Schools Matter: Indianapolis (and a few other places), Meet John Arnold

Schools Matter: Indianapolis (and a few other places), Meet John Arnold:

Indianapolis (and a few other places), Meet John Arnold

By Doug Martin 

With the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Walton Foundation, and others, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation is pumping millions of dollars into Indianapolis, and former Mind Trust executive vice president Ken Bubp now is the Arnold Foundation’s director of education.  For the 2016-2019 years, the Arnold Foundation plans to hand the Mind Trust $11,075,000 and the Indianapolis Public Schools Education Foundation, Inc. $1,256,250 for the “expansion and replication of high-quality schools.” 

As Lindsey Erdody and Hayleigh Colombo noted a few days ago, Arnold, the Texan and former Enron millionaire turned hedge fund billionaire, in a YouTube video says “If Indianapolis is successful in doubling the number of kids that are attending high-quality schools, it will be one of the best investments that the Arnold Foundation has made.” Arnold continues “Indianapolis has this great chance and opportunity to show the nation what can be done.”

It’s no surprise that Arnold is terming up with the Dell Foundation in Indianapolis, for promoting edtech is one of his many favorite pastimes.  In 2012, the Arnold Foundation handed $10,000 to Innosight Institute, Inc. to promote digital learning, almost $600,000 to the North American Council for Online Learning Ltd. in 2011 and 2012, $6 million in 2012 to the PowerMyLearning, Inc. (Computers for Youth Foundation, Inc.) to support blended learning, $3.5 million to the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences to “advance evidence-based policymaking and promote the use of longitudinal data in education research,” $60,000 in 2016-2017 to the Data Quality Campaign, Inc. to “support the development and distribution of materials that capture the growth of the current data systems in education and share lessons for other sectors,” and over $8 million to the edtech charter school investors NewSchools Venture Fund, whose CEO Ted Mitchell later went to become Obama’s undersecretary of education, just to name a few.  The Arnold Foundation stresses so-called personalized learning, recently giving a $2.7 million grant to the personalized learning OpenStax College project that Rice University researchers are working on.  The Arnold Foundation is Schools Matter: Indianapolis (and a few other places), Meet John Arnold: