Leadership Profile: Eli Broad
The impatient philanthropist.
By Alexander Russo
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| Broad Strokes 1991 Endows Michigan State University’s business school 2002 Launches $1M Broad Prize for Urban Education; launches Superintendents Academy and Residency in Urban Education 2007 Launches $60M “ED in ’08” campaign with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2008 Provides $6M to launch the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard 2010 Pledges to give away 75 percent of his money as part of Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge; provides $10M to fund D.C. Teachers Union contract 2011 Contributes $25M toward a Teach for America philanthropic endowment 2012 Awards inaugural $250,000 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools to YES Prep |
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Philanthropist Eli Broad doesn’t have the time or patience for the molasses-like pace of change in most school districts. As a result, he tends to fund efforts that bypass, or even blow up, existing systems.
More than a decade into his mission to revolutionize American education, Broad doesn’t seem to have lost any urgency (his 2012 memoir was titled The Art of Being Unreasonable), and he keeps making changes to his funding process to improve results.
Two of a Kind
Broad’s efforts are often lumped in with those of Bill Gates, which is understandable. They’re both based on the West Coast—Gates in Seattle, Broad in Los Angeles—and compared with the Carnegie or Ford foundations, they are relatively new to grant-making. Broad and Gates agree on many things, including the importance of charter schools and teacher effectiveness, and they’ve gone in together on initiatives such as the effort to make education a top priority in the 2008 presidential election.
Broad’s efforts are often lumped in with those of Bill Gates, which is understandable. They’re both based on the West Coast—Gates in Seattle, Broad in Los Angeles—and compared with the Carnegie or Ford foundations, they are relatively new to grant-making. Broad and Gates agree on many things, including the importance of charter schools and teacher effectiveness, and they’ve gone in together on initiatives such as the effort to make education a top priority in the 2008 presidential election.
Like Gates, Broad is often accused of wanting to privatize public education—a completely inaccurate interpretation of his goals, he says. “Nothing could be further from the truth. As the son of a union activist and a lifelong Democrat, I’ve always thought that privatizing our public schools is not the answer. We must strengthen public schools.”
Indeed, though he backed Hillary Clinton in 2008, Broad has come to admire the Obama
