Latest News and Comment from Education

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Leadership Profile: Eli Broad | Scholastic.com

Leadership Profile: Eli Broad | Scholastic.com:


Leadership Profile: Eli Broad

The impatient philanthropist.

By Alexander Russo




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.
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