Race to the Top funding has all the potential to address this challenge to the educational system.  Lacking a clear framework however, the Federal Government initiated it’s typical Request for Proposals (RFP’s) with its requisite short time-line to submit proposals.  This approach set the States in a double frenzy a. to demonstrate numerical achievement on State standards and b. to spin wildly in its efforts to qualify for the Race to the Top monies.    As an observer, the process  distorts the purpose of a State system to manage and promote excellence in learning and preparing students for the so-called 21Century learning.  It also is a harbinger of colossal waste of Race to the Top Funding, especially in Ohio and some foundations will contribute to the problem.

When the Race to the Top competition was announced, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) invited a group of foundations  to provide input as they planned to shape the application.  Foundations have amassed considerable wisdom on the topic by nature of their investments in education over many years.  The State obliged the Ohio Grantmakers Forum  with an hour-long session with the foundations to provide input.  The deputies from the ODE were only vaguely aware of the OGF report entitled Beyond Tinkering: Creating Real Opportunities for Today’s Learners and for Generations of Ohioans to Come.   The opportunity for public input devolved into a lecture by a  stressed and overworked State bureaucrat whose job was to get this application done!  There was little room for discussion and little tolerance on the part of the person from the State for questions from the foundation representatives on the call.  Several interesting points were brought up and the bureaucrat in question promised to follow-up with phone calls.  None of those follow-up calls were made.

Despite the call two large operating foundations in the State with access to the Governor’s educational inner circle have managed to insert themselves in to the Race to the Top proposal with lucrative benefit including allocations of  $10,000 a day for consulting for five to ten days a year.  Based on their own template for assisting public schools you can be sure the monies will be used to produce a farrago of sounding sessions from teachers across the state who, for the most part, have little exposure to innovation in teaching and, according to teachers I interviewed last week, are fearful of taking risks that might derail kids from current assessment systems.

The governor’s task force’s demonstrated a mistrust of outside advice and assistance can be attributed presumably to pressure to produce a document in such a short period of time.  Wary of outside advice the ODE has again resorted to developing a proposal by “insiders” i.e. career state educational operatives whose very ability to work their way up “the system” will tend to put them in the equilibrium camp and suspicious out new ideas coming from “the edge.”  This is the very system that, within leading companies has stifled innovation with predictable demise.  I say this not to excoriate people, but to put it in a context to understand why the system can’t work as it now stands.   A new structure – such as the innovation zones – hold some potential as to how federal dollars to the States might be better utilized.  These innovation zones would be charged with explore new opportunities to (a) enhance teaching and learning, and (b) with appropriate use of technology, leverage cost savings to the system itself.    Rather than spreading the Race to the Top dollars among a smattering of qualified Learning Education Authority, the focus on innovation zones would provide an opportunity for those in the districts to bring innovation to scale, which is what the Race to the Top monies hope to achieve.

The video below is a conversation with the State Superintendent of Schools, Deborah Delisle  Listen carefully to her conversation. I have great respect for Ms. Delisle, but the poor woman’s aspiration is bogged down by the divergent political interests that pull every which way on the system she is charged with managing.  Her goals for the Race to the Top funds comes across as a mash-up of clichés and betray an anxiety about trying to manage than to think introduce innovation into a school system.  Ms. Delisle is a consummate manager having come to the position as a Superintendent in a Cleveland area school district.  From my experience, she is also a very bright woman and capable of real visionary leadership, however the current political environment thwarts her from finding really creative solutions to the problems that plague Ohio public schools, especially the under-performing districts.  In the absence of a gubernatorial or legislative vision,   Ms. Delisle has little choice by to resort to what authors Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore in their book, Innovation – The Missing Dimension call boundary management.

Within the State Educational system, far to many boundaries exist.  Boundaries between and among departments, boundaries among districts, boundaries among teachers and administrators, between special programs, boundaries between high-performing and under-performing districts and of courses boundaries between charter and traditional public schools.

Innovations in some of the more simple technologies such as on-line learning present new boundaries whose potential presents terrifying challenges in a system already wrought with boundaries listed above.  Part of her job is to attain an equilibrium among those entities to keep the ship moving forward.  As the waters become more turbulent with pressures from new technologies that threaten the very structure of this ship, the reaction to hunker down is understandable.

Messers. Lester and Piore write:

In recent years, management theorists have devised a storehouse full of tools for managing across boundaries.  These include flat, decentralized structures, network organizations, matrix management practices, multifunctional teams, team leadership skills, and a wide array of techniques for listening to the voice of the customer.  But among the practicing managers with whom we spoke, these models and maxims often seemed to be mere placeholders.  Lacking the content to be operable in the real world, they quickly degenerated into clichés.  When prompted, the managers in our cases could usually spout the rhetoric of integration.  But in the real world of new product development, most of them were much more comfortable talking about policing boundaries than about breaking them down.

Unfortunately for Ms. Delisle and for the State of Ohio, this is precisely the situation the State Superintendent finds herself.  Foundations would do well to help the State break this management conundrum within the system by encouraging both the governor and legislatures to create centers for innovation that will encourage boundary free zones where true cross-disciplinary collaboration can take place.  Given the political interests, this would take enormous courage and singular leadership.

It is not an understatement to say, The State of Ohio is at a critical juncture in history.  Pressures from rapid development in technology coupled with increasing “customer” dissatisfaction with the schools as well as a insecure revenue stream, bears the same hallmark as huge companies that are facing unanticipated pressures from outside the company.  In these circumstances, there is an urgency to encourage change and innovation while at the same time trying to manage the company and its responsibility to its shareholders. The two use case studies to drive their point through the book.  The most pertinent case study is that of AT&T  and the synergy between the corporate management structure and its innovation center Bell Labs which, among many other innovations, patented the technology that would become the cell phone.

The initial development of cell phone technology took place at Bell Labs, a sheltered enclave within AT&T that enjoyed the research ethos of an academic laboratory.  Bell Labs was insulated from commercial pressures and hospitable to collaboration among different scientific and engineering disciplines.

…The companies that pioneered cellular typically came from either the radio or telephone side of the business.  At&T was a telephone company.  Motorola and Matisushita were radio companies.  Each faces the major challenge of finding a partner to create the new product.  Not an easy task.  The cultural differences between radio and telephone engineering were deep-rooted…..there were difficulties merging these two industries…

Once it was established as a new and innovative means of enhancing communication, the cell phone section  was moved from Bell Labs.

.. into a separate business unit that was subject to the conventional AT&T bureaucratic practices and hierarchy.  None of the other companies ever had a sheltered environment like Bell Labs in which to start development of cellular.  Most of them began by assembling groups of engineers into newly created but poorly defined organizational entities, where they worked in teams with and ambiguous division of labor and sometimes confused lines of authority.  Like AT&T however, they all ended up adopting more formal, systematic decision making processes and creating better defined organizational structures in which to house the cellular business.

They compare creating innovation within businesses to that of a person hosting a cocktail party. Innovation is spawned by structuring intentional conversations

Cell phones emerged out of a conversation between members of the radio and telephone industries…the manager’s role was to remove the organizational barriers that would have prevented these conversations from taking place.

Here is where the book becomes fun.  Reading this section Deborah Delisle manager blends with Deb Delisle, educational cocktail hostess. Educational Innovation in Ohio could hinge  on her ability to party,

How does a manager initiate these interpretive conversations and keep them going in the face of pressure to solve problems and bring them to closure?  Here the metaphor of the manager as hostess at a cocktail party provides a useful guide.  At most cocktail parties the guests are relative strangers.  They are invited because they might have something interesting to say to one another, but only the hostess really knows that that is, and even she is not always sure.  To make sure the party a success, she will often invite enough people so that it does not really matter if any one pair of them fails to hit it off.

Once the party is under way, her job is to keep the conversation flowing.  A skilled hostess will introduce new people into groups where conversation seems to be flagging, or she will intervene to introduce a new topic when two people do not seem to be able to discover what they have in common on their own.  She may break up groups that do not seem to be working or are headed for an unpleasant argument and steer the guests to other groups.

The lessons of the cocktail party can be summarized in a series of distinct but closely related roles for the manager:

• Step One: choose the guests
• Step Two: initiate the conversation
• Step Three: keep the conversation going
• Step Four: refresh the conversation with new ideas

The governor’s office and the Ohio legislature can create one of the most exciting models to realize a vision for introduce innovation in so called 21st century teaching and learning. Create five places where these allegorical cocktail parties can  take place on a regular basis.  The superintendent will encourage conversations among some of the best people from the field of education, academia,business, technology, neuroscience, as well as teachers, students and union representatives.   Conversations will take place simultaneously and within the context of working school zones. Ambiguity is welcome, encouraged and processed to contribute to creative solutions to problems.  The State will not dictate the parameters of the discussion but be a party to the discussions and seek to find ways to adopt the findings to its way of doing business throughout the rest of the State.

The conversations are too large, and too critical to be diffused among districts throughout the state.  Everyone has to want to be at the party.

The legislature would need to mandate the zones  through the State budget.  The zones would be akin to the Bell Labs.   The zones would be distributed throughout the State.  They would have the appropriate technological support and communication networks to make it happen.  (See my blog post of June 8, 2009)

Teaming Up to Crack Innovation Enterprise Integration is written for the business growth with focus on CEO’s, Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) and IT organizations.  The model easily adapts to a State education bureaucracy and includes two elements that would be critical to the success of the Innovation districts.  Their thesis is relatively straightforward.  Here is how they summarize the concept:

• IT has long been a catalyst of business innovation and essential to cross-functional integration efforts, but few large companies have systematically leveraged technology for these purposes.
• Close study of 24 U.S. and European businesses reveals a model for systematically doing that that through the formation of two IT-intensive groups for coordinating these two processes that are critical to organic growth
• A distributive innovation group (DIG) combines a company’s own innovative efforts with the best of external technology to create new business variations.  The enterprise innovation group (EIG) folds yesterday’s new variations into the operating model of the enterprise.
• The two groups help better identity, coordinate, and prioritize the most-promising projects and spread technology tools, and best practices.

