lot of the stuff that I'm interested in and what I actively speak about in class in this book as well. So I'm going to just offer some brief remarks for about the first 15 minutes. Then we're going to take questions that I'd like to devote the majority of the time to having active discussion. Those of you who have taken my classes know. So starting with ripped from the headlines as I want to do, New York Times 2010 states embrace core standards for schools. LA Unified adopts a value-added approach to teacher ratings, Los Angeles Times 2011, big paydays in Washington DC schools' merit system, New York Times. New Mexico could become the first state with preschool funding constitutionally guaranteed. And personalized learning increases youth of computers in class. What do these very distinct and different cases have in common? There are all major policy innovations that have been championed, partially or fully funded by private foundation. So core standards, very much a project at the Gates Foundation, LA Unified value-added, Broden Gates, DC Brode, New Mexico Kellogg. Personalized learning, anybody? No. But good to guess, Sutton Zuckerberg. So this is the new entrant into this field, right? So Tech, Philanthropy, and Silicon Valley. But major policy issues in education, the way core curriculum is developed and implemented at a national scale, the way that teachers are evaluated and paid, in this case through differential compensation, the way that initiatives are funded at the state level. And the core technologies through which we deliver student learning, all driven by large private foundations. So just to illustrate this, pictures worth 1,000 words, Arnie Duncan and Eli Brode. Here we have Arnie. Arnie figures large in this, actually. Arnie and Phil from the Kellogg Foundation. There's Darren Walker from Ford at the Minnesota Federation of Teachers. And here's Barack Obama with the Gates. And Mark and Priscilla. And then, of course, our very own Michigan resident, Betsy DeVos. That was an interesting day. I woke up to about 100 texts. But again, coming back to Barry's point very timely in terms of policymakers coming to the fore through their philanthropic giving and advocacy work. So private power in the public realm. So the context matters. As Barry said, this applies in all areas of policy. But the area in which I rooted it is public education, key to public education. At its core, this is very much, maybe until recently, a democratically governed state function. It is a tool, it is an institution of the government. But it's been strongly impacted by foundation involvement. I actually argue in the book that there is no sector more impacted than education in terms of philanthropic investment. And this has been true since the dawn of time. Foundations have been around for about 110 years. From the very first grants, public education was a priority, a favorite of Blantheped. And this has become even more amplified the last two decades, because there are large entrants, such as Gates, into this field. And there's also been a huge growth of what we call mega foundations. So foundations that have in excess of $1 billion in their endowments. Just to put a little bit, this is all interesting too, because as some of you know, there are significant legal restrictions on what foundations can and cannot do. They can't lobby at all in contrast to other 501c3 organizations. A lot of what they do is behind the scenes undercover. And that also shows why there's very limited scholarship on this topic, especially contemporaneously, because any work that you can do on this is done through archives after everyone has departed or passed away, who are the relevant actors. So very, very limited contemporary work on foundations policy engagement. So this leads me to the question of the book, the main core question. How and why do large philanthropic foundations seek to influence public education policy, K through 12 policy? And this is motivated by the fact that empirically, we do know that larger foundations are much more likely to want to influence policy as a core strategic lever, four times more than smaller foundations. This is a really big deal for our largest foundations that are rapidly growing as well. So here is just a picture of education funders writ large. 95, there were only about 16 foundations that had in excess of $1 billion. In 2010, it was more like 160. And then there was additional group of foundations that have more than $100 million. That's gone way, way up as well in 2010. This is giving by education funders. So back in 2000, about $500 million, that's gone rapidly up, almost exponentially. We don't have the data crunched yet to really know. But the proportion of giving to policy related work, policy and advocacy strategies has also gone way, way, way up. So time will tell if this really is an exponential trend. But we do know that it's quadrupled in the past 15 years. So the methods for this book, it's a qualitative study across case comparative analysis. I elected to look at four of the largest education funders who are active in policy, so four of the top 20. I conducted semi-structured open-ended interviews over a period of about five years, one of having about 60. They were all confidential. They were all anonymous. I've gotten some heat for this from people in the foundation world. But it's a longstanding tradition and quality of research that if you give people a mask, they will tell you the truth, especially in such a sensitive, politically fraught area. Where foundations actually can get in big trouble for doing too much political work. I talked to very high level people at these foundations, presidents, policy officers, program officers, legal counsel. And I also talked to a selection of national grantee organizations of these foundations, people who are in charge of national associations or major non-profits, as well as some policy makers. I also conducted extensive archival analysis looking at the grants databases of these foundations. And I also had an 18 month period of participant observation, where I actually, during grad school, worked at a large foundation that will remain nameless. And firsthand experienced some of this tension in terms of philanthropists being very involved in influencing agenda setting in the policy process and education. So the four foundations that I chose are actually that I had access to, but that's another story. Gates, Brode, Kellogg and Ford. So they vary in terms of location. They vary in terms of endowment. As you see Gates dwarfs everybody else. These are still the top 20, of the top 20 foundations who fund education. Gates and Brode founded in the late 90s. The first Silicon Valley technological boom, right? Which you guys I have learned are too young to remember in some cases, which makes me feel so old. I was in college. Whereas Kellogg and Ford founded in the 30s. So John Dewey, very progressive era. And part of my argument in the book is that these foundation strategies now, when it comes to policy, are very much imprinted with the norms that were present at their founding dates. So Gates and Brode, again founded recently. They both have living benefactors. Their ethos, their values, their strategies are very much steeped in technologically motivated, market based entrepreneurial logic. Whereas Kellogg and Ford, and much older, no living benefactors, their norms tend to be more about using words like social justice, civic engagement, community engagement. And what's interesting, and what initially drew me into this study, is given this tension of what foundations can or cannot do politically, they have very different comfort levels. So Brode and Ford are very similar in that they're very assertive, very unapologetic. Ford has been doing social justice work since they started. They were the main foundation in the 60s that was funding progressive racial equity work, and they actually got in trouble for that with Congress in the late 60s, which is what instituted those political restrictions in the first place. Brode has always been all about policy. Eli Brode says we do it, that's how we're gonna get things done. Whereas Gates prior to 2008 and Kellogg are much more reticent, much more cautious, much more like quote someone said was, we don't wanna touch that heater cause it might get too hot. You know, like they want to influence policy and they're very active in doing it, they don't wanna put their own name brand on it. They prefer to go through the grantees. And then Gates since 2008 has been much more active and that reflects the policy window opening, right? The Obama administration comes on. But still cautious, they're very much about their legal counsel, making sure all the eyes are dotted and the T's are crossed and they got their P's and Q's and every other letter of the alphabet going on, right? So they are very much about we're going to do it, but we're gonna walk right up to the line. And that's Bill Gates' own words about their policy strategy. So this is a study again that took place over about five years. I used a grounded theory approach, which those view my quality of methods class may be familiar with. I essentially went into these foundations knowing not much about them other than the types of grants they made and the program areas that they had. I didn't know anything about their norms. Again, there's not a lot of literature about how and why people do things. So this is all presented as a pretty little package of the four things that came from years and years of backend work that bubbled up from the data in an iterative way, okay? So the key questions that emerged from that was that there were differences between these foundations in terms of how they manage grantees, in terms of the partners that they prefer to work with, in terms of how they frame problems and solutions and in terms of how they evaluate results. So four engaged policy actors, very different ways. And one of my informants, you said this quote, there are basically two kinds of foundations. I heard this over and over again in different capacities from different people. And so the conceptual framework that I developed as a result of this research, I saw that same thing as well from an empirical perspective and I turned these two types of foundations and their contrasting modes of policy engagement outcome focused and field focused. So again, on the left, we have those four main themes or questions. And then we have the differing, the contrasting ways of going about their work. So I'm gonna throw some quotes at you. I don't wanna just put them all on the slide for you to read because that would be really awkward. So instead I'm just gonna dictate them to you here. So managing grantees, centralized top down versus decentralized bottom up. This is when a policy initiative is managed at the foundation level. And they choose grantees and enroll them into a project where the policy goals are already set at the foundation level. Whereas a decentralized is much more bottom up. The foundation delegates more control to people in the field to decide on their own relevant policy targets. Preferred partners, the outcome focused foundations like to work primarily with elites. That's what they think moves the initiative fast and efficiently. And people in the study over and over again called this grass tops approach as opposed to grass roots. In case that wasn't obvious. Field focus foundations pull our opposite. They prefer to start with grass roots organizations with people in communities, students, parents, teachers. As opposed to an elite or an expert driven agenda. Framing of problems and solutions. This is a characterization that I've borrowed from a scholar called Heifetz at Harvard. Technical problems are those that are amenable to technical solutions. That you can say X leads to Y in a causal relationship. You can bring certain interventions to bear and you know what the solution to the