It’s noteworthy when a serious book about education reform makes it onto the bestseller list. Class Warfare weighs in at nearly 500 pages, almost a quarter of it devoted to sources and references. Chapters end on wonk-friendly cliff hangers: “It seemed that private foundation investments were actually going to bring change. Could investments by a government bureaucracy also produce results?” Class Warfare is selling because it’s a good read, presenting the struggle to reform American schooling as a heroic tale populated by real people. But it also poses some juicy innovation questions.

Brill got interested in education while writing a scathing New Yorker article about “rubber rooms”—holding tanks where New York City teachers suspected of wrongdoing whiled away years at full pay. In doing so, he waded into the hottest debate in education. On one side are “reformers,” who believe that the quality of teaching makes a huge difference in life outcomes for kids and that school systems need to be a lot better at getting good teachers into classrooms and bad ones out. On the other side are those, often associated with teachers unions, who see the role of schools as overshadowed by poverty and other social ills and who see the effort to measure teachers’ and schools’ performance as an excessive faith in testing.

Brill makes no secret of which side he’s on. In his two-year exploration of education, he found voluminous evidence that good teaching matters and argues we need to act urgently on that knowledge. He admires the leaders of the reform movement, from Jon Schnur, co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, to former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose stories he tells in humanizing detail. (Disclosures: my firm supports many of the pro-reform organizations named in the book.) The reformers stand against school districts—“the most lavishly funded and entrenched bureaucracies in America,” he writes—and against teachers unions with “money and playbooks every bit as effective in thwarting the public interest as Big Oil, the NRA, or Big Tobacco.”

Readers can sense Brill’s wonderment at education’s hall-of-mirrors politics. It is the teachers’ own unions that have fought to treat them as a mass differentiated only by years of experience and academic degrees. And it is the left that defends gradualism, arguing that there’s not much that schools can do about poverty. Meanwhile, the right pushes for radical institutional change and for judging school systems by how well they serve poor and minority children. The situation leaves Brill’s heroes, mostly youngish Democrats including candidate Barack Obama, asking, essentially, “Dude, where’s my party?”

Brill’s tale offers Bob Woodward-style close-ups as the nascent Obama administration grabs the reform baton and enacts Race to the Top, a competition that encourages state-based reforms. Yet the focus of reviewer fascination is Brill’s final chapter, where he concludes that reform can’t happen at meaningful scale without the teachers unions. Some have misunderstood Brill’s coda as a repudiation of the previous 400 pages.

So why the last chapter? Brill has said that he was touched, late in the reporting process, by a few incidents that dramatically demonstrated how hard it will be for successful reforms to reach wider scale. Most poignant is the story of Jessica Reid, a teacher in a high-performing Harlem charter school whom Brill follows throughout the book, who quits over fears that the pace of her work is threatening her health and her marriage. Meanwhile, KIPP’s Dave Levin worries about what it would take to give excellent training and leadership to the country’s 3 million teachers. And so Brill arrives at the fundamental social innovation quandary: What will it take to go from islands of excellence to systems of excellence?

Brill ticks off a handful of solutions: paying more in salary to early-career teachers and less for seniority and extra academic degrees; eliminating “last-in-first-out” policies that target recently hired teachers for layoff s; and spending new money to boost teacher salaries. All of these are right, but we’ll need to do much more. We need to do far better at connecting teacher preparation with what teachers actually do in the classroom. We need to ramp up the use of technology that helps teachers tailor instruction to students’ needs and makes better use of teachers’ time. We need broader measures of student learning than today’s standardized tests. We need to get better at recognizing, and reacting to, both strong and weak teacher performance. And we need to get beyond our hall-of-mirrors politics, so that recognizing the impact of teachers can no longer be framed as an attack on them.

Jonathan Schorr is a partner at NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm that supports innovation in education.

Bonilla beat the odds when she enrolled in an antipoverty pilot program run by New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO). In exchange for taking on a full course load, the program provided Bonilla with enough money for tuition, books, and MetroCards for the commute to campus. She received tutoring, academic advisement, and job placement services. The program staff also lent Bonilla a laptop, so that she could do her schoolwork and still be home with her children.

Today, more than 1,000 students from all six City University of New York community colleges are enrolled in the program, and 55 percent of students complete their associate degrees in three years. Bonilla has finished her associate degree and is on track to earn a bachelor’s degree in public administration this spring. After graduation, she plans to open a daycare center for children with special needs.

The community college graduation initiative is just one of more than 40 programs tested by CEO, which evaluates and implements innovative antipoverty initiatives, rigorously assesses their outcomes, and makes funding decisions based on program performance. With an annual budget of $100 million in public and private funding, CEO programs have helped New Yorkers find employment, graduate from college, open savings accounts, shop for healthy foods, and earn tax credits.

In 2006, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg established a commission to analyze the issues and scope of poverty in the city. At the recommendation of the commission, he formed the center within the mayor’s office to better inform the way New York City and the federal government spend dollars fighting poverty. “Usually, mayors are preoccupied with fire and safety and roads and trash pickup,” says Gordon Berlin, president of the education and social policy research firm MDRC. Bloomberg, however, faced an extraordinary situation that was difficult to ignore. “The state requires a dollar-for-dollar match on most programs serving the poor,” explains Berlin. Researchers at CEO calculated a 19.9 percent poverty rate for New York City in 2009.

“It’s daring to talk about poverty and to say: ‘We don’t have the answers. We’re going to build on the work of others, and we’re going to try new ideas,’” says Veronica White, executive director of CEO. “It gets you involved in a conversation that a lot of politicians would be afraid to get involved in, and Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t.”

The center borrows and builds upon existing lessons from private, government, academic, and nonprofit organizations to create its own programs. These antipoverty interventions range from a re-entry program for young offenders that originated in Oregon, to a matched savings program that works closely with the city’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites.

INVESTING WISELY

CEO runs pilot programs in collaboration with appropriate city agencies. Its 15-person staff monitors program performance, and each project’s success and failure is measured by outside research firms such as MDRC. If analysts find that the program makes a measurable impact and an agency can integrate the initiative into its activities with dedicated funding, CEO hands the program over to the agency. “It’s very unusual to see this combination of innovation and mainstream take-up in government,” Berlin says.

Many of the organization’s programs stem from others’ successes. “It’s essential to understand what’s come before you in thinking about programs,” says White, who often looks outside New York City for inspiration. “It is about making sure you do that scan of what’s in existence, what’s working, and what’s not working.”

Preceding her role at CEO, White was a nonprofit consultant and chief operating officer of Partnership for New York City and president and CEO of Housing Partnership. Staff members at CEO are equally versed in government and nonprofit work as well as in translating research into practice. All senior staff have advanced degrees in economics, sociology, public policy and administration, public health, and law.

White says some of her team’s best research comes from talking to providers and participants who are involved in poverty programs every day, asking them about the drawbacks of the existing programs and what they would add if they had more resources. Antipoverty programs dependent on federal funding are often restricted by what they can do with government funds. “There’s only so much room to innovate with federal dollars,” says Allegra Blackburn-Dwyer, chief of staff at CEO. “We start with other resources and test around the edges.”

One antipoverty initiative led Mayor Bloomberg and CEO staff to Mexico. The country’s conditional cash transfer program, called Oportunidades, provides 5.8 million poor families with regular payments if they meet certain requirements, such as going for regular health checkups and keeping children in school. Children enrolled in the program are healthier and stay in school longer.

In 2007, CEO refined the Mexican cash incentive program and adapted it for New York City families. Opportunity NYC: Family Rewards became the first conditional cash transfer program launched in a developed country. During its first two years, the program offered 22 incentives, ranging from $20 to $600, for activities including children’s school achievement, preventive health care, and parents’ work, education, and training. “MDRC worked with CEO and other experts to refine it and adapt it for New York City, and we have put it to a very serious test,” says Jim Riccio, the lead MDRC researcher on CEO projects replicated in New York City from elsewhere.

To appraise its programs, the center uses a range of performance management and evaluation techniques, including random assignment studies. The control group is invaluable in measuring changes in poverty levels, particularly today. “In the current economic climate, of course poverty is going up,” Berlin says. “If you have a reliable comparison group, you may find that the poverty rate would have gone up even more.”

Early results from MDRC’s five-year evaluation of the Family Rewards program are promising. Cash rewards reduced debt and hardship and improved health outcomes and, among some high school students, academic performance. The program also cut poverty among participants by 11 percent.

RIPPLE EFFECT

After benefiting from their predecessors, White and her team return the favor by sharing what they’ve learned. All of CEO’s research and evaluation reports are available to the public on the center’s website. “Other places have done great work, but they don’t necessarily have it available for other people to look at,” says White. “We are really interested in formal and informal learning communities.”