Their charge would be to create boundary-free zones where participating teachers and administrators realize their task is to encourage change and innovation by encouraging collaboration and inter-disciplinary approaches to problems.

Schools buildings participating in the Innovation zones would bridge what is all too common chasm  in today’s schools, i.e. the teachers are different from the “tech-support” offices. These two entities would work hand-in-hand to observe students, monitor progress, look for obstacles and challenges and find solutions that will solve those problems. In many cases those solutions can be resolved with appropriate technological supports. Technology will NEVER replace human interaction which is critical to successful education. Technology can however serve to make good teachers great if it is used to help them become the true professionals they are.

The innovation zones would have an initial life expectancy of five years. In that time the districts will be challenged to come up with unique solutions that will address the challenges facing schools in Ohio. Challenges will not be limited to advances in teaching, learning and assessment, but also to demonstrate administrative costs savings to the State by more appropriate use of technologies to create administrative efficiencies. Advances in these innovations zones will be shared with colleagues in other districts outside the innovation zones.

The task of the Superintendent will be to foster conversations among people with varieties of experiences. Foundations can partner with the States by focusing their grantmaking to programs within the innovation zones that have promise to meet these goals.

I submit that using Race to the Top funds to establish this type of culture for innovation would be far superior to what is currently in the application.

Despite the increasing attention being given to “innovation” in education, innovation remains a loosely defined concept. How can grantmakers envision a truly innovative future for American education-and use that understanding to ensure our education systems meet the needs of learners today? How can human-centered design drive education innovation, particularly as we strive to engage diverse learners? What new capacities must education philanthropists develop to effect trans-formative change? Join colleagues from across the country as we answer these key questions.

This request arrive the very same day that the following article appeared in the New York Times.  The subject addresses innovation and its demise in one of the world’s largest companies.

Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

By DICK BRASS
Published: February 4, 2010

Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.

What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future.

Innovation and its demise within a large business serves as a lesson to the public school system which, by its nature, thwarts an innovative spirit.  Disruptive technologies can be very threatening to school administrators who feel tremendous pressure from “The STATE” to have their schools perform well on the report cards.   In that sense, schools and school officials spend a lot of time talking about “school improvement” which presupposes that the thing they are trying to improve is inherently good.   Disruption, as in disruptive technologies discussed most notably by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn, threatens the very core of what a dutiful school superintendent is trying to achieve which is a kind of  educational “equilibrium.”  How many teachers across the country work with Superintendents whose managerial style mimics those described by the former Microsoft employee.  How many principals, and superintendents have, “created a dysfunctional corporate (educational) culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”  To paraphrase Mr. Bass’ article, it is no wonder greatest and most talented younger people wind up leaving the teaching profession after only a few years.  No wonder why schools have a hard time recruiting new teachers.  What young person, raised and nurtured in a system that encourages creativity and thinking wants to work in such a system?

W. Brian Arthur’s book, The Nature of Technology discusses the question raised by my colleagues at the Grantmakers for Education.  This professor and visiting researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center says in his most recent book, “…we have no agreement on what the word ‘technology’ means, no overall theory of how technologies come into being, no deep understanding of what ‘innovation’ consists of … missing is a set of overall principles that would  give the subject a logical structure, the sort of structure that would help fill these gaps.”

Without a common understanding of what innovation can mean, it should be no surprise that school officials react negatively when the concept is introduced.  Unfortunately, these same officials and their teachers do not embrace the urgency that is needed to explore the ways in which technology can and is challenging the way students learn and achieve.  The lack of any state sanctioned Innovation Zones results in too many classrooms across the states tinkering with technology and learning.  This parody, done by students at University of Denver, show the less than optimal results.

My vision for Ohio would be to legislate the establishment of Educational Innovations Zones.  More specifically  the legislation would support the establishment of five Innovation Zones throughout the State.  This concept starts out being consistent with the Ohio School Improvement Program which, is aspirational at best, but which, in my opinion, flounders in implementation.

Ohio’s School Improvement Program

…Rather than focusing on making improvement through a “school-by-school” approach, Ohio’s
concept of scale up redefines how people operate by creating a set of expectations that, when
consistently applied statewide by all districts and regional providers, will lead to better results for
all children. OLAC’s recommendations are supported by recent meta-analytical studies on the
impact of district and school leadership on student achievement, and provide strong support for
the creation of district and school-level/building leadership team structures to clarify shared
leadership roles/responsibilities at the district and school level, and validate leadership team
structures needed to implement quality planning, implementation, and ongoing monitoring on a
system-wide basis.

The two concepts diverge however when I suggest that these “zones” include some of the best teachers from varying districts within the region.  An ideal zone would include teachers from public, charter and private schools as well as home-schools, who can demonstrate a creative approach to education.  The zones would be given a five-year time period to meet regularly and demonstrative clear and effective methods to improve teaching and learning.  More importantly, these zones would be encouraged to demonstrate effective assessment tools to measure success using these new approaches.  Also within these zones, school administrators and teachers would be charged with coming up with tools that will demonstrate clear cost-savings to the business of educating.  For example,  can a ‘zone’ be managed in new ways that would allow the State to reduce the number of high-paid superintendents and curricular officers.  These zones could and should be given levels of autonomy.  Rather than the current Office of Innovation    These offices could report to the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement which by its description is simply another management office to tinker with what is already in place.  It is certainly NOT a way to stimulate the real innovation that needs to take place on the peripheries.  The zones can be virtual places such as SecondLife where people across long physical distances can meet regularly.

These innovation zones would be managed by local boards, consisting of educators from K-12, educators from higher education, business leaders, education technologists and accountants who will help oversee the evolving budgetary implications of innovation.  These board would report out to a State and/or National official on a quarterly basis.  Real innovation would be posted similar to the way that the Lucas Foundation’s site Edutopia reports out on innovative uses of technology by individual teachers and schools across the country.

In an ideal world, these zones would be the targets of Federal Race to The Top funding.  It is not inconceivable that other states could legislate innovation zones and a national competition be underway to demonstrate real innovation in teaching and assessment for learning.  To appease the teachers unions which will likely fight this every step of the way, the legislation should be firm (urgency should prevail), but allow for the entire concept of innovation zones to be scraped if no significant cost-savings or significant gains in learning take place.  We can go back to the way things were.

It is important to realize that real innovation will be a process.  A process similar to medical research in which making mistakes is allowed.  Failures should be published and shared.  Medical researchers can learn as much from failure as they seek to create new and effective protocols for treating disease.  Similarly, risk taking can be encouraged with the understanding that all will learn from success as well as failure.

Referring again to Dr. Arthur’s book one can understand why these innovation zones need not be concentrated in one particular school building or “district” as we have come to know them bound by geographic lines drawn over a century and a half ago.  The zones need to be centers of knowledge as well as ways of thinking.  This thinking by its nature will conflict with the aspiration to equilibrium too many school administrators crave.

…when new bodies of technology – railroads, electrification, mass production, information technology – spread through an economy, old structures fall apart and new ones take their place.  Industries that were once TAKEN for GRANTED become obsolete, and new ones come into being.

Real advanced technology – on-the-edge sophisticated technology – issues not fro knowledge but from something I will call deep craft. Deep craft is more than knowledge.  It is a set of knowings.  Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work.  Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique.  Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to.  This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted.  And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of experience.”

The urgency remains.   Too many good teachers who are indeed professionals are not meeting their potential due to a system that has lost its ability to mange.   Philanthropy can play a role by working with the State to fund these centers of innovation.  President Obama is working with the MacArthur Foundation to stimulate innovation in education with a $2 million competition.  Other foundations across the country could pick up the challenge but I believe that better coordination with the States who ultimately run education would be a better approach.  More on this later.

The Context – According to results from the 2008 Ohio Family Health Survey, there are an estimated 29,326 uninsured adults, age 18 to 64, in Lorain County.  This number represents 15.9% of adults in Lorain County, a statistically significant increase of 4.9% (9,160 persons) over 2004 figures.  Further, there are 2,723 uninsured children, under the age of 18.  This, however, represents 1% fewer uninsured children over 2004 figures.

The improvement in the rate among children is attributable in large part to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which provided insurance for children in families with incomes up to 250% of the federal poverty level.  In 2008, eligibility was increased from 200% of the federal poverty level.

Some of the characteristics of the adult uninsured population are as follows:

• Males were more likely to be uninsured than females.
• Younger adults have higher estimated uninsured rates than older adults.  In Lorain County, 34.1% of adults ages 18 to 24 were uninsured versus 8.4% of adults ages 45 to 64.
• Married couples have much higher health insurance rates than others.  In Lorain County, 32.4% of unmarried adults ages 18 to 64 were uninsured versus 4.8% of married adults.
• Adults ages 18 to 64 who are less educated are also less likely to have health insurance.  In Lorain County, those with a four-year college degree had an uninsured rate of 8.1% versus 47.6% for those with less than a high school diploma or equivalent.
• Differences in employment status are also related to insurance status.  In Lorain County, 7.8% of full-time workers were uninsured, compared to 19.9% of part-time workers and 29.4% of unemployed adults.
• In Lorain County, adults in households with income of at least twice the federal poverty level (FPL) had an uninsured rate of 8.5%. Those below poverty (less than 100% FPL) had an uninsured rate of 34.6%, and almost half (48.6%) of those with incomes between 101% and 150% FPL were uninsured.

