Yes, Even Billionaires Face Dilemmas in Giving Money for School Reform
While big foundations face many issues in giving money to reform U.S. schools, two dilemmas in grant-giving arise again and again.
The first dilemma involves foundations’ strategies to inject new ideas into urban districts to change the status quo: They can give money to urban districts for locally-designed programs (e.g., new technologies, coaches to execute an experimental reading curriculum, professional learning communities) and then hold their collective breath that these funded programs will make meaningful changes in classrooms. Or they can arm-wrestle (or jawbone or lure–pick your metaphor) those same educators into taking gobs of cash to put innovations into practice that altered districts elsewhere even when locals are uncertain the reforms will help them (e.g., small high schools, pay-for-teacher-performance plans, charters).
The second dilemma that big spending foundations (Gates, Broad, Walton, etc.) do not like to discuss publicly