Now, she will be able to expand CEO’s reach even further. The organization was the only government body to win a Social Innovation Fund federal grant of $5.7 million annually for five years to reproduce one or two of its five most successful programs, including the conditional cash transfer initiative, in New York City and seven other cities.

With the federal grant, CEO is replicating its savings account program in Tulsa, Okla., San Antonio, and Newark, N.J. Participants of the SaveUSA initiative are eligible for a 50 percent match, up to $500, if they deposit at least $200 from their tax refund into a SaveUSA account and maintain the deposit for a year. In New York City, the 2,200 participants of the original banking program saved more than $1.7 million in three years.

But not all of CEO’s programs have been worth replicating. As planned, the center has discontinued several of its less effective initiatives. Most programs that the center has cut were inadequately put into practice, had flawed models, or offered too few services. When the center partnered with just a single provider and tested a program that proved unsuccessful, researchers couldn’t decipher whether the program failed as a result of its design, location, or recruitment.

The center’s ventures, successful or not, are not always viewed as positive learning experiences—especially by Bloomberg critics. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has been a vocal challenger of the conditional cash transfer program.

“CEO has to deal with the fact that they’re in a political world and can take heat directed by political opponents,” Riccio says. He says the scope of the city’s poverty problem also can set the center up for failure. “They risk setting expectations that are beyond what they can do. The cause of poverty is affected by macroeconomic forces that the city can’t control.”

Despite these challenges, White and her CEO colleagues continue to innovate and test models that they plan to replicate in and outside of New York City. “It’s important to build on the basis of what other people know,” says White. “We’re working with what they’ve done and we’re trying to retool it and make it better.”

The organization is using some of the Social Innovation Fund award to create how-to guides for five of its antipoverty programs, so that other governments and nonprofits can replicate CEO’s star achievements. Says White: “I think part of the long-term value of the center is that we can spread so much of our knowledge base across the country.”

Corey Binns is a journalist based in New York City. She writes about science, health, and social change for publications including Popular Science and msnbc.com.

There are numerous reasons, including the difficulty of getting to school and the cost of schooling. Even when tuition is free, there are often expenses for lunch, uniforms, and examination fees. And because the quality of education is often poor, parents are forced to pay for additional tutoring to enable their children to pass tests. Opportunity costs may be even larger—while they are in school, children forgo opportunities to produce income working on the family farm or selling in the marketplace. It is not surprising that when education investments do not result in adequate learning, or even basic literacy and numeracy, parents do not keep their children in school.

Even when learning outcomes are adequate, very few students continue on to secondary school. Job prospects for most people in the developing world are poor, and staying in school past grade 5, or even through grade 10, does not improve them significantly. In impoverished regions, the vast majority will not secure formal employment and will be supported primarily through subsistencelevel agriculture and trading. Health outcomes in these regions are also dire. Millions of children die every year from controllable diseases such as diarrhea, respiratory infections, and malaria.

Educational programs typically adopt traditional Western models of education, with an emphasis on math, science, language, and social studies. These programs allocate scarce resources to topics like Greek mythology, prime numbers, or tectonic plate movement—topics that may provide intellectual stimulation, but have little relevance in the lives of impoverished children. Highperforming students in less developed regions face a much different future from their counterparts’ in wealthier areas. There are no higher levels of schooling or professional job opportunities awaiting most of these children; they will likely end up working on family or neighborhood farms or starting their own small enterprises.

Schooling provides neither the financial literacy students will need to manage the meager resources under their control, nor the guidance needed to create opportunities for securing a livelihood or building wealth. In addition, schooling provides little assistance to promote the physical health needed for economic stability and quality of life. Life expectancy is low in impoverished regions, and not just because of lack of quality medical care. The devastation preventable disease wreaks on well-being and financial stability in poor regions can be dramatically mitigated through instruction on basic health behaviors, such as hand washing.

We fervently believe that what students in impoverished regions need are not more academic skills, but rather life skills that enable them to improve their financial prospects and well-being. These include financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills; health maintenance and management skills; and administrative capabilities, such as teamwork, problem solving, and project management.

Over the last five years, we have done extensive work on the state of education in developing countries. We have visited many government, nongovernment, and private schools and teacher training programs in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and we have talked extensively with teachers, students, headmasters, school owners, and government officials. We have visited innovative educational programs that are among the world’s largest and most successful, including BRAC, an NGO in Bangladesh that owns and operates 32,000 primary schools; Pratham, which provides literacy and other educational support programs, teaching 33 million children in India; and Escuela Nueva, the Colombian program of mono- and multigrade teaching that has grown to 20,000 schools. We have implemented training for illiterate adults in developing countries and have tested that training effectively over the last few years, applying the best of our experience to improving organizations like Opportunity International, a large microfinance institution.

These experiences have convinced us that the time is right to redefine quality education in the developing world.

A NEW EDUCATIONAL MODEL

We have developed a robust educational model that combines traditional content with critically important financial, health, and administrative skills, which can be delivered via existing school systems and teachers.

Our model, which we call “school for life,” shifts the goal of schooling away from the achievement of standardized learning outcomes toward making a positive impact on the economic and social well-being of students and their communities. The model requires significant changes in both content and pedagogy. First, entrepreneurship and health modules are mandatory curriculum components for all primary grade students. Second, student-centered learning methods are used that require students to work in groups to solve complex problems and manage projects on their own.

This approach is inspired by models of adult education in developing countries that focus on self-efficacy as a critical foundation of positive livelihood and health-seeking behaviors, along with active-learning pedagogies used in progressive schools throughout the world. The health curriculum draws on the work of the World Health Organization and focuses on preventing disease, caring for sick children, and obtaining medical care. The entrepreneurship curriculum is informed by our work with adult entrepreneurs in developing countries, and it draws ideas from a broad range of financial and entrepreneurial programs developed by organizations like the International Labour Organization, Junior Achievement, and Aflatoun.

Conceptual knowledge is put into practice at school through activities that empower children to use what they have learned. For example, students practice routine health behaviors, such as hand washing and wearing shoes near latrines—and, to the extent feasible, gain exposure to other important behaviors, such as boiling drinking water and using malaria nets. They practice routine market-like transactions by earning points for schoolwork and budgeting those points to obtain valuable prizes, such as sitting in a favorite chair or being first in line.

Students also develop higher order skills as they work in committees to develop and execute complex projects. Health-related projects can range from planning and carrying out an athletic activity to be played during recess, to practicing diagnostic skills when classmates are ill—helping to decide, for example, when a cold has turned into a respiratory infection that requires antibiotics. Entrepreneurship projects include identifying and exploiting market opportunities through business ideas like school gardens or community recycling that create real value. Students learn and practice workplace skills and attitudes like delegation, negotiation, collaboration, and planning—opportunities that are rarely available to them outside their families.

Some school systems, especially at the secondary level, have begun to include entrepreneurship and health topics in their curricular requirements. But including information in basic lectures is not enough. Schools must simultaneously adopt action-oriented pedagogical approaches that hone critical thinking skills and enable children to identify problems, seek out and evaluate relevant information and resources, and design and carry out plans for solving these problems. This involves tackling real problems that require and empower students to take the initiative and responsibility for their own learning.

A full implementation of this new school for life approach has not yet been adopted by any major organization, but a pilot is currently being developed by Escuela Nueva in Colombia. Escuela Nueva was the pioneer in adapting student-centered approaches for use in impoverished rural environments, which often use multigrade classrooms. Escuela Nueva develops classroom materials and pedagogical approaches in which students work in self-directed teams to learn, discuss, and actively practice, using the basic content included in standard governmental curricula.

Through this unique combination of relevant content, practical implementation, and student empowerment, children develop a body of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will enable them to succeed and thrive when they leave school, whether they are headed toward college or remain in their communities.

DRAMATIC CHANGES ARE NEEDED

The traditional definition of school quality in the developing world is based on content mastery. But using traditional schooling approaches during the few precious years most children will spend in school leads to wasted resources and forgone opportunities for individuals and communities. Governmental agencies and organizations that support and promote quality education for all children must move beyond traditional models to help children develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are relevant to their lives and that can lift them out of poverty.

For too long, governments and organizations investing in developing-world education have operated under the unquestioned assumption that improved test scores were clear evidence that their investments have paid off. But if, as we argue here, mastery of the basic primary school curriculum is not the best means for improving life chances and alleviating poverty in developing countries, that model is broken. Investing in interventions that produce the highest test scores is no longer a valid approach for allocating scarce educational dollars or the scarce time available for the development of young minds. It is time to seek out the interventions that lead to the greatest social and economic impact for the poor.