The two primary hospital systems located in Lorain County are Community Health Partners Regional Medical Center and EMH Regional Healthcare System. Both systems do their share to provide care to those without coverage and/or the ability to pay.  In 2007, EMH provided approximately $17 million in charity care.  This was an increase of 15% over 2006, a 54% increase since 2004, and more than double 2001.  The same year, CHP provided $4.8 million in traditional charity care, and an additional $11.7 million in unpaid costs for Medicaid.

The Response – In 2008, The Nord Family Foundation contributed $129,000 to the Community Foundation of Greater Lorain County, to initiate HealthCare Lorain County.  These funds leveraged local grants allowing the group to contract with the Altarum Institute and the Public Services Institute of Lorain County Community College to facilitate a year-long community engagement and planning process aimed at improving access to health care for the uninsured in Lorain County.   The two contractors, guided by Robert Woods Johnson’s Communities in Charge, initiative  diagrammed stakeholders’ perspectives of the current and desired Lorain County health system, completed a local environmental scan, outlined key problems, and mapped provider resources.

Contributions from local funders included

• Community Foundation $33,000
• Stocker Foundation $25,000
• CareSource Foundation $20,000
• United Way of Lorain Co. $5,000

Participants – Approximately forty (40) community leaders, referred to as the Working Group, participated on this initiative at some level and are committed to addressing/improving the health care situation in Lorain County.  This Working Group was comprised of individuals from all aspects of the health care field (hospitals, health departments, mental health board, medical society, etc.), as well as state and local government, law enforcement, social services, local funders, faith-based organizations, and business representatives.   A Steering Committee of ten (10) members acted as a sort of Executive Committee and met when the Working Group did not – vetting data and information and taking suggestions back to the larger Working Group.  Between August 2007 and December 2009, the Working Group and the Steering Committee each met five times, under the guidance/facilitation of the consultants.

Goal – HealthCare Lorain County focused its efforts around providing access to Medical Homes for the uninsured.  In a medical home model, primary care clinicians and allied professionals provide conventional diagnostic and therapeutic services, as well as coordination of care for patients that require services not available in primary care settings. The goal is to provide a patient with a broad spectrum of care, both preventive and curative, over a period of time and to coordinate all of the care the patient receives.  This “Medical Home” decision was reached by the Steering Committee in June 2008 and presented to the Working Group in late July 2008 after much data analysis regarding the statistics of the uninsured in Lorain County, and the current rates/usage stats of the two main hospital systems.   Over the next several months the group reviewed examples of other communities’ successful solutions to the same problem Lorain County is facing and ways in which those communities adopted medical home models or something similar.  December 2009, the Committee recommitted to the long-term goal.

Status -

Charity Hospitals

Currently, Community Health Partners has started a very small Medical Home pilot program with the assistance of the Lorain County Free Clinic – both of whom served on the Steering Committee.  The two main hospitals, CHP and EMH, along with the Steering Committee Chair and two of the larger foundations funders, met in November 2009 to discuss how the two hospitals are prepared to commit to/expand on a full Medical Home program for the Lorain County community.  The most viable option for the two appeared to be the Toledo CareNet model which serves a triaging center to make sure the medically uninsured and under-insured have a human being ushering them to an appropriate care.  CareNet’s strength is in providing a continuum of care for the medically indigent requiring chronic care.  At this writing, the hospitals are reluctant to make a financial commitment to what could amount to a $300,000 operating budget for CareNet to function in Lorain County.  The foundations are continuing to meet with the hospital directors to determine why this is the case.

Public Health Departments –

In 2008, The Public Services Institute (PSI) of Lorain County Community College was contracted by the Lorain City public health department to initiate a strategic plan.  The plan was published in July 2008 with little discussion from the Health Care Lorain County group. The plan calls for a need for the three entities to “collaborate,” but fails address Health Care Lorain County’s call to explore consolidation of the three separate health districts into one.  PSI had engaged in low-level negotiations with the health departments to push the idea of merger forward in 2009.   In January 2010, Nord Family Foundation inquired about the PSI’s efforts and received the following response from the Elyria Public Health Director,

We have been unable for many reasons to meet with Lorain City. We have of course had financial reductions in grants and have laid  two positions and eliminated the well child program. We just received an 100,000 cut in the general fund from Elyria — and so are anticipating  other major changes within this year — because so much of our budget depends on grants and those grants are on a fed fiscal year, we have until June to complete whatever we  decided to do about consolidation of some of our remaining programs, etc. This has been — due to our early and constant involvement withH!N! — a very difficult and challenging year. The Board has worked and supported us — but we all know we need to come up with a new business plan that will fit our budget. Unfortunately at a time when our services are really needed on a lot of fronts, we are at risk! But the Board is still interested in some kind of collaboration with Lorain city. There has been no enthusiasm or cordiality on their part re. to invitations — but they are also under stress.

PSI’s message to Nord Family Foundation is,

You will notice the strategic priority regarding collaboration.  Honestly, unless someone funds a neutral convener and facilitator to take these two entities to the next level, I doubt much will happen until either Kathy (Elyria director)  and/or Terry (Lorain director) retire.  Both individuals have to be close to this point so the time is now.

As these conversations continue, the Nord Family Foundation awarded $297,000 in grants to unrelated health-delivery organization in Lorain County between 2008-2009.  The recipient organizations are: Community Health Partners Regional Foundation; Family Planning Services of Lorain County; The Lorain County Free Clinic; The Lorain County General Health District and the Lorain County Health and Dentistry.

Progress is being made in that the foundations continue to engage in conversations with the hospitals, the federally qualified health centers and the free clinic.  An ad hoc committee on the medically uninsured continues to meet regularly with focus on sustaining the Lorain County drug repository.  The Nord Family Foundation hosts those monthly meetings.

After more than a year of meetings, the following challenges remain:

1. There is a need to continue exploring this very complex issue of providing quality health-care to medically uninsured and underinsured people in the county.
2. There must be a new technology infrastructure put in place to facilitate data sharing.
3. There is a desire to provide every citizen a sense of a medical home.  People desire a relationship with a personal health care provider rather than an impersonal institution.
4. The community needs to explore open-source charts so every patient can have an online chart that will follow him or her to their port to the health care system. The Cleveland Clinic’s remarkable on-line health record called My Chart is a great example of what an electronic health portfolio for medically underinsured and uninsured could look like.
5. There is a need to examine how health dollars currently flow into the county.  There are tremendous inefficiencies and possible duplication of effort among  three distinct health departments (Elyria, Lorain City and Lorain County Health) which draw most of their funding from federal and state programs.  These departments which were established initially to address infectious disease in the earlier decades of the 20th Century, are not equipped to handle comprehensive chronic care that the majority of the population needs.  Competition from for-profit clinics such as Walgreens Take Care Clinic raises questions about the place of these health departments in a 21st century health care model.
6. The economic pressure necessitates collaboration between the two charitable hospitals and the Cleveland Clinic.
7. All eyes are on the negotiations with the impending federal health care legislation in Congress.

Lessons Learned -

The challenge for the Nord Family Foundation (or any foundation) deciding to take on a convening effort of this magnitude trustees must determine

• How visible a role you want the foundation to take
• have flexibility built into the expectations you have for the outcome
• know the level of risk you will tolerate (the outcome could result in stakeholders walking away from the table)
• determine how much staff time and money you are willing to put into the effort
• look for innovation from players outside the local cohort
• be willing to stick with it – conversations of this magnitude can take years but n the long run, the Medical Home is likely to result in savings to patients, employers, and health plans.  Increasing the emphasis on primary care could produce large dividends throughout our health care system

I thought the letter would intrigue you, please read on…

When I was in seventh grade, Sister Michael Mary emphasized that, “…to be anything in life, you must always re-read anything you write out loud and to yourself. The task was reemphasized later in high school with my teacher, Sister Kevin Marie. I found myself channeling my inner nun with my high-school aged sons urging them to do the same with each of their essays. Everyone in my family has tried a variety of text-to-voice tools but they never really worked well. My wife is a teacher of languages at Oberlin College and runs a blog called Language Lab Unleashed. She showed me a very interesting tool that teachers are exploring in classrooms. It is called Xtranormal, and could have applications in classrooms. Just to play with it, I decided to use a “Letter to the Editor” which the Cleveland Plain Dealer Published on January 3, 2010. The original letter which comments on a ruling by the Ohio High School Athletic Association with regard to a soccer tournament at a private school in Cleveland.  The result would make Sisters Kevin Marie and Michael Mary happy.

January 03, 2010, 4:07AM

The story of the forfeiture of the Hathaway Brown soccer team’s state title should anger every parent of a child engaged in sports at any high school in the state. The Ohio High School Athletic Association rules were developed to address the inane acts of a few misguided adults and coaches who, instead of serving as role models of good sportsmanship, will stack teams in an effort to win at all costs.Having coached recreational youth soccer over the years, I was amazed at the number of parents who thought they had permission to verbally assault coaches and referees. More shocking was the number of coaches who would try to find “ringers” to win a game. These few adults are the ones to blame for this hideously stupid set of rules developed by OHSAA.

I know of several young people at independent schools who, through no fault of their own, transferred to new schools and were prohibited from participating on the new schools’ teams. Past actions of self-serving adults created a situation that now punishes young people across the state.