problem is. It's a more engineering based mindset. Whereas adaptive, problems are much seen as much more complex, multifaceted, involving more culture, social context, power differentials, things that are not necessarily in a regression equation. Looking at my husband here. And then similarly evaluating results. Quantifiable means that foundations are primarily wanting their results to be quantifiable. They want to see their impact expressed in calculable metrics. Whereas the integrated approach and again this is something I've borrowed from Liz Schor I'm at the Center for Study of Social Policy. These foundations use both qualitative and quantitative metrics to show to build a plausible and defensible case for their interventions as opposed to establishing proof. So some examples from each one. For managing grantees. Outcome focused foundations. One person says we treat our grantees as contractors. We formulate a goal and we hire people to fulfill it. On the field focus side. I am not going to do what 95% of foundations do which is come up with the answer and sell it. Ford Foundation. Partners, preferred partners. Outcome focused. The first order of business was leveraging at the highest level the people who had the most influence. We're going to the superintendents. We're going to the mayors. We're going to the senators in the state government. Field focused. Someone just said that's broad. Who's that? Someone's read the book. I hope so. Field focused. If there's a policy direction that grows out of our work it's come all the way through the bottom and up to the top. Right, so again that's similar to the managing grantees but it's about grassroots. That's a Kellogg person talking. Framing problems. Someone's from Gates and Outcome focused approach. We're technocrats. We wish there was an app for that. Field focused. It's about building a field as opposed to injecting a specific idea or a specific national solution and it's what some people might call old school. Kellogg and Ford remember from the 30s. And finally evaluating results. Outcome focused. To give money to a school. Our benefactor which is Eli Broad needs to see the test scores rise at least 5% after one year. Gates. Our outcomes were to get public policies changed. Kellogg rather than just say the victory is the policy we need a more complete picture of all the things that need to work to get that outcome we're looking for. Okay so very very distinct. Again this by no means is a one size fits all. Everyone fits in their own little box. So I said before there's a lot of different elements that each foundation involves. They might be more reticent with policy influence but they might be doing a field focused approach or an outcome focused approach. So broadly speaking Gates and Broad fall into this category of outcome focused and Ford and Kellogg fall into the field focused. But there's elements in which Ford especially is more outcome focused and there's elements in which Gates is increasingly more field focused which we'll talk about in a minute. A main theme throughout the book is that the outcome focused approach is dominant. It's common sense call at this point we're in a very managerial society. We've all been marinating in this approach for 30 years. 30 years of neoliberalism, the new public management. Couple quotes. This is someone from Gates. It still seems like there was a little talk about field driven versus strategic grant making 10 or 15 years ago. There's still a few places here and there that do that kind of field based grant making but they're really far, few and far between. So describing kind of a convergence of approaches towards a much more outcome oriented approach has a common sense of appeal, particular mindset and that's of course an MBA. Also reflected at Gates and Broad, market oriented. Focusing on charter schools, competition, accountability, performance metrics derived from market principles, right? And then this has implications. So we talked about before a little bit. Foundations are largely unaccountable. So they're very active in policy but they can't get voted out of office. They don't sell a product that people can stop buying. They are literally only accountable to the IRS which can come after them for their tax exempt status if they overstep. That has never happened once in 40 years of these regulations, 50 years almost. So they have very little, very few meaningful mechanisms of accountability. And so this is what winds up happening in this case. So this is interesting quote because this is someone from Gates talking about this in a very self-reflective way. There's this twinkle in the eye of a senior staff member at Gates when Obama's education policy framework comes out. They said, aren't we lucky that the administration's education agenda is so compatible with ours? And then there came the twinkle. We wouldn't take credit out loud even amongst ourselves but you know, the twinkle. So there's alignment and convergence and a lot of this is due to, again, that elite focused approach, building closely coupled relationships. At one point, someone told me an anecdote about someone from the Gates Foundation coming to talk at the Department of Education and they had a Freudian slip and referred to it as the Gates administration. But she said, everyone fell on the floor laughing because it's funny because it's true. So again, a lot of influence on what comes to the fore of the agendas in a public realm by having very little accountability for it. And the same Gates person says, we have this enormous power to sway public conversations about certain issues and we can mobilize lots of resources without robust debate. It's striking to me, okay? And here's what gets super interesting at least to me. The outcome focused foundations, their alignment with elites and policy initially caused a lot of impact, a lot of impact. This is from the Broad Foundation's annual report. We feel the stars have finally aligned with an agenda