Marc J. Epstein is Distinguished Research Professor of Managementat Rice University.

Kristi Yuthas is Swigert Endowed Information Systems Management Chair at Portland State University.

It’s a different story for students arriving at one of 35 colleges with a Schools App for Facebook. Even before setting foot on campus, students can use this customized social network to start meeting new classmates, find campus groups to join, and connect to staff and alumni. Because updates focus on their college, they don’t have to filter all the social media noise to get the information they need.

“We want to make sure that by the time every student lands freshman year, they already have created this personal network around them that will help them get through school,” explains Michael Staton, former high school teacher and now CEO of Inigral. The San Francisco-based company that developed the Schools App for higher education is attracting customers and investors with its plan to leverage social networking to increase college graduation rates.

One of the ugly secrets of higher education is that a substantial number of students who start college never graduate. This problem is particularly acute among students who grew up in disadvantaged communities, such as African-Americans and families living below the poverty line. For example, only 40 percent of African-American students and 41 percent of Hispanic students enrolled in a four-year college graduated within a sixyear period, compared with 62 percent for white students.

Earlier this year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $2 million in the startup. This is the foundation’s first equity investment and reflects its goal to help more students reach graduation, especially those who are the first in their family to go to college. The investment is also a sign that the foundation sees “significant demand for the product and services and the opportunity to build out a scalable platform for their delivery,” says Greg Ratliff, senior program officer for the Gates Foundation.

The infusion of philanthropic dollars is helping bring the Schools App to community colleges serving large numbers of Pell Grant recipients. Many of these students are commuters on slim budgets who may not feel a strong link to campus. “They don’t engage effectively with faculty, staff, and peers, and they do not access available support services,” observes Ratliff. “The Schools App will leverage technology to test whether student engagement and retention can be increased using social media.”

The top reasons students drop out of college have to do with financial challenges and academic readiness. “After that, there can be a lot of reasons—they don’t feel like they fit in, aren’t engaged with a broader community, or don’t have a supportive social environment,” Staton says.

The Schools App helps new students connect but within a closed, private universe. That makes it more palatable to admissions officers who may be wary of social media’s wilder side. Early adopters range from Arizona State University, with 70,000 students, to Columbia College Chicago, serving 12,000. Cost to the college ranges from $10,000 to $70,000 annually.

“What students seem to want is a place to talk to their peers and a convenient way to connect to college staff. We give them a place to do both things,” Staton says. Making friends seems to be students’ driving interest, especially for incoming freshmen. The software suggests friends based on common interests, which might be a mutual love of the outdoors or something more specific, such as returning to college as a single parent or military veteran. “It’s not about finding someone to date,” Staton adds.

Many colleges are recognizing that they need new ways to connect with digital-age students who want information delivered on their terms. E-mail and snail mail tend to get ignored by this generation. Instead, Staton says, “they want an on-demand, peer-supported, student support system.”

In the long run, Staton sees the need for “a new core piece of technology” to help colleges meet these evolving student support needs. For now, Inigral’s staff of 15 is busy improving its killer app for freshmen. A mobile version of Schools App is due for release this fall.

This disappointing performance has led educators, policymakers, and parents to search for ways to improve student achievement in schools. Foundations, too, are focusing on school reform, with the largest and most powerful, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to initiatives for improving teacher competence and accountability. The accountability models increasingly in fashion find their roots in the discipline of economics rather than education, and they are exemplified in the value-added metrics now gathered by large urban school districts. These metrics assess annual increments in each student’s learning derived from standardized tests in subject areas like math and reading, which are then aggregated to arrive at a score for a teacher—her “value added” to students’ learning. Anyone can go to the website of the Los Angeles Times and find a ranking based on these scores for every teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Needless to say, many teachers and the unions that represent them are opposed to value-added models, arguing that they fail to capture the complex factors which go into teaching and learning.

Value-added modeling is one example of a larger approach to improving public schools that is aimed at enhancing what economists label “human capital”—factors such as teacher experience, subject knowledge, and pedagogical skills. If a teacher’s human capital can be increased, films like Waiting for Superman argue, the United States would be well on the way to solving its alarming educational problem. But the research my colleagues and I at the University of Pittsburgh have conducted over the past decade in several large urban school districts suggests that enhancing teacher human capital should not be the sole or even primary focus of school reform. Instead, if students are to show measurable and sustained improvement, schools must also foster what sociologists label “social capital”—the patterns of interactions among teachers.⁴

In addition to targeting teacher human capital, many believe that a key to improving public schools lies in bringing in people outside the school, or even the school district, to solve problems. These outsiders often take the form of curriculum consultants and pedagogy “experts” from university schools of education or of teacher-to-teacher “coaches” supplied by the district office. But they also include people with almost no experience in education or public schools. Here the examples are numerous, such as the Teach for America program, which seeks out recent graduates of elite colleges to temporarily join the teaching corps in the toughest schools; or the district-financed leadership academies, which select aspiring principals partly because they lack experience in education; or the recent installation (and removal) of Cathleen Black, a magazine publisher with virtually no experience in education, as chancellor of the New York City public school system.

A natural extension of the belief in the power of outsiders is the notion that teacher tenure is the enemy of effective public education. Governors of Florida, Indiana, Nevada, New Jersey, and Tennessee all have introduced measures calling for the dismantling of teacher tenure in their states’ public schools. Implicit in such arguments is the assumption that the ranks of senior teachers are plagued by incompetence and that the less experienced would do better in their place.

A third belief centers on the role of the principal. In many reform efforts, the principal is cast as the “instructional leader” who is responsible for developing and managing pedagogical practice. In many of the current principal training programs, principals are taught how to manage curriculum, monitor lesson plans, evaluate teachers, and hold them accountable for student progress. In the language of business, the principal is a line manager expected to be a visible presence in the classroom, ensuring that teachers are doing their jobs. The principal is likewise a hands-on “super teacher” whose primary job is to be involved in the day-to-day business of instructional practice.

These three beliefs—in the power of teacher human capital, the value of outsiders, and the centrality of the principal in instructional practice—form the implicit or explicit core of many reform efforts today. Unfortunately, all three beliefs are rooted more in conventional wisdom and political sloganeering than in strong empirical research. Together they constitute what I call the ideology of school reform. And although this, like all ideology, may bring us comfort in the face of uncertainty and failure, it is unhelpful and perhaps dangerous if it leads us to pursue policies that will not bring about sustained success. Our research suggests that there is some truth to the predominant ideology. Teacher competence does affect student learning. Outsiders can bring fresh ideas and enthusiasm to tired systems. And principals do have a role in reform efforts. At the same time, our findings strongly suggest that in trying to improve public schools we are overselling the role of human capital and innovation from the top, while greatly undervaluing the benefits of social capital and stability at the bottom.

To be clear: I am not opposed to recognizing the contributions of outstanding teachers or to holding bad teachers accountable for poor performance. But I believe in the power of objective data. The results of our research challenge the prevailing centrality of the individual teacher and principal leadership in models of effective public education. Instead, the results provide much support for the centrality of social capital—the relationships among teachers—for improving public schools. (See “How to Reform Public Schools” on opposite page.) Our results suggest that we need to broaden the focus on teacher human capital to an approach that supports both human and social capital development for teachers.

WHAT IS SOCIAL CAPITAL?

In the context of schools, human capital is a teacher’s cumulative abilities, knowledge, and skills developed through formal education and on-the-job experience. For many years, teacher human capital was thought to be attained through a combination of formal education and certification both before entering the profession and throughout the course of a teacher’s career. This has been a boon to the universities that provide such training, but several studies conducted largely by economists have shown little relationship between a teacher’s accumulation of formal education and actual student learning. In our studies, teacher educational attainment similarly shows little effect on improving student achievement.

Due partly to the questions raised by these studies, recent approaches to developing teacher human capital have looked beyond formal educational requirements. Many approaches emphasize ongoing professional development. At a different end of the spectrum are the approaches of education economists, who use value-added modeling to tie teacher performance directly to student achievement with the effect of exposing underperforming teachers. A variant of this is merit pay, which monetarily rewards teachers whose students demonstrate high achievement and sometimes imposes a financial penalty on teachers whose students perform poorly.

Social capital, by comparison, is not a characteristic of the individual teacher but instead resides in the relationships among teachers. In response to the question “Why are some teachers better than others?” a human capital perspective would answer that some teachers are just better trained, more gifted, or more motivated. A social capital perspective would answer the same question by looking not just at what a teacher knows, but also where she gets that knowledge. If she has a problem with a particular student, where does the teacher go for information and advice? Who does she use to sound out her own ideas or assumptions about teaching? Who does she confide in about the gaps in her understanding of her subject knowledge?