Adults need to learn that cheating to meet their own unfulfilled fantasies has an effect on the entire civic fabric. The OHSAA needs to be less punitive, re-examine its rules and consider a policy that will allow the student, his or her parents and the school’s coach and principal to develop a policy on a case-by-case basis rather than submit to a rule like this that creates cynicism and resentment.
John Mullaney, Oberlin

I realize that few people take the time to read letters to the editor, especially on a Sunday.  To enhance the impact of my comments, I decided to turn my letter to the editor into an discussion topic featuring Larry King and Sarah Palin.  I took the time to add additional comments.  The outcome is, if nothing else, mildly entertaining.

So I also did a similar adaptation of a paragraph from the a June 14 2009 post on this blog. Here is how it turned out.

I am not sure yet how these tools can apply to foundations, philanthropy and the nonprofit world. I thought perhaps an entire board book in this format could provide an added dimension to the dreadful anticipation of “the Board Book.” Any viable suggestions would be welcome. One are where there might be some interest is in the area of autism where children seem to relate well to computer games.

Compounding the problem is the fact that Innovation by its nature implies risk-taking.  Government entities (and some philanthropic institutions) tend to be risk averse.

I have struggled with the question how can philanthropy play a role in galvanizing the community around the idea of implementing zones where we can do something about the many glaring inefficiencies we see in our local governments.  I continue to be intrigued by Innovation Zones.  Some municipalities have introduced Innovation Zones but these are typically involve tax incentives between public and private entities to attract new businesses into towns.  The Innovation Zone I propose of are not to attract new business, but change the ineffective ‘business as usual approach to public management.  These Innovation Zones  engage the public, private, university and nonprofit sector in a zone (virtual and real) to demonstrate new collaborations that will result in cost savings and produce greater efficiencies in service delivery.  I hope that soon philanthropy will help to develop just one as a demonstration site that can be replicated in many other communities across the country.

I am going to attempt to answer for myself the following questions.  Anyone reading this blog is welcome to comment and perhaps provide answer I cannot see at this point.

• What is an innovation zone mean?
• How does one create and foster innovation zones?
• What is the goal of an innovation Zone?

Innovation is an approach to a problem.  Foundations and the nonprofits they serve, have a huge problem on their hands – an economic recession unlike any in recent memory. Philanthropic dollars no matter how large constitute a mere fraction of what it actually costs for non profit organizations to do business. Government monies in one form or another constitute the bulk of operations for schools, state agencies and the non-profits we work with each day.

The economic meltdown of 2008-2009 had a catastrophic effect on State budgets.  The Ohio 2009-2010 budget shows unprecedented cuts in social services and in education. A local school superintendent told his school board last night, “What hit Wall Street a few years ago, is only now beginning to hit us.  We are in a crisis.”  Even though the market seems to be making modest recovery, the government and nonprofit sectors are in a crisis that demands new and creative approaches to the way things have always been done.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported on a recent survey by the Business Volunteers Unlimited (BVU) that  revealed

… of 103 local nonprofits, conducted by Business Volunteers Unlimited and the Nonprofit Finance Fund, found that 36 percent reported ending the most recent fiscal year with an operating deficit, and 32 percent predicted a deficit for the current year. The survey represents a tiny slice of the thousands of nonprofits registered in Cuyahoga County.

To stay afloat, 34 percent of the nonprofits expect to dip into reserve funds this year. Thirty-one percent said they’ll freeze hires and salaries and 28 percent intend to reduce or eliminate programs.

In reaction to the budget crisis, nonprofits as well as government agencies now approach foundations with requests for funding that will serve as “stop-gap” funding to replace lost government dollars.  There is a presumption this money will be a temporary fix until things get better.  It is becoming quite evident that things will not get back to normal as state and local governments scramble to find new revenue sources through taxes.

The economist Jeffrey W. Sachs has an article in the October 2009 issue of Scientific American addressing The Crisis of Public Management.  The rider to the title states, “Nothing less than an overhaul of the systems that implement federal policies will suffice.”  Sachs cites a litany of government “failures” including the lack of coordinated intelligence prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, the U.S. occupation of Iraq as well as, “Government regulatory agencies (that) completely dropped the ball while overseeing the surge of dangerous financial instruments that underpinned the reckless lending that eventually burst in the Great Crash of 2008.  Mr. Sachs suggests,

“we need a better scientific understanding of these pervasive system failures.  Other nations’ governments more successfully manage infrastructure investments, health systems and environmental resources, apparently with greater flexibility, less corruption, lower costs and better outcomes…

…today’s challenges cut across specialties and institutional divisions.  In health care and energy for example, the private sector holds the key technologies, but only the public sector can finance R&D, regulate sustainable practices, and ensure access for the poor to resources and services.”

Although I agree with Mr. Sachs,  I worry that he overestimates the virtue of the government designated to oversee the R&D and regulatory abilities.  Cleveland has been witness to an unfolding drama of government corruption which involves sordid greed mongering among elected officials and business people.  I would hope that his definition of the public sector would go beyond elected officials. The inspiration is there, but the challenge for those of us in philanthropy and the non profit sector is how to make efficiencies happen in the communities where we live.

In my experience I often hear of cases where politics gets in the way of creative solutions to budgetary problems.  Recently, I spoke with two mayors who said that the county could save more than $1 million dollars a year in tax dollars by rationalizing a 911 dispatch service to route emergency calls directly to  the police and emergency departments in each city, rather than routed through a county managed dispatching agency.  The county administration is reluctant to give up budgetary control of the centralized system.   Giving up control would mean downsizing jobs often involving friends or political supporters.  Budgetary transparency is not the norm in this county.

I would argue that the greatest success with public officials is secured when one can demonstrate success. The best models have a solid financial model with demonstrable buy-in from a community that understands what the model is trying to achieve.

Unfortunately, nonprofits and government agencies have never had the funds or the idea to invest monies into developing such models and prototypes.  Government certainly does not have the funds to conduct this type of R&D modeling.  Philanthropy can be the only source for funding prototypes that will simulate new ways of doing business.   Most nonprofit and agency directors complain about the budgetary constraints and negative effects on their services.  In the next breath however, they can also provide suggestions on how the process could be improved .  Few have ever had the time or opportunity to participate in modeling solutions in virtual or real worlds.  In a web 1.0 world problems are addressed by in-gatherings of the interested and concerned.  Consultants are called to help map solutions that are translated into paper reports that rarely effect significant change to the problems at hand.  Even fewer result in any meaningful legislative change.

For years now, businesses have made effective use of web-based tools to prototype and/or simulate changes in product design and/or management that yield great greater value for the company and increase the bottom line.  The auto industry moved from using clay to prototype the automobile to three-dimensional virtual environments, the financial industry moved from pen and paper to spread sheets, and think of the innovation that has taken place in increasing knowledge and understanding in physics, biology, chemistry and astronomy by use of virtual simulation environments.  It is only the social sciences that have left this magnificent tool untapped and with the result being a woefully inefficient and overly expensive public system. In his book Serious Play, How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate author Michael Schrage, of the MIT Media Lab says, “The conventional interpretation – in science, academia, and businesses alike – is that we build ‘virtual worlds’ to better understand the problem to be solved of the opportunity to be exploited.  This is accurate without being true.  It fails to recognize where the bulk of the value may actually be realized.  The real reason we need to build and seriously play with prototypes is to get a better understanding of ourselves and our priorities.”

The current budgetary crisis places increase obligation on both the public and philanthropic sector to make better use of  the myriad of modeling tools that can positively apply to the public sector.  Simulating new ways of delivering public services and provide local, State and the Federal government with new models for finding efficiencies in service delivery and cost-savings to the tax payer.

Better and more effective use of web-based technologies and even gaming programs make that prototyping not only possible but quite feasible.  Regulating the number of “players” can allow an entity to not only guarantee transparency, but create several prototyping “teams” to come up with a variety of solutions to the same problems.  Philanthropy can serve an important role by providing some of the early-stage funding to trip-start these games for the public.  Philanthropy can also ask questions that are often difficult for government officials to ask and hard for invested parties to answer honestly. Question like: In this day and age do we really need 14 separate school districts, each with its own superintendent, curriculum director and top-heavy administration to deliver effective education in this community of 280,000 people?  Do we really need to have three separate fire departments in a geographic radius of five square miles?

Philanthropy can not only provide early financing, it can help find the partners.  To begin, you need a place to build the virtual world.  Typcially a university-based system will be a good start.  For example the New Media Consortium would provide an instant web of any number of computer gamers who would jump all over the opportunity to create a project of this scope.  In Cleveland, OneCommunity and its Knight Center provides a perfect platform to convene the public to initiate engagement in the modeling process.  Philanthropy can easily convene any number of constituents from a variety of sectors.

Innovation zones are an area where philanthropy and the public sector can explore new ways of doing business. Communities can begin to ask questions they were unable or unwilling to ask before.  The right tools will enable the community to model various alternatives and develop budgets that will demonstrate the feasibility of alternative ways of doing business.  Ultimately an innovation zone should have as its goal new models of doing public management that produce cost savings and greater efficiencies.

One of the most exciting models of this approach to better government can be found in Cleveland with the Fund for Our Economic Future and Advance Northeast Ohio’s introduction of Efficient Government.  A brief description from their website explains the idea:

The Fund for Our Economic Future, a collaborative effort to strengthen regional economic competitiveness in Northeast Ohio, has announced a new competitive awards program, EfficientGovNow.

Under the program, local governments in the region are encouraged to submit government collaboration and efficiency proposals to the Fund, which will provide a total of $300,000 to as many as three projects. Project proposals will be posted online for public review, and the residents of Northeast Ohio will ultimately select which of the collaboration projects will receive funding.