that echoes our decade of investments. Obama is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition that seed that we have planted. Someone from Ford talking about the work that Gates and Broad has done. A national core curriculum like the Common Core, that was like the third rail. You just don't touch that in American politics. But now we have a Common Core and we are moving towards a common protocol for teacher evaluations. Mine knew this was a quote from 2012. So we know how the story ends which I'll talk about in a minute, right? Someone from Brookings, or no, the Urban Institute. I'm amazed at what they've done. Look at how education is a high priority item in this country. It's singularly because of Gates and Broad. So they were able to get things on the agenda to move elite interests towards their chosen or their preferred models of social reform, right? But as the last couple of years have shown, even just the last year, which was crazy because this was all happening as I was finishing the book and I'm like, stop, stop, I can't even handle this, right? There was a huge backlash. Those of you who are familiar with that policy are familiar with, right? So every student succeeds act. President Obama signs this in December of 2015. This is essentially a referendum on most of the stuff that Gates and Broad has worked on for the last decade. It devolves a lot of control back to the states. It essentially dismantles their work on the common core, leaving that to the states as well as opposed to being more of a federal mandate. And also a huge backlash against high stakes testing, the value added evaluation, right? So this all happens. And then Gates Foundation issues a miacopa. So this is from their annual letter in June 2016 from Sue Desmond Hellman, who is their CEO. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently gauge educators, also parents and communities. This has been a challenging lesson for us to absorb, but we take it to heart. Female jaws drop all around the world, right? This is really interesting that Gates is now doing this. And the Melinda Gates saying in the Washington Post, community buy-in is huge. It means that in some ways you have to go more slowly. This could not be more distinct from what they were doing for the past 10 years. It is striking, okay? Oh, and then Rindy Weingarten, again. Gates is now moving that away from a top-down managerial approach. Okay, I'm like, yeah, I told you, but great. I kid, what's the balance? I think this is really the core question coming out of the book, and that also motivates me in my work. So this is another Gates informant. I apologize for all the lengthy quotes. This will be one of the last ones. How do you establish a top or a bottom-up versus top-down mix? This is a puzzle we've never resolved. It's very tricky. At the beginning, we were two top-down. Bottom-up seldom came up with the breakthrough thinking. The higher risk, what was possible without constraints types of ideas. The big think things came from a tight group of people with a blank sheet of paper. Or as one of my informants described it, six guys in a room with two McKinsey consultants. I'm just putting it all out there, right? People really start talking when they have a mask, I will say. A bottom-up approach, so this is a national nonprofit leader, very well-known. A bottom-up approach is a more effective way to do policy change and philanthropy. So in the long run, you really need to have that democratic element to make it stick. And this is the argument I'm seeing now. That democratic engagement, civic engagement, community rootedness is desirable because it makes the outcomes more effective. Because again, that's an outcome-focused approach. Whereas a field-focused approach, it's more in their DNA, their progressive, their core norms are about community engagement. So again, they're doing the same thing, but for different reasons, okay? So that leaves us with all sorts of things we can talk about, as Barry said, the role of foundations in this new policy world that we're in. I think you guys would like to talk about, I really appreciate your engagement and I look forward to answering questions. Yes, I don't know your name, I'm sorry. The question was for the live stream, do these foundations have political alignment? Progressive versus conservative? Yeah, so intentionally I, so the top 20 foundations are mostly progressive in nature. Gates is sort of more neutral. Broad is very anthropologically progressive or liberal. Kellogg and Ford are the same. So they're all on the progressive end of the scale. Foundations are not supposed to have out front political alignment. They can't say we support Donald Trump or we support Hillary Clinton. Like that's not allowed. But we see a lot of evidence of the benefactors of the foundations they're giving as private citizens tends to align more with Democratic Party. Do you want to make sense? Yes, what's your name? Jeremy. Jeremy, thank you. I'm a senior and I was wondering, what do you think are the biggest educational changes that are trying to push at this moment? Mm-hmm. And which foundations are really leading the charge? That's a really good question. You know, a year ago, my response would have been a lot different. I think after this whole, the ESSA and Backlash to Common Core and Value Added, people are kind of in a holding position, especially given the election and you know, DeVos being appointed and there's just a sense like we don't know what to do and we need to figure this out because the same rules are not applying. So what I have seen is again, going back to Zuckerberg Chan initiative, they actually hired someone who was at the Department of Education and prior to that was at Gates. So going in sort of that same vein, which very much aligns with that outcome focused approach, they have embraced personalized learning. So again, like personalizing lessons online and with computers to students, a very technical approach. One that is not necessarily dependent on policy wins. So I can see a little bit, like I would hypothesize that perhaps that's a reaction to feeling like we have no control over the political realm and want to do something that's more contained. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Matthew. Yeah, so the question was to what extent do these foundations sort of collaborate, collude, compete, all the different seas? Yeah, so it's a great question. Gates traditionally has kind of framed itself as we don't work with other people, but they do, but they kind of don't like to be tied to other people's brands in case something goes wrong. Broad works a lot with Gates and Walton. They're kind of like the big three, Diane Ravitch calls them the billion our boys club. Kellogg and Ford tend to be more, like they will be part of national coalitions of like 15 or 16 foundations to do things, especially Kellogg, because they're very uncomfortable with being in the public eye. And they kind of like the words that one important use, they like to kind of water it down a bit by being one of 15 funders on initiative. So again, the quote that I kept hearing is you've met one foundation, you've met one foundation. I think that's very true. It just really kind of depends on the culture and the staff and the sort of norms that the benefactor sat down even 80 years ago. Pick a. I was going to say to this auditor, it seems like pick a top down approach and a weak approach and risk very serious backlash which actually defeats the whole policy approach. Or take the bottom up approach, build community, et cetera, but it's so contingent you never know the outcome that you desire. And it's messy. The democratic process is very messy, right? And it gets diverted. So do you have any examples that you can cite for us where there has been a top down approach by a foundation where the policy has stuck? The presumably enlightened policy has stuck and hasn't been overcome by what kind of backlash between them? That's a great question. So the question was are there examples of this sort of non binary sort of top down versus bottom up depressing versus not depressing? Yeah, so actually the Ford Foundation is probably the example I would point to is having been the most effective because they are really deliberate about balancing those two things. So they are working directly with elites, directly with policymakers. Half of the cabinet of John F. Kennedy's presidency was drawn directly from the Ford Foundation. They called it a revolving door, right? So they're very much closely coupled with that but they also are very, very deliberate about having this much more field oriented approach with grantees and also with communities. So they have people going into the field, they hire people from these communities, not just people from Harvard, right? So they kind of try to balance that. And that's manifested in a lot of different ways, not so much their recent education work which has been focused around getting policies past that are about expanded learning time so longer school days and longer school years. But it has been effective in terms of some of their more historically famous work in terms of the civil rights movement. They were instrumental in the Civil Rights Act, getting that passed, supporting people who were going to Freedom Summer in 1964, that sort of thing. But it's again, it's very behind the scenes. They've also been really successful in the 70s with school finance reform which you would never know about, right? So they are again, working with elites and experts, developing new studies and scholarship that will influence the ideas and also working directly with teachers on the ground. So I think they're the best example I can think of of at least in these large foundations, one that's striking that balance pretty well. Eduardo. So the question is, are there efforts to limit foundations influence in the public sphere? That's a really great question. There have been periodic efforts to do that over the past 100 years. There was the first one was in like 1912, foundations were under fire for supporting the Ludlow massacre and they had the Walsh commission. So that was robber barons, right? They were worried about robber barons being philanthropists. The 50s, it was communism, kind of the opposite. Like, are these foundations fomenting communism? In the 60s, it was while the Ford Foundation is holding voter registration drives in black neighborhoods in Cleveland. Right, so there's been periodic efforts by Congress to sort of censure them. And the most effective of those was the 60s, late 60s when they said, here are the political regulations. Since then, there are periodic little blips. You know, there's talk now about, you know, since Citizens United, maybe foundations should be able to lobby just like everyone else, but then there's a perennial argument that their tax exemptions shouldn't be subsidized by the government for being political. Right, they're supposed to be more neutral. But what I did get from my various interviews is that people think one of these waves is coming. Right, so there hasn't been a big wave since the late 1960s. And all the signs kind of point to the same conditions that were at stake then. There's a lot of income inequality and energy around that. People kind of questioning, why should these foundations be tax exempt? And you'll basically be taking money that would otherwise be in the treasury and holding them in these huge endowments. So it comes in the form of more, let's increase the payout rate. You know, all foundations have to give five percent of their assets annually. People say let's raise that to 10 percent or let's mandate about these foundations' sunset, which means that they have to close after 25 years and they have to spend down. But nothing really major except for those little things. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if something comes up soon. Yes, your name? The road and gates, which would say that not only did they kind of mis-evaluate or mis-estimate what they were doing, but that they were inspired to do so perhaps by the lines of the testing companies or with people who are very excited to buy or sell iPads in every class. And there is a substantial evidence for this, say in Chicago or LA, where there's kind of intent to mingling, say, between new schools for Chicago or Renaissance, two dozen patents ever, and executives and tech companies and testing companies. So in your experience around these philanthropies, what evidence do you see for the kind of most cynical account of what these philanthropies may have gotten on? Great question. The question was, what evidence am I seeing of a more cynical or less cynical view towards these foundations work? Are they sort of aligned with corporate interests? Have other things in mind besides the public good? I mean, it's a really, it's a hot debate, honestly, always. I think in the last five years, it's taken up a lot more energy and it's also become less marginalized as a viewpoint. It used to be, oh my gosh, the corporate reformers are just wanting to make money off the poor children. I think there's less of that now, partially because the mainstream view has shifted left. My personal opinion from looking at these for so many years is that I personally don't find that in these foundations. I'm sure there are foundations in which that's happening, but I do think that the people in these foundations do have very good intentions. I think they have blind spots about privilege and power and wealth and their lack of knowledge about effective communities. But in terms of that very cynical view about everyone wants to profit or make test profit off of these companies or massive testing, I'm sure some of that comes into play. But I honestly don't think that it infuses their work. I think that they are ethical actors who make some mistakes in terms of their execution as opposed to fundamentally bad human being. That makes sense? Yes, back here. Yeah, that's a great question. What was the difference? The question was, what's the difference between attention paid to the agenda setting phase of policy and then more implementation? It was divided along these two lines. So the outcome-focused foundations tended to be more about the big picture, let's get people on board, let's quickly move the policy, and then we'll again contract out the implementation. So that lack of attention to the implementation, I think that's why they didn't see that they needed to engage political strategy on the ground. Whereas Kellogg and Ford were very much about the implementation and sort of having longer term relationships with their grantees that enabled them to think through those things more at the outset. Thank you. Yeah, so personalized learning, what's my opinion, and how will that influence evaluate? That's a really, that's a more higher eddish question, but I like it. Yeah, it applies everywhere. Yeah. I am not cynical, I am skeptical because there have been so many iterations of the same sort of idea. So in the outcome-focused foundations, they tend to be focusing more on structural reforms. In the early 2000s, it was let's make the schools small or let's make the classes small and that's going to be what fixes education. It's about class size. And now it's about students need more individualization of their lesson plans, work at their own pace. We can cut a lot of waste through technology. I personally, given that I am someone who has studied a lot of John Dewey and education policy, I personally think that I personally, my biased view is that I don't think it's a scalable solution to fix all of education. I think that there's a place for personalized learning, but I'm skeptical of efforts to make it such a central component of some public schools and that's really happening in California right now, mostly due to Gates and Chan Zuckerberg initiative. Yeah, and I mean the trend towards quantifiable teacher evaluations, there's a lot of empirical evidence about how those can be skewed against women or faculty of color and that it creates bad incentives for people to give better grades. It's interesting, certainly personalized learning will provide more of that granular data that can influence how people are evaluated as teachers. But yeah, it's a really good question. I'll have to think more about that. I haven't made that connection to teacher evaluations specifically. Erica. Biggest problem that I have heard all the time in education is teacher pay. Do you think foundations have any role in such an infrastructure level problem in education or did any of the foundations still feed to that? Yeah, so the question from Erica was merit pay differential compensation is a big deal and has been for a while. What was the second part of the question? Do foundations have a role? Do foundations have a role? Yeah, I mean it's a great example. I think like the historical literature on foundations and sort of some of the normative arguments about the role of foundations is that foundations are supposed to be like the research and development arm of society. Or Paul Ilbisaker who's a famous Ford Foundation president calls it America's passing gear for those of you who like drive stick, which I don't. Yeah, so that it can, it has discretionary capital that the government doesn't. The government can't experiment on the public dime. They have to serve the median voter, right? So foundations have the luxury of being able to pilot innovations and then maybe the best ones will get scaled up for broader implementation. So that's kind of in the historical role of foundations. And that's the role that Broad has played with differential compensation in Denver and in DC. They had philanthropic money paying out this effectiveness pay for teachers in both those cities. And then eventually those reforms got incorporated into the contracts, the teacher contracts. And that was more