Social capital is a concept that gained traction in sociology with the publication of James Coleman’s work comparing students in public and parochial schools. He found that parochial school students performed better and attributed this to the social links among parents and within neighborhoods, which strengthened student support systems. In business, social capital has received attention because of its role in creating intellectual resources within a firm.⁵

Our research shows that social capital is also at work in schools. When a teacher needs information or advice about how to do her job more effectively, she goes to other teachers. She turns far less frequently to the experts and is even less likely to talk to her principal. Further, when the relationships among teachers in a school are characterized by high trust and frequent interaction—that is, when social capital is strong—student achievement scores improve.

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Although we have conducted studies of teacher human and social capital in several school districts,I will focus here on a large-scale project conducted in the New York City public schools. Between 2005 and 2007, we followed more than 1,000 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers in a representative sample of 130 elementary schools across the city. We examined one-year changes in student achievement scores in mathematics. That is, we looked at how much each student’s knowledge of mathematics advanced in the year he or she spent with a particular teacher. We also took into account the economic need, attendance, and special education status of a child, because these factors might affect not just the level of student learning but also the rate of learning growth.

We examined several facets of teacher human capital, including experience in the classroom and educational attainment, as predictors of student achievement gains. We also had all teachers respond to a series of classroom scenarios developed and validated at the University of Michigan, which measured each teacher’s ability to instruct children in the logic of mathematics.⁶ Thus our human capital indicators included teacher education, experience, and ability in the classroom.

In addition to these more objective indicators, we surveyed more than 1,200 kindergarten through fifth grade teachers in one New York City subdistrict and asked them to report how competent they felt teaching particular aspects of math. We found that many elementary school teachers reported that they did not like to teach math and did not feel particularly competent at it. Teachers in the early grades were particularly uncomfortable, but even in fifth grade, three in 10 teachers expressed little confidence in their preparation for teaching basic math concepts like ratios and fractions. As explained by one New York City math coach: “Elementary school teachers are math-phobes. They are scared of teaching math because they don’t feel like they’re very good at it themselves.”

So we asked the teachers whom they talked to when they had questions or needed advice. Did they go to other teachers, to the school principal, or to the coaches hired by the district specifically to help them to be better math teachers? And how much did they trust the source of the advice they received? What we found is that in most instances teachers seek advice from one another. Teachers were almost twice as likely to turn to their peers as to the experts designated by the school district, and four times more likely to seek advice from one another than from the principal. As one New York City teacher explained, “It’s dangerous to express vulnerability to experts or administrators because they will take your professional status away” and replace it with scripted textbooks.

Most striking, students showed higher gains in math achievement when their teachers reported frequent conversations with their peers that centered on math, and when there was a feeling of trust or closeness among teachers. In other words, teacher social capital was a significant predictor of student achievement gains above and beyond teacher experience or ability in the classroom. And the effects of teacher social capital on student performance were powerful. If a teacher’s social capital was just one standard deviation higher than the average, her students’ math scores increased by 5.7 percent.

One New York City teacher described how social capital works in her school: “Teaching is not an isolated activity. If it’s going to be done well, it has to be done collaboratively over time. Each of us sets our own priorities in terms of student outcomes. For example, one teacher might emphasize students knowing all the facts and operational skills. Another might think that what’s most important is to develop a love of learning in students. Still another teacher might want to develop students to be better critical thinkers and problem solvers, and they’re not as concerned about students memorizing the facts. A good teacher needs to help students develop all of those things, but it’s easy to get stuck in your own ideology if you are working alone. With collaboration, you are exposed to other teachers’ priorities and are better able to incorporate them to broaden your own approach in the classroom.”

What happens when you combine human and social capital? What if teachers are good at their jobs and also talk to one another frankly and on a regular basis about what they do in math class? If human capital is strong, individual teachers should have the knowledge and skills to do a good job in their own classrooms. But if social capital is also strong, teachers can continually learn from their conversations with one another and become even better at what they do.

Our results in New York City confirmed this expectation. We found that the students of high-ability teachers outperformed those of low-ability teachers, as proponents of human capital approaches to school improvement would predict. More significant were the interactions between human and social capital. Students whose teachers were more able (high human capital) and also had stronger ties with their peers (strong social capital) showed the highest gains in math achievement. Conversely, students of teachers with lower teaching ability (low human capital) and weaker ties with their peers (weak social capital) showed the lowest achievement gains. We also found that even low-ability teachers can perform as well as teachers of average ability if they have strong social capital. Strong social capital can go a long way toward off setting any disadvantages students face when their teachers have low human capital.

I interviewed a teacher from a California school district who provided a vivid example of how human and social capital can be mutually reinforcing: “In my school, we ask teachers to set up a schedule where they observe someone else’s classroom at least twice a year. Teachers really see the benefit, and we get 80 to 90 percent voluntary participation. So not only does the teacher who is being observed get peer feedback, but the observing teachers learn new methods or approaches. With new teachers this is really important, and most are really grateful for the help. One year I had a brand-new teacher who had never really taught before. She spent every one of her prep periods just observing my class and what I taught, and then she would do the same thing in her class a few days later. This sort of modeling was really helpful to her in developing her own competence and confidence.”

In presenting these results to education experts, I generally find that there are lots of questions and a great deal of interest. When I present them to teachers, the results immediately resonate and many express relief that their informal work networks are finally being recognized as a valuable resource. When presenting them to school administrators, however, I have faced more skepticism and some unwillingness to let go of long-held beliefs about the need to monitor teachers and set strict guidelines for practice in the classroom. Such skepticism is captured in the words of Michele Rhee, the ousted superintendent of the Washington, D.C., school district and an ardent supporter of reform efforts that stress scripted approaches to teaching. According to Ms. Rhee, “cooperation, collaboration, and consensus building are way overrated.”⁷

VALUE OF TEACHER EXPERIENCE

Teacher tenure is a topic of intense debate among education policymakers. Opponents argue that tenure systems shelter the worst teachers from dismissal or even remedial action. As New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said recently, teacher tenure is a system “where excellence is not rewarded and failure is not disciplined.”⁸ New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long argued against the “last in, first out” protection that tenure provides, asserting that by allowing more senior teachers to keep their jobs in tough times and laying off less experienced teachers, the district as a whole suffers.

Proponents argue that tenure protects experienced teachers from bad administrators and allows teachers to use their own professional judgment to make decisions in the classroom. After all, who is better positioned to make pedagogical decisions than the teachers who have day-to-day responsibility for student learning? These views on teacher tenure are in stark opposition to each other, although both arguments center on the value of teacher experience to student success. Tenure proponents explicitly argue for the centrality of experience in the making of a good teacher, whereas opponents of tenure implicitly undervalue experience.

Although our research does not tackle the complex social and political aspects of the tenure debate, our results in New York City clearly come down on the side of teacher experience, showing that greater tenure in the classroom leads to higher student achievement gains. There is one caveat to this finding, however, and it concerns where that experience is gained. Students show stronger growth in math achievement when their teacher has spent more time teaching at the same grade level. The value of experience—and the growth in teacher knowledge that accompanies it—is found in what psychologists call contextualized learning or, in the case of elementary school teachers, learning how to teach children at a particular point in their chronological development.

To illustrate, let’s compare two hypothetical teachers, both of whom have five years of experience teaching elementary school math. Susan Monroe has spent all five years teaching fourth-graders, while colleague Catherine Carpenter has spent two years teaching second-graders, two years teaching fourth-graders, and one year teaching fifth-graders. Our results show that Monroe’s students are likely to outperform Carpenter’s students. Why would this be? One could argue that Carpenter has had more diverse assignments and thus broader experience, and that her students should benefit from the breadth of human capital she’s developed. But Monroe has stayed with fourth-graders and, although she hasn’t had the breadth of Carpenter’s experience, she has developed depth in her human capital. Learning mathematics—even at the elementary level—appears to be a sufficiently complex enterprise that the depth of teacher experience matters more than the breadth of experience.

Another factor might be the enhanced social capital that comes with tenure in one grade. Like most urban school districts, in New York City there is a significant movement of teachers from school to school and even outside of the district. We found that one-year teacher turnover rates averaged almost 20 percent in the 130 schools in our study. One cost to such high turnover is that when teachers leave, they take with them not just their human capital but their social capital as well. So if Monroe moves to a different school, not only does she take with her the knowledge gained from five years of experience teaching math to fourth-graders (a loss of human capital), but her absence also disrupts the network of relationships that the fourth-grade teachers in the school have built with one another (a loss of social capital). In some New York City schools, particularly those with a challenging student body, teacher turnover rates averaged 40 percent and more each year. With all the movement, many teachers felt that spending time on developing social capital was not a good investment: No one expected to be there very long.