The name EfficientGovNow was chosen because it explicitly tells elected officials and the public the purpose of the program.

“The Fund wants to support government collaboration efforts that will result in more efficient government now,” said Brad Whitehead, president, Fund for Our Economic Future. “The EfficientGovNow program isn’t for studies or planning. The public is eager to see greater government collaboration and this program is designed to encourage such efforts.”

Throughout the region, numerous government entities have increased governmental collaboration and efficiency. Projects like shared fire halls or combined city-county buildings, shared school superintendents, shared emergency dispatch services, and other such collaborations are gaining momentum. The Fund sees this program as a means to accelerate more collaboration, added Whitehead.

Efficient Government project demonstrates not only a wiliness on the part of the public to meet the challenge to find more effective ways of doing business but, by a creative use of the public radio, created a competition among cities and invited the public to judge the merits of each city’s proposal to create a more efficient system

An Innovation Zone takes Efficient Governments use of both competition and fun a step further. If it makes use of virtual environments readily available, a citizens from communities across NE Ohio can develop a prototype of their proposal in a simulated virtual environment and not only study, but test the budgetary theories in that environment.  The first level of an Innovation Zones in a virtual environment can test civic-based prototyping for new ways of addressing the civic needs in community.  If it works, those citizens can petition their legislators  to establish a real-life Innovation Zone having demonstrated how the model can work.  A virtual prototype may serve to convince the most risk-adverse legislator to approve the application.

In Serious Play – How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate, Michael Schrage writes:

Innovation requires improvisation.  It means innovation is not about rigorously following the “rule of the game” but about rigorously challenging and revising them.” Schrage says that his book, “is a journey from ethnography to ethology, from describing cultures of prototyping and simulations to the behaviors of people who build and use models together.

Written more than ten-years ago, the book holds relevance to how technological developments can re-form the way humans behave when given the change to apply them to their tasks.  Two chapters trace the way the invention of the spreadsheet transformed the way people not only conducted business but spawned ways of trading money, stocks and mortgages which were unimaginable prior to the invention of this rather simple application.

The story of the financial innovations and financial engineering that transformed the business landscape of the 1980’s is written in the cells of spreadsheet software.  Every major deal was touched by this technology. From Michael Milken’s high-yield “junk-bond” financing  to Kohlberg Kravis Robert’s leveraged buyouts to the global explosion of “synthetic securities,” spreadsheets functioning as the computational catalysts accelerating the intensifying the dynamics of deal making, Venture capitalist, investment bankers and mutual-fund managers enthusiastically embraced them for their ease and power.

Spreadsheet software enabled organizations to ask themselves questions they had never been able to ask before.  And the same spreadsheets could be used to help answer those questions.

In the ten-years since this book was written there has been an explosion of many types of technological tools that – if put into the appropriate ‘teams” of workers challenged with  prototyping applications of these tools to the government – there is high probability that new value can be brought to the challenges that plague our state and city administrations. The same could be said for schools and school districts.

The Orton Family Foundation has developed a fascinating program called CommunityViz™ which allows many players to simulate community land-use issues.  With modest adaptations, CommunityViz could likely have many other applications that could simulate alternative public management systems.  Other games such as SimCity are commercial applications of gaming options for community involvement with more exciting graphic interface.

An innovation district could start as a virtual world, as a means of testing various options for planning.  Teams could compete for to prove the greatest cost-saving.  Once devised, the foundations, and collaborating government officials could petition to legislature to declare a government “innovation zone” that would impose a moratorium on the “old way” of distributing state and federal funds to nonprofit and government agencies, and allowing for better distribution of funds.

Let’s use the example of the 911 emergency call number referenced above.  Suppose the cities of Lorain and Elyria, along with the County Administrator could simulate a more efficient use of 911.  The system could be simulated and an attached budget sheet could test the hypothesis that $1 million could be saved each year.  A team would include parties from the police departments, EMT’s as well as dispatchers and so called friends who are involved in the project.  The mayors and several citizens would be appointed to sit on a panel to judge the modeling strategies.  In a simulated environment a team could test the model over a five and ten year period.   As in the case of spreadsheets, the modeling could allow city managers to ask themselves questions they had never been able to ask before and the games could provide answers to those questions.

In the midst of a terrible budgetary crisis in public education, foundations have asked the question, “Why in a county of 280,000 people do we need 14 separate school districts each with its own superintendent, curriculum director and host of highly-paid administrators?”  “What does this antiquated managerial system cost the taxpayer?” and finally, “With communication technology the way it is, can there not be a more efficient way to manage schools across the county?’ The reaction is general discomfort at best because everyone asks the same questions but few are brave enough to ask it openly.  Fewer still have any expectation that “the public school system” would change.   In an innovative zone, one could simulate the 14 districts and empower a couple of civic teams to model new ways of dealing with the issue and see what savings could result to the State educational budget.  The simulation could factor in successful charter and non-profit schools and factor in their costs and outcomes into the model.  The team that wins the prize could be rewarded with a civic engineer award with a dollar amount established by one or a group of foundations who have an interest in finding more efficient use of public dollars.

Once the “game” is proven, the legislature could provide an official designation of Innovation Zone which would enable the community to have voice in allocating the state and federal dollars.  Philanthropy could have a better sense of where it’s dollars could yield higher impact in the equation.

I can submit one final example.  Lorain Count has two tertiary-care charity hospitals and three separate public health systems: one for the City of Lorain, one for the City of Elyria and yet another for the County areas not in the Lorain or Elyria city limits.  These administrations were established at the turn of the century when the cities were more densely populated and when the primary public health challenge was prevention and management of infectious diseases.  Today, most primary health care clinics and an ever growing pharmacopoeia can treat infectious diseases.

These expensive administrative institutions serve as distribution depots to Federal and State funds that try to deal with what amounts to chronic diseases.  They were never set up for that problem and as a result are not the most efficient means of addressing that public health challenge.  In a previous blog post, I discussed a grant in which our foundation convened more than 35 citizens who were engaged in some level or another in health care delivery in the county.  Participants included physicians from the charity hospitals, directors of the Drug and Alcohol and Addition Boards, the board of Mental Health, the free clinic as well as the local public health agencies.  Each of these people would happily take part in modeling a new way of doing business. They realize that the way things are now will only exacerbate a dismal state of health care in the county.

Innovation zones are really a means for a public entity to provide the platform for greater citizen engagements.  If you listen to Michael Schrage’s comment on Innovation and shift the mental framework from his discussion of business to government, you can imagine how innovation can shift the way citizens (customers) engage with their public institutions.

Philanthropy can play an important role in stimulating this level of civic engagement.  I welcome thoughts or examples from colleagues.

The Nord Family Foundation contributed funding to a State-wide effort to inform the Governor and the legislature on the role of philanthropy.   After a year of a multi-constituency task force, including philanthropy and educational leaders from across the state, the final House Bill 1 .virtually ignored the top two recommendations which would have  “Created  Real Opportunities for Today’s Learners and for Generations of Ohioans to Come” were all but ignored by the State officials.  The top two recommendations were:

Create Ohio Innovation Zones and an Incentive Fund

• Attract and build on promising school and instructional models (STEM, ECHS, charters etc.)
• Introduce innovations w/ district-wide impact
• Eliminate operational and regulatory barriers that preclude schools/districts from pursuing innovations
• There is little to no emphasis in the Bill on removing operational and regulatory barriers, other than the recommendation that districts develop charter schools.

Focus on Transforming Low Performing Schools

• Develop a statewide plan targeting lowest 10% of schools
• Focus on research-based best practices
• Develop rigorous, local restructuring plans w/ state guidance

The first recommendation was based on Innovation Schools Act  legislation in Colorado which established the creation of school innovation districts designed to  strengthen school-based decision-making by letting schools break free of certain district and state education rules.  This legislation allowed schools like the Bruce Randall School in Denver’s inner city to be relieved of the typical State imposed restrictions on access to technology and collective bargaining rules. This act enabled administrators to have significant flexibility over the length of the school year and the use of time during the school day, the hiring of staff, the leadership structure within the schools, and the ability to pay staff above the levels stated in the collective bargaining agreement for certain assignments.

Last month, the Indiana State Board of Education issued a blanket waiver allowing state-accredited public and private schools to use a broad range of multimedia, computer, and internet resources to supplement or replace traditional textbooks.

My work on the Ohio Grantmakers Forum Education Committee has made me come to learn that the political leadership in Ohio acts much like many companies when confronted with the idea of innovation.  An article in the November 2008 Harvard Business Review, authors James Cash, Jr., Michael J. Earl, and Robert Morrison.  Teaming Up to Crack Innovation Enterprise Integration write that, “…business innovation and integration have two things in common – both are still ‘unnatural acts.   …Businesses are better at stifling innovation than at capitalizing on it, better at optimizing local operations than at integrating them for the good of the enterprise and its customers.  The larger and more complex the organizations, the stronger the status quo can be in repelling both innovation and integration.”  This assumption  is reified when one looks at reports from local charter schools our foundation has supported over the years.

“Advocating for charter school funding has been a challenge this year. Governor Strickland’s first budget reduced funding to charters so significantly that E Prep would have had to close its doors if the budget had been adopted. E Prep joined Citizens’ Academy and The Intergenerational School and hired a state lobbyist to help draw attention to both the success of these schools and the devastating effect of the proposed budget. In addition, many, many E Prep supporters were asked to write letters to the state legislators. The budget that was finally passed restored funding to charters, thankfully. We believe we will have to revisit this issue in two years, however.”

