Will Bezos Heed Other Education Philanthropy Mistakes?
The world’s richest man is heading down a path of charitable giving that has tripped up some of his contemporaries.
AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF Bezos is the latest tech giant to splash onto the education philanthropy scene, announcing plans to develop a network of preschools funded through an initial $2 billion commitment.
"The Day 1 Academies Fund will launch an operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos wrote in a letter posted to Twitter on Thursday morning. "We will build an organization to directly operate these preschools."
In doing so, Bezos follows in the footsteps of other tech giants, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell (the widow of Steve Jobs), who have all directed through their foundations hundreds of millions of dollars – billions, in the case of Gates – to various education initiatives.
To be sure, Bezos – who also plans to use some of the money to aid nonprofits that help homeless families – is not new on the education scene. The Bezos Family Foundation, founded in 2000 and run by Bezos' parents, focuses solely on education, and earlier this year Bezos gave $33 million to a scholarship program for children brought to the United States illegally, TheDream.us.
But the uptick in philanthropic giving from such organizations has sparked heated debates about the influence they wield over public education and their overall impact.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been involved in education for nearly two decades and has directed billions of dollars into advancing policies that gave rise to the education reform movement.
Some of the foundation's biggest bets have been in its decision to back the Common Core State Standards – academic benchmarks for what students should know by the end of each grade – and its push to reimagine teacher evaluation and compensation systems based in part on student test scores.
But the foundation has been widely criticized for funneling funding into what some consider silver-bullet policies or the latest education fad.
In May 2016, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Gates Foundation, apologized for the foundation's misread of how ready – or not ready, as it turned out – states were to handle implementation of the Common Core standards. And last year, Gates himself offered somewhat of a mea culpa for the foundation's involvement in teacher evaluation.
In fact, in outlining plans for a new $1.7 billion investment last fall, the Gates Foundation made a Continue reading: Will Bezos Heed Other Education Philanthropy Mistakes? | Education News | US News