At the same time, social capital can be a lifeline in chaos. I recently talked to a teacher who described her experience in a troubled San Francisco elementary school after being involuntarily transferred to teach in a new grade. “I taught fourth grade for two years, then, without asking, I got switched to third grade. I really wasn’t sure what I was doing, and there were so many content areas that I had never taught before, so I wasn’t sure what to emphasize and what the kids were likely to struggle with,” says the teacher. “I was fortunate in that I signed up voluntarily for a program that was available called Peer Assistance and Review, where an experienced third-grade teacher was my mentor, available to be my sounding board, and give me guidance and new ideas that weren’t in the textbook. We had a set time to work together every week, but I talked to her informally nearly every day. This was just invaluable to me and showed the power of peer-to-peer learning.”

In our research we found social capital losses to be highly detrimental to student achievement. We compared the rates of turnover in each of the 130 schools in our New York City study and related those to student achievement. As we expected, the higher the teacher turnover rate at the school, the lower the student achievement gains the following year. But it also mattered which teachers left, in terms of their levels of human and social capital. When teacher turnover resulted in high losses of either human or social capital, student achievement declined. But when turnover resulted in high losses of both human and social capital, students were particularly disadvantaged. These results show that teacher tenure can have significant positive effects on student achievement.

PRINCIPALS AS EXTERNAL FACILITATORS

Teachers are not, of course, the only school professionals who have been the focus of reformers. Principals, too, have been in the spotlight with much of the recent activity centered on training them to serve as the school leader of pedagogical change. To address the role of the principal, I will draw on data we collected in the Pittsburgh public schools over the past decade. In this study we examined human and social capital among teachers, but here we also focused on what the principal did to enhance or hinder teachers’ efforts. We used a time diary method, asking principals to record all their activities during a typical workweek. To ensure that principals were recording activities in real time, we had each principal carry a PDA and record activities when prompted by a beeper.

We found that principals, like most managers, multitask in their jobs and also do a significant amount of unplanned work each day. On average, principals recorded more than 60 distinct tasks in a five-day workweek. As expected, they spent the largest portion of their time—an average of 57 percent, or 28 hours per week—on administrative matters like facility management and paperwork. They spent a far smaller portion of their time—25 percent on average— on instructional activities like mentoring and monitoring teachers. Still less of their time—14 percent on average—was spent on external relations like meeting with parents, developing community relations, going to community meetings, and interacting with outsiders, such as foundations and publishers, to enhance the school’s resources. But it is this latter class of activities—which can be conceived of as building external social capital—that made the difference both for teachers and for students.

When principals spent more time building external social capital, the quality of instruction in the school was higher and students’ scores on standardized tests in both reading and math were higher. Conversely, principals spending more of their time mentoring and monitoring teachers had no effect on teacher social capital or student achievement. The more effective principals were those who defined their roles as facilitators of teacher success rather than instructional leaders. They provided teachers with the resources they needed to build social capital—time, space, and staffing—to make the informal and formal connections possible.

APPLYING RESEARCH TO PRACTICE

What do these findings tell us about effective education policy? First, they suggest that the current focus on building teacher human capital—and the paper credentials often associated with it—will not yield the qualified teaching staff so desperately needed in urban districts. Instead, policymakers must also invest in measures that enhance collaboration and information sharing among teachers. In many schools, such social capital is assumed to be an unaffordable luxury or, worse, a sign of teacher weakness or inefficiency. Yet our research suggests that talking to peers about the complex task of instructing students is an integral part of every teacher’s job and results in rising student achievement.

Second, our findings suggest that there is not enough emphasis on the value of teacher stability. We found direct, positive relationships between student achievement gains in mathematics and teacher tenure at grade level and teacher social capital. This suggests that current political efforts to undercut teacher stability and experience may come at a very steep cost.

Third, our results question the conventional wisdom about the power of the principal as the internal leader of teachers in school reform efforts. Principals spending their time on instructional activities and teacher interaction had no effect on teacher social capital or student achievement. But principals who spent more of their time on collaborating with people and organizations outside the school delivered gains to teachers and students alike.

Building social capital in schools is not easy or inexpensive. It requires time and typically the infusion of additional teaching staff into the school. It requires a reorientation away from a Teacher of the Year model and toward a system that rewards mentoring and collaboration among teachers. It also asks school principals and district administrators to become more external in their focus—spending less time looking over teachers’ shoulders and more time on collaboration with potential outside supporters of teachers’ efforts. But after decades of failed programs aimed at improving student achievement through teacher human capital and principal leadership, such investments in social capital are cheap by comparison and off er far more promise of measurable gains for students.

Carrie R. Leana is the George H. Love Professor of Organizations and Management at the University of Pittsburgh, where she holds appointments in the Graduate School of Business, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and the School of Medicine. Her current research is focused on organizational processes and employee outcomes, with a particular emphasis on the nonprofit service sector.

Preparing students from all kinds of communities to thrive in the fields known collectively as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) has become a national obsession. President Barack Obama, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and corporate CEOs all offer a similarly urgent message: If we don’t act fast to fill the STEM pipeline with qualified and capable students, we risk a stalled economic engine and a future of missed opportunities.

The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI), launched in 2007 with corporate and philanthropic dollars and an all-star board, aims to avert the STEM crisis through a rapid-response approach. CEO Tom Luce, former assistant secretary of education, says what sets NMSI apart from other education reform efforts is its focus on replicating proven programs. Instead of waiting for a moon shot to improve math and science education, NMSI is betting on ready-made strategies that can be rolled out immediately. “We’re not a startup. We’re not a garage innovator,” he says. “We go find existing programs that have proven results and figure out how to get them replicated.”

For starters, NMSI has invested $126 million to scale up two signature programs “and show communities that success is possible quickly,” Luce says. He has been working to improve public education since 1983, when A Nation at Risk sounded an alarm about the declining quality of American schooling. “Back then, we had to convince people there was a problem,” Luce says. “Today, we have to convince them there’s a solution.”

Recent years have brought a spate of bad news, with US students faring poorly on international comparisons of achievement in math and science. Interest in STEM subjects is lagging along with achievement. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology cautions that many of the country’s most proficient students are choosing other professions over science and engineering. Qualified math and science teachers are in short supply, prompting the president to set a goal of recruiting 10,000 new teachers in these fields within five years.

Luce insists there’s no shortage of good strategies to change the picture. He’s seen them rolled out in one pilot program after another—but seldom replicated.

A Texan prone to folksy phrases (“It’s time to stop stewing and start doing”), Luce has built NMSI’s two-pronged approach on programs piloted in the Lone Star State. The larger effort is the Advanced Placement Training and Incentive Program. APTIP, developed in Dallas, focuses on improving the ability of current teachers to teach AP courses, touted as a gateway to college success. The second program, UTeach, was developed at the University of Texas at Austin and builds the preservice teacher ranks with candidates who have strong foundations in math and science.

EXPANDING AP OPPORTUNITIES

Once the domain of only the most talented and privileged, AP courses are now standard fare for college-bound students. Yet minority, inner-city, and rural students have long been underrepresented in AP. For many, prior educational experiences don’t prepare them for the pace and rigor of AP. Even if they are ready, there aren’t enough qualified teachers to go around.

APTIP offers professional development and incentives to bring AP courses in math, science, and English to more students, especially to minority and low-income teens. The program goes beyond access and aims to increase the pass rate on AP exams. Research cited by NMSI shows a correlation between students who pass AP tests in high school and those who go on to earn college degrees. Now offered at 229 high schools in six states selected for the first round of competitive, five-year funding, APTIP is already producing measurable results. Luce cites a 97 percent increase in the number of students taking and passing the national test. The average annual cost of $120,000 per site makes the program a bargain, he adds, when it comes to changing the culture of a school to emphasize academic achievement.

Teachers say they appreciate the peer-led, practical approach to professional development. Anthony Palombella, a high school science teacher with a doctorate in molecular and cellular biology, entered teaching with a mastery of his content area. Attending the summer institutes with his colleagues “adds more tools to my tool belt as a teacher,” he says.

Having a range of teaching strategies available—from technology-assisted labs to hands-on activities using duct tape and Velcro—helps diverse learners understand challenging concepts. At Cosby High School in Midlothian, Va., where Palombella teaches, enrollment in AP biology has swelled from 20 students per year to more than 100, and similar gains are occurring in AP math, English, and other science courses. “Students who might not have thought of themselves as AP material are taking these classes,” he says.