Herein marks an interesting parallel to our work with OGF.  Philanthropy as a sector is great at setting up “pockets” of innovative projects and in many cases supporting successful schools that work.  When reporting these successes to the public sector, public school leaders repel those concepts, often fueled with activist organizations like teachers unions to tell people why things like successful charter schools or faith-based enterprises rob the system of monies.  Try introducing innovative technological solutions in schools and many will not participate in the training that is inevitable required unless stipends are provided.  Leaders (including governors and the state and local superintendents and even board members) who do not understand the technology and/or innovations will act similarly to the CEO’s described in the article.  They allow the status quo to repel both innovation and integration.  The best the legislature could do in response to the explosion of innovative technologies and approaches to learning and assessment available was to appropriate $200,000 to establish an Office of Innovation within the Ohio Department of Education to examine best practices.  This is the epitome of command and control economy practices.  Ohio’s intolerance for innovative practice outside the public system is known nationally.

The final report on the bill shows where the legislature, and ultimately the governor took recommendations.  In short, they went for recommendations that dealt with nominal modifications to recommendations about standards, teacher hiring and firing principals and modest changes in granting public school teachers tenure.  The decisions were influenced heavily by partisan politicking on the part of the Governor, his aids and the Head of the Chancellor of the State Board of Regents.   Unfortunately, the policy makers adopted least resistance to anything that would jeopardize relations with the ever powerful Ohio Department of Education and the Ohio Teachers Union.  When setting out on this committee, I was not expecting to become so negative about the teachers unions; however. it is evident to me that unless the system is shaken up,  the unions have too much interest in self-preservation  and the status quo than they do in promoting innovation.

The OGF Committee remains committed to continuing conversation about exploring options for Innovation Zones across the State.  In philanthropy, I think trustees of foundations have a moral obligation to state authorities to focus attention on improving educational opportunities for students who are trapped in under performing public schools.  It remains to be seen whether those efforts will result in legislative change in this ossified State School bureaucracy.  To be fair, I think Philanthropy needs to do a better job informing the power stakeholders in defining what innovation is and what innovation in a school district can and should look like.  It is not only related to technology.

Innovation in education technology – evidenced by the rapid proliferation of Online learning, as well as improvements in technologies that will support the burgeoning number of children in public schools in need of special education is happening at rapid pace.  Change is happening and schools must be prepared for how those changes will benefit children and families in poor performing districts. For them, education is their ticket out of poverty.

I do not believe that technology is the answer for all districts, especially districts that are financially challenged.  I do however think that innovation includes new ways of approaching teaching and learning that stand outside the box of the top-down structures of the ODE.  I have posted previously on successful charter and faith-based schools that have little to no technology, but can and do produce students with academic achievement that far outpaces that which is done in neighboring public schools.  I will write more on my ideas on innovation  in my next post.

I recommend the book to anyone with an interest in philanthropy but most importantly for anyone who finds him or herself in a position of owning or being the beneficiary of significant wealth.

After reading the book, I remained disturbed about the newspaper reports of compensation and bonuses offered to investment firms and banks that had been the recipients of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) initiated by the Federal Reserve just short of one year ago.  I need not go into the details.  Suffice to say I was listening to a story about executive compensation on the National Public Radio’s Market place on September 2, 2009.  Bailout bank CEO salaries very healthy.  I listened as I drove through working-class neighborhoods of the Ohio county where I live.  These modest homes owned by people who, for the most part, worked in the manufacturing industries that were once numerous – Ford Motor Plant, Republic Steel, American Shipbuilding not to mention numerous smaller manufacturers.  In one neighborhood alone, I counted fourteen houses for sale.  I am quite certain that most are in foreclosure.

I think a challenge for the philanthropic sector is to set a standard for what people can do with this sudden wealth.  The thought brought me back to exactly ten years ago when, new to my job in philanthropy, I was asked by the then Donors Forum of Ohio to come to Columbus to provide testimony to the State Attorney General Betty Montgomery and her Tobacco Task Force which was called to gather ideas on how Ohio should deal with the approximate $10 billion windfall in tobacco settlement monies.  We argued that the State should set up three Trust Funds overseen by the general public with protections that would ensure that money would be focused on reducing tobacco use in the State and take aggressive measures to improve public health.    The state did establish funds, but did not relinquish power to a general public fund similar to a community fund.  As a result, a significant amount of the funds were used by the governor to pay for budgetary shortfalls beginning in 2006.

After the funds came to Ohio, it became evident that a number of lawyers began receiving huge salaries for their involvement with the funds.   In September 1999, I wrote the following piece addressed to lawyers who benefited from the windfall.   I submit it to this blog asking the reader to imagine the same suggestion to CEO’s and hedge fund managers who have won mightily at the game of risk management, often on the backs of those who have lost savings and their homes.  The Presidents have changed, but the call to give back still holds. not only to CEO’s but lawyers and any professional that stands to earn well in a time when others are loosing everything.

The question is what leader in the political or philanthropic sector is willing to keep the theme in front of those who benefit from the bounty.

September 1999

Tobacco Settlement for Lawyers Fees –

Dreams of What Could Be

About a year ago, I was asked to Testify before the Governors Task Force Committee on Tobacco.  I an my colleague Lyn Hiberling-Sirinack from Donor’s Forum of Ohio stood before the committee which included State Attorney General Betty Montgomery.  In our testimony, we gloated over the fact that we were the only people in the room not requesting money.  Instead, we made a plea that the Governor not spend all the settlement money at once, but reserve a portion (we recommended one third) of the 10 billion dollars in settlement monies into a charitable foundation.  Our testimony demonstrated that placing approximately $3.5 billion in a Trust for all the people of Ohio could increase in value over time, and in doing so, ensure charitable off-sets for inevidtable shortfalls in the State Budget for years to come.  Although we do not pretend to take credit for the decision, the Task Force did make the recommendation to set up two “Trusts” that would be used to support development projects well into the future.  The recommendations were accepted and two Trusts have been set up to serve the citizens of Ohio.

A year later, I find myself stunned at the unprecedented amount of money $265 million dollars that the Tobacco Free Arbitration Panel has decided to award three Ohio Law firms and five out-of-state firms for legal fees for successfully working with the State of Ohio to secure the $10 billion dollars.  I am in no position to make any comment or pass judgment on the size of the legal award and the amount of time that went into the effort.  I do find myself wondering however about how that money will be spent.

A quick scan of recent newspaper articles reveals that many law firms involved in the state tobacco settlements have contributed to the political campaign of a Seattle attorney whose consultations enabled a number of private law firms to reap as much as $20 billion dollars in legal fees.  That is quite an accomplishment.  A New York Times article describes hundreds of thousands of dollars from tobacco settlement legal fees going to support Democratic candidates.  In one instance, a lawyer from Charleston, West Virginia who headed up the legal team for the Florida tobacco settlement gave $30,000 for charities in three cities in that State.

If there were a panel like the one I testified last year,  I would make a plea that the three Ohio and the five out-of-state firms to apportion some of this windfall for public charities.  I would love to challenge the lawyers to think boldly, strategically and bravely and apportion on half of the award  $130 million  – to an existing or new charity to respond to any number of charitable needs.  A Tobacco Lawyers Charitable Trust with an operating corpus of $130 million dollars, invested properly could yield approximately $6.5 million dollars each year for charitable programs throughout the State of Ohio.  If a national charity were established with just a fraction of the $20 billion dollars awarded to legal firms, the impact would perhaps be as significant as

Just as an example, wouldn’t it be great to have the lawyers Trust fund a program that would resurrect speech and debate programs in all Ohio public schools.  Speech and debate programs could encourage young people to engage constructively in public debate and perhaps groom some future lawyers.

Surely the lawyers who have benefited from the Tobacco Settlements have the right to choose how to spend their money.  Supporting political candidates is entirely within character and perhaps to be expected.  Curiously however, each of the Presidential candidates has made a point of encouraging philanthropy.  The Chronicle of Philanthropy quoted George W. Bush as wanting to take a “muscular” approach to encourage giving.  Mr. Bush stated, “”We could be on the verge of one of the great philanthropic periods in America, where enormous wealth has been generated,” he said in an interview. “The next president needs to encourage that wealth to spread. People need to give back.”

Let the lawyers of this State exercise this muscular approach to encourage giving back.

Ten years later, the characters change, but the call has not.

The blog post Daily Finance’s writer Peter Cohan cites five reasons why GM failed. Read and draw analogies to public schools in the United States.

1. Bad financial policies. You might be surprised to learn that GM has been bankrupt since 2006 and has avoided a filing for years thanks to the graces of the banks and bondholders. But for years it has used cars as razors to sell consumers a monthly package of razor blades — in the form of highly profitable car loans.

And the two Harvard MBAs who drove GM to bankruptcy — Rick Wagoner and Fritz Henderson — both rose up from GM’s finance division, rather than its vehicle design operation. (Read more about GM’s bad financial policies here.)

2. Uncompetitive vehicles. Compared to its toughest competitors — like Toyota Motor Co. (TM) — GM’s cars were poorly designed and built, took too long to manufacture at costs that were too high, and as a result, fewer people bought them, leaving GM with excess production capacity. (Read more about GM’s uncompetitive vehicles here.)

3. Ignoring competition. GM has been ignoring competition — with a brief interruption (Saturn in the 1980s) — for about 50 years. At its peak, in 1954, GM controlled 54 percent of the North American vehicle market. Last year, that figure had tumbled to 19 percent. Toyota and its peers took over that market share. (Read more about GM ignoring the competition here.)