of a ground up strategy. They actually did work with teachers and with teachers unions to do that. So I have no problem at all with foundations investing in those sorts of pilot programs. I do have a problem when it becomes wholesale policy especially in environments that are perpetually cash strapped because what resource deprived public school system is going to say, sorry, Gates don't want your pilot funding, right? It's almost a false choice. So that's my concern. There's a power differential. Yeah, everyone says, oh, those who elect no wrong can be done to them. But I think a foundation grant from a Gates or a Broad is more than just financial capital. It's also prestige. It's social connections, it's political capital as well. So that's my biased opinion. Yes, great question. So the question was, why do we have this weird thing? This weird, very American category of private foundations and should we have it? I mean, I think that's a really important point that's starting to come more to the fore. I mean, it's a very odd thing. I mean, foundations were only differentiated from other 503s in 1969. Public charities can lobby. They can advocate up to about 25% of their budget. Foundations can't do that at all. And that is the only distinction in the tax code. And that grows out of a particular congressman, Bob Patman from Texas, having a real agenda or have vendetta against foundations because he thought that they were funding his challengers in the political arena. So that's where that restriction came from. It's very arbitrary. There's no kind of historical precedent for it. But now we're seeing kind of the opposite end. We're seeing Chan Zuckerberg, for example. You guys think that was a 501c3? He gave $45 billion to an LLC, $45 billion to an LLC. And that's a new form of philanthropic investment called impact investing. And that gives you more leeway. You don't have to limit yourself in terms of lobbying. You don't have to just pay grants. You can make investments, much like you would in a regular company. And so at least among new entrants to this space, that's becoming, slowly you're starting to see that more and more in terms of what they elect to do. They're not just going for the private foundation anymore. Maybe they're going to a donor-advised fund at a large mutual fund where they have some control, but they don't have the overhead of a foundation. So the model that we see that started in 1910 is, again, we don't have enough data to make generalizations. But we're certainly seeing a lot of really interesting things happening that I didn't see five years ago. And I think it's very contested terrain. And in some cases, it's happening as I speak. It's a very dynamic field right now. So I mean, not that I have $45 billion, but if I did, I would probably think very hard about putting it into an LLC. You don't get the tax benefits, but assuming you have $45 billion, it's probably not going to be that big of a deal. Gives you more freedom, gives you less stress about, oh my gosh, are we going to get censured by the IRS. So I think a lot of people are starting to explore alternative models or institutions in terms of how they give money away. Yes? Zuckerberg and his phone dropped by college, raised upwards of $100 million for Newark's in schools and enrollment there is a little bit less than what it is in the Detroit public schools now. And originally, Mayor Berger and Governor Christie were very, very sympathetic. But I think after nine years or so, there's pretty much consensus that that money had many more minimal effects than one anticipator's. It wasn't a fundamental money for a $45,000 student. $45,000 student, that would be even worth it. Do you think that that will have any effect on these large foundations? I mean, depending on their charter, they can get out, support an education, and go back to buying monies. Sure. You're interacting in part, is there a consequence of the Newark experience of these large foundations? That's a really great question. So the question was this high-profile case of Newark public schools getting $100 million from Mark Zuckerberg in concert with Chris Christie and Cory Booker. Dale Rusukoff wrote about this in a great book called The Gift, basically showed that that money mostly was tied up in bureaucracy and funding consultants. And very little of it got to the classroom and the students. I mean, I think absolutely, I think for Zuckerberg in particular, that lesson has meant that he's not putting his money into a foundation. He is still giving money. He gave $120 million to Bay Area public schools, like around Redwood City in California. So it's not like he's not giving that money, he's just doing it in a different way that allows him, I think, more leeway. And not having to, again, it's about disruption. It's like not having to work with a messy bureaucratic state. It's more efficient, it's more effective. He can do more things under his own control. So yeah, I do think a lot of these sort of big, laudable gifts that get a lot of media attention. People are thinking about it in a more nuanced way as opposed to, yes, this money will fix. And again, it's a drop in the bucket, right? $100 million against what a school or a school actually needs to survive and overcome these major issues. Again, it's not a technical solution. So yes? Foundations moving towards as they try to become more grassroots oriented, and particularly, how are they trying to avoid astroturfing, where they have the appearance of community support that they don't control? Yeah, so the question is, what are these outcome focused foundations doing to be more field focused? And is there a danger that that's astroturfing, sort of appearing to do it, but kind of co-opting the actual value to have that appearance when not necessarily doing things that are substantive? Yeah, I mean, again, it's very recent. It's only been since late 2015, 2016 that I'm seeing this from Gates. What I'm seeing is more language