Teachers also learn pre-AP strategies to introduce as early as middle school. That gets students ready for tougher high school classes, says Trevor Packer, vice president of College Board, which administers the AP program. He credits APTIP for “helping overcome the two greatest barriers to student participation and success [in AP]”: improving access to qualified teachers and student readiness to succeed.

UTeach, currently offered on 22 college campuses and enrolling nearly 4,000 undergraduates, focuses on another critical piece of the STEM puzzle: recruiting and retaining the next wave of STEM teachers. Participants in the four-year program fulfill requirements for a math or science major, while also taking education courses that prepare them to teach high school. Graduates are not only entering the teaching profession with deep understanding of math and science, but they’re also sticking around. Some 92 percent of UTeach graduates immediately start teaching math and science. Five years later, 82 percent are still in the classroom, compared with a national retention rate of about 50 percent.

University of Texas at Austin education professor Anthony Petrosino played a key role in developing the UTeach curriculum. New teachers’ knowledge of math and science is a hallmark of the program, he says, along with “faculty who are active researchers.” It’s no accident that UTeach courses incorporate research about learning science. And coursework reinforces best practices in assessment, equity, and technology integration.

The most popular aspect of UTeach may be the fieldwork. Undergraduates are assigned to master teachers’ classrooms “early and often,” Petrosino says. That gives them real-world context for what they are learning, plus a chance to find out fast whether they’re cut out for teaching. Andreea Popa, graduate of UTeach-University of North Texas, arrived at her first teaching job in the Dallas area “so well prepared,” she says. Classroom management issues that plague many first-year teachers haven’t been a worry in her algebra classes. She can concentrate on convincing a new generation to love math as much as she does.

QUESTIONING GOALS AND REWARDS

Despite support for NMSI from corporate, philanthropic, and government sectors, not everyone is convinced that a national expansion of rigorous AP courses is the best solution to the STEM crisis. Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards, says AP courses “typically offer an accelerated version of the worst sort of traditional teaching: lecture driven, textbook based, and test focused. People confuse harder with better.”

Luce has heard that argument, but counters that AP offers the best available combination of curriculum and assessment. “Right now, it’s the highest standard we have. If there’s a better program in the future, we’ll consider it,” he says. “Meanwhile, we’re giving opportunities to kids who have never been given the opportunity to stretch themselves.”

The offer of cash incentives—$100 to students who pass AP tests plus a per pupil bonus for their teachers—also has rankled critics. Robert Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, calls such rewards “bribes for the kids, bounties for the teacher.” Tying teacher bonuses to student achievement “is further incentive to teach to the test,” he says. Pay for performance “is not positive and may have negative consequences long term.”

Kohn points to a research base of 75 studies showing that external rewards can get in the way of internal motivation to learn. “What rewards can never do is help kids to become more effective or enthusiastic learners,” he says.

Healthy critique is important as these programs expand. An iterative design process has improved UTeach over the years, Petrosino says, and he hopes replication allows for ongoing fine-tuning. “It’s easy to fall into PR mode,” he admits. “We need to keep reflecting, refining, responding to research, and addressing new challenges.”

From Luce’s vantage point, the biggest challenge is securing public and private resources to fund expansion so that NMSI lives up to its name and achieves national impact. There’s no time to waste, he adds. “We need to move the needle in all 50 states.”

Suzie Boss is a journalist from Portland, Ore., who writes about social change and education. She contributes to Edutopia and is co-author of Reinventing Project-Based Learning.

The mPowering model leverages rewards to improve the lives of “the poorest of the poor,” says Kamael Ann Sugrim, co-founder and president of mPowering. “The ultra poor spend 80 percent of their income on food but still fail to meet their daily nutritional needs,” she explains. “That leads to people making short-term decisions because they’re hungry. We want to help them make long-term decisions that will lead them out of poverty.”

Thanks to mPowering, now there’s an app for that. The organization doesn’t provide direct services. Instead, mPowering connects with nonprofit partners such as Citta, which provides education, health care, and other services in high-poverty areas. When Sugrim visits project sites like Orissa or Bhaktapur, Nepal, she finds high concentrations of extreme poverty—as well as cell phone coverage that rivals what she has back home in Silicon Valley.

Through its partners, mPowering distributes smartphones loaded with mobile apps to monitor desired behaviors, such as kids attending school or expectant mothers accessing prenatal care. Participants can cash in their earned credits for “food, medicine, books, or even extras they’d never be able to afford, like bicycles,” Sugrim says.

To implement the program, mPowering has created new job opportunities for adults who serve as local project liaisons. “They tend to be young leaders who want to help their community,” she explains. They’re also handy with mobile devices, which they use to record attendance or take photos to document positive moments.

With another mPowering app, data collected at the project sites is channeled back to donors in real time. For instance, a donor might get a Facebook photo showing a sponsored child celebrating perfect school attendance or eating a nutritious lunch. These real-time updates will help keep donors engaged, Sugrim predicts, “especially the 17-year-olds who are on Facebook and Twitter but also are looking for ways they can make a difference. We think this can unlock this interesting group of young donors and hold their attention.”

Sugrim says the idea for mPowering began to take shape after she spent five years in the corporate world, most recently at Salesforce.com. Co-founder Jeff Martin spent a decade at Apple Computer before starting Tribal Brands, which combines entertainment marketing with mobile technology. Their shared goal is to take advantage of ubiquitous technology, “and reach the bottom bottom of the pyramid,” Sugrim says.

One of their first challenges was to develop picture-based mobile applications to get around literacy and translation issues. The picture-based apps run on smartphones, not the simpler cell phones that are more common in the developing world.

MobileActive, which focuses on mobile technologies for social change, has documented the use of phones to promote health care, microfinance, literacy, and other efforts. “Fairly simple apps are accomplishing a lot of interesting things,” says Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive. But the human dimension typically proves harder than app development. For mobile projects to succeed at the bottom of the pyramid, “you really have to understand your users.”

That’s a message mPowering is taking to heart. “We’re challenging ourselves to take into consideration the behaviors and needs of the ultra poor,” says Sugrim. “What gets them motivated? What are the barriers they’re facing? The technology is cool,” she says, “but we don’t want to forget the issues they are dealing with every day.”

Consider the views of Kim Oakes, director of sharing and communities of practice at the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a national network of 99 charter schools serving 27,000 students via 1,900 teachers. Oakes told Bridgespan’s research team: “We know that about 80 percent of our teachers create materials from scratch. … It became increasingly important to connect our teachers, so that they could build upon one another’s ideas rather than work in isolation.”

Or consider World Vision, an international Christian development organization with an annual budget of more than $2 billion operating in 93 countries. World Vision was facing the consequences of rapid growth. In the words of Eleanor Monbiot, its senior director for knowledge management: “We were growing at 10 to 15 percent a year. We had moved from everybody knowing each other vaguely, to a breaking point. … The No. 1 need was to know what people were up to, where the best practices lay.”

KIPP, World Vision, and a host of other nonprofits, large and small, are tackling the challenge of making their organizations as smart as the individuals who constitute them. In short, they are engaging in the hard work of organizational learning: The intentional practice of collecting information, reflecting on it, and sharing the findings, to improve the performance of an organization.

Authors ranging from the late business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. to MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer Peter Senge have emphasized the value of knowledge and learning inside organizations. But, to use another well-worn phrase, this is easier said than done. In the fall of 2010, a Bridgespan Group team surveyed 116 nonprofits about how they learn—and how they translate the knowledge gained into practice, to increase their impact and fulfill their missions. We then explored these topics through interviews with more than half a dozen organizations, which were recommended by their peers for their innovative approaches to learning.

The results of the survey indicate that nonprofit leaders care deeply about capturing and sharing knowledge across their programs and fields. But they also identify three significant impediments to organizational learning: a lack of clear and measurable goals about using knowledge to improve performance; insufficient incentives for individuals or teams to participate in organizational learning activities; and uncertainty about the most effective processes for capturing and sharing learning. These issues also surface in forprofit organizations, according to outside studies, where knowledge hoarding between business units can result from competition for resources.¹ In the nonprofit sector, however, 97 percent of survey respondents said their leaders value knowledge sharing as a means to achieve their missions. Still, many of them struggle to do it well.

In this article, we look at the components of organizational learning; explore the challenges surrounding its goals, incentives, and processes; and provide examples of organizations working to address barriers to sharing knowledge. In an age driven by technology and information, organizational learning has not just become part of the successful 21st-century nonprofit; increasingly, it is a key ingredient.