4. Failure to innovate. Since GM was focused on profiting from finance, it did not really care that much about building better vehicles. GM’s management failed to adapt GM to changes in customer needs, upstart competitors, and new technologies. (Read more about GM’s failure to innovate here.)

5. Managing in the bubble. GM managers got promoted by toeing the CEO’s line and ignoring external changes. What looked stupid from the perspective of customer and competitors was smart for those bucking for promotions. (Read more about GM’s managing in the bubble here.)

GM has now produced this mea culpa, promising a new organization with new products and a new attitude.    The answer is to reinvent itself.

It is not hard to draw analogies to public schools.   Poor financing and financial management.  Management (administrative bubbles), inflated salaries for administrators, ignoring the competition…..the list goes on.   The list does not mention the tortuous negotiations and battles with organized labor – but that analogy fits as well.

Interesting that the public sector (federal government) has to be in the unbelievable position of having to bail out this failing industry.    The act has people from the private sector incredulous.  Even the President himself seems uncomfortable with the fact that the government has had to take this unprecedented action.

Public Schools in too many urban districts are a failing industry.  Too many administrators, public officials and even some private philanthropists ignore the competition (i.e. charter schools, successful faith-based schools and even advances made in independent schools).  These entities are seen not as competition, but as the enemy.    In an effort to preserve themselves and guarantee job  security, those in the bunker form the bubble.

Too many are afraid of adapting to new technologies that are likely to guarantee, smarter, leaner administrative budgets and more likely than not to improve students learning outcomes.   Good administrators will report up to the “management” that revises standards and tests to juke the stats and have the public believe their inferior product is actually working.

Far too many individual school “districts” makes no sense anymore. I live in a county of 280,000 but there are 14 individual school districts each with high-paid administrators including superintendents, principals, curriculum directors. The cost to the public every year exceeds $4 million dollars. Much of that work can be done online through more effective use of management technologies.

Too many public dollars are wasted paying for textbooks. Innovations in online texts are occurring every day, yet too many school administrators are slow to adapt them. Many philanthropists have funded organizations that provide solutions to this unnecessary expense. cK-12 is a private non-profit foundation that is just one example.  Another is Currwiki.  Schools and school districts – not to mention the multimillion dollar textbook industry has an interest  in keeping these innovations out of schools.  Too many foundation officers and school administrators – fearful of change, block innovation with the appeal to waiting for results from “evidence-based practice” before they do anything.  Where are the “practices” taking place and who is collecting the “evidence?”  I know than many foundations have a lot of evidence of what is working, especially in charter, faith-based and indepdendent schools, but this evidence is ignored unless it has imprimatur from “the academy.”

It just seems to me that the time is ripe for foundations across the country to sponsor one or a series of local symposia that will bring together leaders from the field of educational  technology, business, K-12 systems, and higher edcuation to re-imagine doing schools.  These symposia should be public – coordinated with local newspapers, and newsmedia.  Public television stations typically have local afficilates that could foster regularly scheduled converesations about re-inventing school and invite public policy officials to be part of the conversation.  Together, these entities can help to reinvent public schools just as the auto industries are about to embark on reinventing themselves.

I was a member of the education task force for the Ohio Grantmakers Forum which produced a set of recommendations for changing education in the State of Ohio for the Governor and legislature.  Beyond Tinkering was the report and I have written about the effort in previous posts.  The full document can be found at.  www.ohiograntmakers.org

One of the most satisfying results of the effort was gathering information from colleagues from other foundations to push the idea of innovation districts.  We used legislation out of Colorado as the inspiration.  The call for creating innovation districts in Ohio is the first recommendation in the report.  When the report was published, I did not think the Governor or the legislature would seriously consider the idea of innovation districts. It had certainly hoped it would and my colleagues can attest to the fact that I pushed for it every meeting we had.   It appears however that both the Ohio House and Senate are intrigued by the idea and have written it into the education budget.  It has to go to conference and perhaps will actually become a reality.  Should that happen, the state has opened up an exciting opportunity for transforming education and establishing national models.

Among the many excellent recommendations in the report, several have particular relevance to legislators who are genuinely interested in transforming education in the state. The idea of creating innovation districts has all the potential  to develop budget-neutral programs that could serve as models for all districts in the state. In a time of budgetary constraint, it is my guess that if they are developed carefully, and with strong leadership from the top offices in the state, innovation districts could result in cost-savings over time.

I underscore the call to create innovation districts rather than schools.  There are many school-based programs spearheaded by exceptionally creative teachers.  Unfortunately, these programs are restricted too often to one classroom.  In some cases, we see school buildings implementing innovative use of technology to support learning, but it is once again,  more often-than-not these innovations lack any alignment with the other buildings in the same district. In my travels I have heard disturbing news that successful schools are often scorned by peers in their districts.  I had the great pleasure to explore the  Macomb Academy in Michigan.  The leadership there has implemented a highly successful approach to learning with emphasis on Sciences based on the approaches advocated by the Natural Learning Institute. Despite the demonsrable success, Macomb teachers and leaders are resented by peers in their district because they have developed their own method of teaching and assessment that diverges from the norm.

I bring up this case because  a. it is not the first time I have heard cases of professional jealousy of this type crippling innovation in schools and b. because I think it illustrates a reason why we need to stop creating innovation schools as isolated entities within districts that may or may not be on board.  The emphasis must be on the district as a whole.  An innovation district would focus efforts on an entire community, and put benchmarks in place that could measure success.  Foundations could be called upon to help support these districts and direct funding to the support positive outcomes to the benchmarks put into place.

An innovation district would focus efforts on an entire community, and put benchmarks in place that could measure success.  Foundations could be called upon to help support these districts and direct funding to the support positive outcomes to the benchmarks put into place.

The language in the OGF Byond Tinkering report is very clear.  It calls for, “A bold plan for accelerating the pace of innovation – for restructuring the traditional industrial model of teaching and learning and for addressing the lowest-performing schools in our state.”  That includes a recommendation to create innovation districts. I purposely put emphasis on districts and not innovation schools.  Further in the report, is the call to “Develop a statewide P-16 education technology plan.” “Which includes improving teacher capacity in using technology.”  What better way to set this off than a district whose mission and focus would be to develop a plan that will train teachers on appropriate use of technology to meet the student learning objectives.

These recommendations are the primary ingredients for developing districts which – if properly carried out – could serve as a model for public schools across the country. The leadership would have to have the political will to take on the political battles which will be waged by interest groups.  It would prove the political leadership is finally willing to move Beyond Tinkering and transform learning opportunities.  Set the bar high and challenge these districts to carry out the plans in a budget-neutral environment and it is my guess most administrators and teachers would meet that challenge.   Ideally there would be five or more districts set up and given a five to ten-year exoneration from current collective bargaining and technological rules that could thwart the overall effort. For example, teachers in the district would not be able to “opt out” of professional development programs that would be essential to creating the districts.  If teachers do not want to participate fully in the learning opportunity they can be ushered to other districts or find employment elsewhere. That is where extreme leadership is required from multiple stakeholders in the state including union leadership, superintendents the ODE, the Oho Federation of Teachers and the Ohio School Board.  Getting them to agree means providing a coherent vision and establishing certain benchmarks to measure quality improvement.

The objective would be to create districts focused on excellence in learning. We are speaking of a new understanding of learning from pre-conceived ideas.  That means educating the stakeholders to the remarkable opportunities that new technology provides.  I had the privilege of attending a presentation by Helen Parke, Director of the Cisco Learning Institute.  During the Sunday evening keynote, Ms. Park presented a vision of education technology to a group of K-6 math teachers from across the state of Ohio.  This was a vision of Web 3.0 solutions to problems.  The conference continued for two days with the task of finding solutions to the challenge of improving the quality of math teaching in schools across the country.  Teachers were treated to presentation from education “experts” from universities across the country. As the weekeind went on however, teachers were challenged with coming up with solutions to the problem – To improve Math scores in schools across the state.  Unfortunately, the so-called solutions called for more funding to provide “math coaches” in buildings across the districts.  It was as if the presentaion from Ciso never happened.  Teachers were unable to make the connection between 3.0 software and its potential to solve their problems.  In short, we had 1.0 solutions to problems in a world where 3.0 can provide easy answers.  The experience convinced me that a better job needs to be done to invite teachers to experience and understand the technology.  Short of that, they will never understand the potential these technologies hold.  Professional development needs a complete 360 evaluation and (I would guess) a complete overhaul.

In such these innovation districts, a district adults would learn as well as  the students.. Teachers would be respected as the professionals they are, and encouraged to work with administrators and technologists to find ways in which technology can be used to find solutions to issues like student-centered learining, new ways of assessment and rethinking the way we establish standards.  Teachers would be encouraged th think of new ways to help children understand the content.

In these districts, goal would be to use technology to support student engagement and understanding of the content. Technology cannot and should not be expected to replace  learning that takes place between and among human beings.  It is not to create innovation for the sake of innovation, but to establish a culture of learning that will likely change the current model of one-teacher in a room in front of twenty students each of whom is expected to pass a testing pattern based on a pre-established set of standards.  Technology presents students and teachers with new ways to gather, assemble and demonstrate knowledge that exposes the shortcomings in the current system of assessment.  A challenge for the district would be to allow teachers in shared learning communities, to develop meaningful systems of assessment that make use of the tools available.  The result could be an incarnation of the “student-centered” learning module that has gotten a lot of lip service with few demonstrable models.

A major challenge to the district leadership would be to demonstrate reasonable cost savings as a resulting from use of social software. (For example why would five districts each need a “curriculum director” when one could possibly suffice. Could each of these districts demonstrate effective use of open-source tools to reduce the cost to the district (approximately $800 per student for textbooks used only one-year).