and verbiage coming from the CEO about we need to be more humble. And one of Gates' core values that they put on every wall is, we need to be humble and mindful. But I think they're actually bringing in more efforts to do more like privilege implicit bias awareness, like actually focusing on issues of race and power, which were previously unmentionable in many foundations. New schools venture fund didn't even think about that. Huge blind spot, right? But important in terms of a more bottom up approach. I'm seeing, I've seen a couple instances where Bill Gates has gone to meet with teachers in various cities and says we really need to learn from you. So he's doing some of that. I don't know that it's happened more than two or three times, but I think that's happening. Broad is an interesting example because they are very top down as well, but they do in certain instances have more engagement on the ground. So like in New Orleans, they've been instrumental in converting New Orleans to charters and people have different opinions about that, but they have worked on the ground quite a bit with schools, parents, and those types of kind of community-rooted strategies. But again, I think time will tell, I don't know. I mean, that's, it's a really interesting question because I think if you're doing it to get better outcomes and it's not really a core part of your institutional DNA was the phrase I kept hearing, harder to maintain that and really root that in the culture and have your staff take ownership over it. I, in your research, is there a lot that came up out of some of the evaluation think tanks or even some of the academic research that comes out of it? And I say this because you don't hear a lot of, a lot of negative results coming from some of the evaluation studies or the research that comes out and I worry about some of the think tanks and faculty that live off of some of the small money that CASE and other foundations provide. And so I just wanted to know what your feelings were about both that for higher ed, but also for the foundation and potential solution. Yeah, so the question was, what's the role of sort of these think tanks producing evidence, academic researchers, not necessarily publishing, discrepant results? So kind of to that point about an echo chamber, we're funding everyone who does advocacy and all these organizations singing from the same hymn book or all getting money from us. I mean, that's actually a good plug because I am now writing a book about that with a friend from Michigan State University, Sarah Reckow, who is just brilliant, brilliant political scientist. And that project looks at how research on teacher evaluation is used to influence policy and it draws a distinction between more like think tank advocacy research and academic research. And we show through various network models how we basically trace an infrastructure in which this research travels and to what extent it's taken up and why and by who. So we're doing both interviews and discourse network analysis. So I mean, the empirical evidence, there isn't a lot about it in the foundation world, but in other fields, there's been quite a lot of evidence that the think tank stuff, if it's funded by a foundation, more likelihood that it's going to be offering a less nuanced view, right? They are, that's one of the characteristics of advocacy research is that it doesn't waft wafer, waver, waftful waiver. Right, whereas an academic piece might say, might hedge its bets a bit more, say there's uncertainty here, this is not the answer. Whereas advocacy research might say value added is the right way to do a thing. Can that make sense? So stay tuned for those results. We doing okay on time? Yeah. So, Jeremy again, and I would just be very interested in your opinion because you probably know so much more than I will ever know about this. Maybe not. And I was just interested in how you view education and what policies have actually worked and specifically for a lower income family. Yeah, so my question was my personal or scholarly opinions about what has worked in education? I know it hasn't worked. And what hasn't worked is over quantification of test scores, right? So you see what happened in Atlanta, there's a huge cheating scandal. And that is because there were certain high stakes cutoffs that the schools had to meet in order to be making adequate yearly progress under no time left behind. So efforts to, one of my informants called it, make the indicator of an outcome, the outcome in and of itself. So the outcome is supposed to be student learning. But the indicator is the test score, but the test score becomes what we're actually going towards. Campbell's Law, the more quantitative you make an indicator, the more likely it is that you can game it or that you will game it. So there's that. I also think there's been some really interesting research lately about how important race of the teacher is to students in low income schools. Exposure to a black male teacher in elementary school, something like 40% more likely controlling for all these other variables that students would go on to college. So race matters a lot. And that's kind of late breaking news. So I don't know the specifics. I need to find that study. But yeah, I think efforts to have teachers that look like the children that they're teaching are really fruitful and promising. I think efforts to continue to pay teachers more and respect them and make their profession valued and compensated they're in. I think, I mean, that's my little armchair theory that what's gonna work. We pay the teachers more, we respect them. We diversify that profession and have a more field focused approach quite honestly. That's what I came to at the end of writing this book. Although I didn't go in with that. I kind of drank the Kool-Aid about the outcome focused at first. And then I had a different opinion. So I think we're at time. Thank you so much for the wonderful discussion. Thank you.