CREATING IMPACT THROUGH LEARNING

Developing organizational knowledge and integrating that knowledge into everyday practice can be a powerful tool for multiplying an organization’s impact, especially as it grows. But a nonprofit doesn’t have to be a multisite, multimillion-dollar agency, or even have a dedicated knowledge management function, to benefit from clear goals, incentives, and well-developed processes for organizational learning. If you train your staff, circulate meeting minutes, share programmatic best practices across sites, measure the impact of your programs, discuss metrics with your board of directors to inform decisions, or present your results at professional conferences, you are practicing knowledge management. Indeed, one of the tricky aspects of this topic is that learning-related activities are varied and can sit in many different parts of an organization. In some organizations the locus of activity is in staff training; for others it may be in impact assessment or performance management. Wherever learning sits, the key is that it be closely connected to the organization’s mission and impact.

This connection is also the biggest challenge. Although 98 percent of nonprofit organizations reported in our survey that they collected a lot of information, a third of them said that they were unable to reflect on it and integrate it in a meaningful way into program activities. Our research tells us that to be intentional about organizational learning, organizations need to focus on doing four things well.² (See "Four Elements of Organizational Learning," below.)

First, leaders must champion organizational learning. They need to demonstrate their commitment by setting a vision and goals for learning connected to furthering the mission. And they must act as role models by participating in learning activities. Second, leaders need to foster a culture of continuous improvement that values organizational learning. The culture reinforces learning by providing incentives for learning behaviors and by measuring and communicating results of learning. Third, the organization needs to define a learning structure that specifies the people who are accountable for capturing, distilling, applying, and sharing knowledge. The structure also should include networks and coordinating tactics that help information flow among the people who need it, when they need it.

Last, the organization must design intuitive knowledge processes that are aligned to how people work. These processes specify how staff members define a learning agenda, and how they capture, distill, and apply knowledge. These processes also include the technology systems for exchanging knowledge, but they need to keep people-to-people interactions at the heart of them.³

GAPS IN THE LEARNING CYCLE

More than 90 percent of the nonprofit leaders we surveyed reported that they care deeply about learning and actively strive to model knowledge capture and sharing within their organizations. And the majority appeared to be devoting significant resources to this work. The challenge, these leaders report, is defining clear goals for organizational learning, creating adequate incentives to invest the time it takes to capture and share knowledge, and designing intuitive processes that capture and disseminate knowledge.

The Goals Gap

The good news is that leaders say that they care a great deal about learning. But a third of the nonprofit leaders we surveyed report that their senior managers have not defined clear and compelling learning goals. And nearly six in 10 said they don’t track metrics for learning at the organization level. Without clear goals and metrics, it becomes that much harder to effectively deploy knowledge resources, measure progress, and influence behavior across the organization. So how might nonprofit organizations set clearer goals for learning—goals that clearly advance mission?

World Vision considers its mission accomplished when children have access to education and health care, participate in their communities, and experience God’s love in their lives. Following a period of fast growth, its leaders believed that rapidly sharing information on effective practices (and failures) from one field of operation to the next would be a key to changing children’s lives. They translated the broader strategic goals of the organization into a subset of knowledge goals, including the goal of deploying best operating practices across all relief and field operations. And they broke this down into specific activities and tasks necessary to expedite know-how around the world for practices such as training community health workers in AIDS prevention and patient care, increasing yields for subsistence farmers, and boring wells in arid regions.

To devolve ownership of these goals across the networks, the organization focused on strengthening communities of practice (CoPs), virtual gatherings of far-flung World Vision experts in areas such as education, health, agriculture, and water, whose shared experiences could drive institutional learning and change. As of March 2011, World Vision had 23 CoPs with a combined membership of more than 10,000, all using a SharePoint Platform nested within the organization’s global intranet. Each CoP is staffed with a senior leader, who listens to needs across fields and sets a responsive knowledge-sharing agenda, abetted by a dedicated administrator who manages and stimulates ongoing collaboration and discussion around key issues.

CoP members engage in different ways and groupings: Some plug in to listen and learn; others actively develop, review, and collaborate on global documents, including strategies and standards for their respective areas. Ongoing discussions take place around best practices, advice and support for applying them, and research proposals to find better answers. The CoP itself is the one place where members and broader management can find all the knowledge assets for a given sector, analyze them, and use them to manage change. Most CoPs also have regular WebEx meetings, where members can discuss issues in depth, as well as an annual meeting where a subset of members come face-to-face to share and strategize.

According to Monbiot, “We’ve had (CoPs) for years but they’ve been pretty informal. We’re trying to operationalize these and to ensure that all staff are involved.” Now that each of these communities has a formal leader—with a staffing allocation and administrative support—they are making strides. The health care CoP has been particularly successful, attracting 900 members in a matter of months, who now act as champions of effective primary health care practices throughout the system. Monbiot believes that clear leadership and goals are a factor in the group’s size and that most World Vision partner organizations have health specialists on staff hungry to share specific technical expertise.

Arizona’s Children Association (AzCA), a near century-old child welfare and behavioral health agency that links organization learning goals to its merger strategy, is another example of an organization that has achieved remarkable results because of its improved organizational learning process. Twelve years ago it decided to move beyond residential treatment for children, adding home-based supports and earlier interventions for families and children to its services. The organization pursued this expansion through mergers and acquisitions, growing its annual budget from $4.5 million to $40 million over 10 years. Throughout the process, AzCA not only acquired staff and programs—it acquired knowledge. As Fred Chaffee, president and CEO, told us: “We gain a nucleus of expertise because we got an agency and brought it in. … Then growth occurred because we have a statewide system and a knowledge base.”

The results of carefully managing the learning and sharing of a knowledge base can be powerful. One AzCA acquisition was the New Directions Institute for Infant and Brain Development, which teaches the science of brain development and specific strategies caregivers can use to enhance children’s learning. AzCA integrated that knowledge into its other services through a series of 13 workshops that New Directions co-founder Jill Stamm and her staff have given to AzCA professionals—about 450 employees—to ensure that they understood the growing emphasis on prevention. To reinforce these ideas, the workshops mirrored community outreach to caregivers and were filled with messages from the neuroscience community that apply directly to very young children and their families. Why teach youth workers about young children? Says Stamm: “Say, for example, a family has an out-of-control 10-year-old. Chances are they have a 2-year-old crawling around, too. We wanted all our staff working with youth to help ensure that the 2-year-old gets a better start and does not spin out of control.” The key is to understand root causes of behavior.

As a result of these workshops, says Stamm, AzCA professionals across Arizona began to incorporate prevention into their jobs. Some of the caseworkers in Prescott and Flagstaff changed their home visitation agendas to include discussions of children’s brain development. Now the regional AzCA offices always include the New Directions curriculum in their new-employee training, and New Directions is training caseworkers in four other states. Chaffee reports that the careful integration of personnel, budgets, and programs, as well as of knowledge from new organizations, has allowed AzCA to more than double the number of clients served and has reduced costs per beneficiary by 11 percent to as much as 40 percent. It’s also allowed AzCA to fundraise for merger efforts, because prevention can demonstrate payback in the cost and quality of a program.

Smaller organizations, too, testify to the impact of clear learning goals tied to mission. Adoption Resources of Wisconsin (ARW) is a $2.2 million statewide organization with 17 staff dedicated to finding a good, permanent home for every child in Wisconsin. It carries out its mission by offering information, training, and support to families and professionals and through ongoing advocacy work. The goal of its learning efforts is to determine which information and training is getting results for kids who need homes. For ARW, this means learning how many people are seeking information from them, what they’re looking for, and whether the information is meeting the needs of adoptive parents or their intermediaries. According to CEO Colleen Ellingson, “We have a massive database, where we log how we’ve serviced anyone over the existence of our organization. We have 60,000 unique visitors per year. Every month we’re looking at data on website usage. What are [current or prospective parents] looking at? What aren’t they looking at?” Program managers study these usage patterns to identify trends and respond to them, continuously improving their services.

Getting the technology right took time. ARW started with several, small, customized data systems in the mid-1980s. Five years ago, it migrated to the Defran data system to track greater volumes of data. Throughout, Ellingson has promoted technology investments as a way to learn more, reduce cost, monitor progress, and develop initiatives.

For staff at World Vision, AzCA, and ARW, the goals of knowledge capture and sharing are championed at the top and connect directly to the impact they hope to create—respectively helping the poorest of the poor toward self-sufficiency, helping youth break out of destructive patterns, and giving kids homes to call their own.