A district-wide initiative across the state would require an entities that supports the multi-district application.  I suggest that a good model can be found in a November 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review by authors James Cash, Jr., Michael J. Earl, and Robert Morrison.  Teaming Up to Crack Innovation Enterprise Integration is written for the business growth with focus on CEO’s, Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) and IT organizations.  The model easily adapts to a State education bureaucracy and includes two elements that would be critical to the success of the Innovation districts.  Their thesis is relatively straightforward.  Here is how they summarize the concept:

• IT has long been a catalyst of business innovation and essential to cross-functional integration efforts, but few large companies have systematically leveraged technology for these purposes.
• Close study of 24 U.S. and European businesses reveals a model for systematically doing that that through the formation of two IT-intensive groups for coordinating these two processes that are critical to organic growth
• A distributive innovation group (DIG) combines a company’s own innovative efforts with the best of external technology to create new business variations.  The enterprise innovation group (EIG) folds yesterday’s new variations into the operating model of the enterprise.
• The two groups help better identity, coordinate, and prioritize the most-promising projects and spread technology tools, and best practices.

An effective DIG and EIG could be set up within an office within the Ohio Department of Education but that is likely to be too insular and protective.  My suggestion is that  an outside agency such as the Cisco Learning Initiative or the OneCommunity in Cleveland could be a better locus for the activity.  I say that only because a good innovation district would want to gather ideas from both public and non-public schools.  Foundations could provide a service by funding the costs of the DIG and EIG officers for the course of the five-year period.   Paying salary and benefits for a year is well within ambit of  funding levels tolerated by foundations, even in this challenging economic environment.  Additionally, outside funding could guarantee that the data gathered is open to all who may want to benefit from it.    So, if we imaging these two offices set up to serve the five-districts their scope of work could be defined pretty much by what is presented by the HBS authors.   This is what they would recommend including my insertions between parentheses:

A distributed innovation group (DIG) … doesn’t “do” innovation but rather fosters and challenges  it.  Innovation is an inherently distributed activity, encompassing innovators across and outside the corporation ( ‘districts’).  The DIG serves as the center of expertise for innovation techniques, scouts for new developments outside the company ( ‘district’) and provides experst for internal innovation initiatives.  And it deploys technologies and methods that facilitated collaboration and innovation.

An enterprise integration group (EIG) is dedicated to the horizontal integration of the corporation (’districts)’ and among the buildings w/in the district).  It picks from among competing integration projects and provides resources that enable them to succeed.  It develops the architecture and management practices that make business (educational) integration easier over time..  It may also manage of portfolio of integration activities and initiatives;  serve as the corporation’s ( ‘district‘) center of expertise in process improvement,  large project management,  and program and portfolio (curricular) management; and provide staff and possibly leaders for mager business (school) integration initiatives.

The money for this undertaking could be secured from private  sources but in the longer term, funds are likely to be found with more efficient use of funds that currently feed the Educational Service Centers across the state.  Another foundation or group of foundations can and/or should coordinate with the ODE and hire a group like the RAND Education corporation to conduct a complete evaluation of the efficacy of professional development in the state and the role of the Education Service Centers in light of this new initiative.   I would imagine their is opportunity for a vast overhaul of the administrative function of the ESC’(s) across the state.

Technology should not be focused only on the curricular components of the project.  Innovative approaches to addressing the social service supports need to be integrated into the process.  Social services as well as primary health and mental health programs must be brought to the schools in new ways.  Achieving this goals will require new ways of working the the multiple state and nonprofit agencies that provide support to families in some of the more impoverished districts.  Why can’t mental health and primary health screening programs be place right in school buildings.  School buildings can be a logical catchment for families who will bring their children to schools.  It is essential that innovation districts consider new ways in which social support services can be ushered into the schools. It is common knowledge that too many teachers are expected to teach children who do not have access to essential primary health care or mental health services. A local physician our foundation has supported conducted a study in a Lorain City elementary school and found that more than 25% of the children suffered from chronic asthma which accounted for about 40% of the absences from school. Children that suffer from undiagnosed chronic illness cannot be expected to learn. If a child is not feeling well, no increase in mentoring, after-school programs or mandatory extended days will enhance learning. Currently State programs for help these youngsters are funneled through a variety of public entities and/or nonprofit organizations but few of these entities (if any) have a presence in the school buildings. State regulations and sometimes collective bargaining rules keep these services from being performed in the building.

I would propose that a Ohio Innovation district(s) would lift all restrictions that keep essential social services out of schools thereby creating a place where schools can be a center for families rather than just students. The Harlem Childrens Zone serves as an interesting model. Getting there would be a process – probably six-months to a year, where health officials (public and private providers), school board members, teacher and administrators would form a task force to articulate a plan of how these services would be made available for each school. The plans would be posted on an open site and other districts could have input. The plans would be compared and funneled to the DIG. A goal for each plan would be to demonstrate where the plan could result in cost savings to the entire community served by this new Innovation district.

A third and final goal would be to create a place where leaders from higher education meet regularly with leaders and teachers from K-12 to ensure that the two areas are seamless. Almost every educator I speak with agrees that in the United States, there is virtually no formal communication between K-12 and “higher-Ed.” The technology available to citizens of this country is making that disjuncture a serious threat to the goal we have to create and educational system that will set the stage for young people to succeed in college and beyond.

Take a look at two Youtube video’s by Dr. Richard Miller from Rutgers University. He provides a vision for what university/college teaching will look like in the not too distant future. Although geared to an audience in higher education, his vision casts shadows on the K-12 environment.  He talks about transforming pedagogy and even learning spaces. If this vision is even remotely true, the question facing K-12 teachers across Ohio are preparing children for this future?

It is time for some state or group of state to introduce the idea of innovation districts to create  a space where innovation can combine with tried and true best practices and create new approaches to learning that can be brought to scale and save money.

There are four main findings to the report:

1. Charter schools are not skimming the highest-achieving students from traditional public schools,  nor are they creating racial stratification.

2.  On average, across varying communities and policy environments, charter middle and high schools produce achievement gains that are about the same as those in traditional public schools.

3.  Charter schools do not appear to help or harm student achievement in nearby public schools.

4.  Students who are attending charter high schools were more likely to graduate and go on to college.

Mr. Zimmer was quick to qualify the data saying that this is an average of the data collected across eight States.  Each State has its own legislative restrictions to authorize charter schools, and each has different funding allocations as well. These differences will affect the quality of charters.  There is a very broad spectrum of quality among charters schools, much of which is attributed to authorizing rules.

The research finds that,  for the most part,  all charter schools take children who have some of the lowest performance scores anywhere.   The truly impressive outcome of the meeting was to hear from the RAND researchers and from the panelists themselves that there are several charter schools in Cleveland that are “extraordinary” and reporting remarkably successful results.  These include the E-Prep Charter School and Success Prep.  They found that these schools succeed because they make the investment in training the principals and teachers.  Marshall Emerson, the outstanding director of the E-Prep trained for one-year at the Boston-based  Building Excellent Schools. This organizations was funded initially from the Walton Family Foundation and has produced some of the finest leaders of charter schools across the country.   Building In Excellent Schools has demonstrated tremendous success in many States across the country.   In my opinion, the State of Ohio – including the ODE, the legislature and the Governor would do well to allocate funds to send a core group of promising school leaders to attend this one year program to support charter schools in the State.   After five-years foundations could support an evaluation of the outcome of these schools compared with their public school peers and measure the outcome.  Such a project could be a great opportunity to learn from investments in education.

The audience was respectful.  I felt as though I was in a room with people who were confused with the findings.  Ms.  Smith-Richards commented that she has been covering the charter school movement since its inception.  Initially there was overt hostility toward charters on the part of the education community, but it is her sense that people are now more open and interested in the results of charter schools. Mr. Stevens admitted that laxity on the part of the authorizing bodies resulted in a proliferation of charters schools in Ohio. As he stated, “Some began with well-meaning people who wanted to respond to the education but realized two-years into it that quality schooling is harder than one might initially think!”  Clearly one has to know what they are doing.

Interesting to the discussion however is  the recent opinion on charter schools  from Ohio Federation of  Teachers Director, Sue Taylor.  Ms. Taylor did not attend the meeting but representatives from her department did.  Her May 2009 letter to President Obama excoriates charters schools claiming they have by an large, failed in the State of Ohio.  You can read the excerpt from the letter at the OFT website.   As a funder, it is disheartening to see how far this organization will go to deliberately mis-represent facts to move a political agenda.   It is equally disturbing to me to see how much power organizations like this have to thwart truly innovative programs in education.

I would love to see her do a public debate on the findings, not to  mention address the enthusiasm of  Cleveland Browns player Jason Wright.

The report indicated that there is an increase in the amount of virtual  or e-schools in Ohio which is having an influence on both charter and Public Schools.  The speakers encouraged those in the audience to read carefully Clayton Christensen’s book Disrupting Class.  Clearly people in the room do not know what to make of this disruption and few really understand electronic curriculum and schools.

The most important statistic for anyone interested in education is finding number 4. Why is it that charters across the board have greater success in having students not only complete high-school but complete college! Complete is the operative word here because as we know young people get into college but too many find they are not prepared for the work and wind up dropping out.

RAND wants to explore the reasons why charter schools appear to produce better results for students to stay in school. I think foundations would do well to continue to fund these types of studies.

For a State that is focused on increasing the number of College graduates, this fact warrents investments in schools that show promise to deliver on those goals.