The Incentives Gap

Strategic clarity around the “why” of organizational learning can bridge the first gap in the learning cycle. But creating a culture that motivates each person in an organization to capture and share knowledge actively requires a rewards system beyond the clarity of a compelling goal—and this is where about half of the nonprofits we surveyed experienced a problem. Leaders report that they fail to clarify incentives for individuals, for teams, or for their organization as a whole. Yet incentives at multiple levels are often exactly what it takes to transform a goal into a priority that rises above competing demands.

About half of the nonprofits we surveyed do not evaluate or reward some of the behaviors that support learning. Specifically, four out of 10 nonprofit leaders said they don’t incorporate knowledge capture and sharing into how staff members are evaluated. In our interviews, we heard that measuring and encouraging learning behavior was the area where nonprofits struggled most.

A straightforward incentive strategy builds organizational learning responsibilities directly into the job. The Council on Foundations (COF), a national nonprofit membership association whose members’ collective assets exceed $300 billion, has no dedicated knowledge staff. Instead, knowledge is becoming an explicit part of the job descriptions for their member-facing staff, which make up about half of the organization. COF uses a customer relationship management (CRM) database to track interactions with members. It also uses CRM tracking to inform performance reviews, measure and evaluate staff on how well they capture and pass on learning to colleagues, enable richer services to members, and collaborate across departments to pass on best practices.

FSG, a 70-person nonprofit consulting firm, believes incentives start with whom you hire. The firm uses knowledge sharing as a criterion for recruiting, and evaluates it as part of performance reviews. Hallie Preskill, FSG’s executive director of strategic learning and evaluation, says: “We look for a certain kind of person—smart, humble, and curious. Wanting to share what they learn is part of their DNA.” She notes another motivator: productivity. “People recognize that sharing knowledge saves time and increases productivity,” says Preskill. “When a content area surfaces that we need to understand better, we’ll put a note on the intranet and people respond. Within an hour, you will hear from six colleagues with tangible ideas.”

At the same time, FSG’s human resources system rates performance and recommends pay increases based in part on the extent to which an employee contributes to the firm’s development of intellectual capital. In 2010, FSG hired its first director of knowledge management, who is developing a firm-wide knowledge management system so that people can access, store, and share information comprehensively and in real time. Says Preskill: “It is about people and technology.”

Not all incentives and rewards have to be explicit. KIPP, for example, sees a link between organizational learning, increased staff effectiveness, and intrinsic rewards for effective staff. According to Oakes, the rewards for participating in organizational learning activities are of three types: achieving better student outcomes by leveraging the collective wisdom of KIPP teachers; enabling personal satisfaction by providing a means for teachers to expand their impact beyond their classroom and school; and helping teachers find kindred spirits among fellow teachers, which builds community and can help retain effective teachers. Says Oakes: “We want teachers to build on each others’ work. Giving them a [learning] tool so they don’t have to recreate the wheel is the key. But giving them access to other educators, who think like them and are dedicated like them, helps them really participate in the broader organization and mission.”

The chance to deeply influence an organization or field can provide another intrinsic reward for staff to share what they know. The employees of In My Shoes, a small, peer-mentoring organization for youth aging out of foster care, find motivation there. As a newly acquired unit of AzCA, In My Shoes is using knowledge sharing to further twin goals: tuning the ears of child welfare professionals to the child’s voice in foster care decisions and smoothing the road to independence for fostered youth. At a recent training of 85 child welfare professionals, In My Shoes founder Christa Drake spoke about how a move into foster care can result in loss of independence, connections with family, and community. It’s frightening, she says, and yet, in the ebb and flow of the system, it is the adults’ voices that are listened to. Through storytelling, testimonials, and role-playing, In My Shoes is getting its message across and reaping policy changes. Arizona child protective services now requires every new social worker to receive training that includes perspectives of foster care youth. And Arizona community colleges have begun designating and training counselors to work with youth coming out of the foster care system, addressing personal needs that go far beyond course recommendations. For Drake, these are huge rewards.

The Process Gap

Once clear learning goals are established that align tightly to the mission, and individuals and teams feel motivated to reach for them, at least one key question remains for many nonprofit staffers: How? Through what processes do we capture knowledge, share it, and use it to increase our impact? The most important first step in closing the how gap is to make these processes intuitive. Identify who needs the knowledge, where the best opportunities lie for learning, and what systems fit best with the way people already work.

For many organizations, the No. 1 goal of organizational learning is to identify, codify, and disseminate best practices to ensure that they are used across the organization. But KIPP goes about things differently. “Knowledge sharing for KIPP is particularly powerful because we don’t have a master curriculum,” says Oakes. “Even within the regions, school leaders and teachers have discretion over how they’re going to run their classroom. We’re not going to tell you, ‘Here is what to do in 3rd-grade math.’ But we know there are fantastic things happening across the board; there are teachers who are getting results through creating an academically rigorous curriculum, but still bringing joy into their classrooms each day. … This past year, we identified 15 of KIPP’s most effective teachers and videotaped them and made their content available online. We’re highlighting the practices of these teachers, but we’re not saying this is the only way to do it.”

The online system, called KIPP Share, which was developed by the Cambridge, Mass., start-up Better Lesson, includes documents and multimedia and was designed to walk the line between highlighting effective practices and out-and-out recommending them. Besides displaying videos that demonstrate the practices of great KIPP teachers, KIPP Share helps new teachers find helpful classroom materials that experienced teachers have already created. And it remedies a major gap in knowledge flows that KIPP had faced: When teachers moved to non-KIPP schools, their precious materials left with them.

But virtual systems tend to become truly useful through painful user feedback, and Oakes was candid about the system’s flaws before developing KIPP Share with Better Lesson. “We found that we had tens of thousands of documents, but it was hard to make the most of them. Also, we learned that teachers want to understand the context of the document. Let’s say I searched for the US Constitution. On the old system, you’d get a laundry list of documents that had something to do with the Constitution. Great, but who is the teacher who created it, how does this document play into broader context? Now you get a list that tells you how the document fits into the curriculum of the teacher who created the material. It isn’t just about resources, but also about who created them.”

Oakes notes the importance of designing systems and processes that align with an organization’s culture. For KIPP, it was important to design a system that respected autonomy in what and how to teach. “We are learning a lot along the way and realize there is no one perfect solution to sharing,” acknowledges Oakes. “We are learning how important it is to continue to support in-person gatherings where teachers can exchange ideas, create relationships, and build community.” KIPP is in the process of creating measures of success for the new system. Ultimately, KIPP is looking to make an impact on students.

Clearly, this kind of national network or multisite entity creates rich opportunities for organizational learning—both virtual and face-to-face. Within such systems, effective tactics can range from the idea-specific to the broad or field-based. The Nature Conservancy, for example, makes extensive use of peer reviews for proposals on significant initiatives—such as mitigating coastal effects of climate change. One peer review tactic involves a board of peer reviewers, who sit in a circle and, one by one, name the proposal’s strengths— until they start to repeat themselves. Then they go around again, this time naming the proposal’s weaknesses. This way, the author of the proposal gets a dose of highly concentrated learning, directly from peer experts, before he or she begins to implement a strategy, which can help avoid missteps.

GETTING BETTER AT ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

In the early days of the Internet, it was said that the World Wide Web was the globe’s greatest library—only that all the books were on the floor. Many nonprofit leaders and staff no doubt have had similar feelings about their organizations: The organization’s hard-won knowledge is just lying there on the floor—or worse, checked out with the departure of a key employee.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Ensuring that knowledge flows throughout an organization, informing the quality of service to clients whose lives depend on it, takes hard work. But the steps required of leaders are pretty clear. (See "Creating a Knowledge-Sharing Process," above.) They need to set learning goals that resonate because they advance the organization’s mission; they need to reinforce a culture that rewards knowledge capture and sharing; and they need to engage staff in creating intuitive processes for making it all happen.

Technology advances may provide the tools for sharing knowledge more broadly and effectively, but as examples like KIPP, World Vision, and the Nature Conservancy show, adoption rates rise when the people-to-people element of shared learning is kept robust. This element provides context and enables advice and collaboration and, well, makes learning satisfying. Indeed, technology becomes a true multiplier of organizational learning when put in service of deeper person-to-person connections and exchanges.

Authors' note: The authors thank the Alliance for Children and Families, the Boston Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, and World Vision for inviting their constituents to join the survey. They also thank their research team—Peter Ross, Tessa Bysong, Aaron Pick, Jennifer Sauve, and Kelly Greenwood—and advisors Bradley Seeman, Ann Goggins Gregory, and Nan Stone.

Katie Smith Milway is a partner at the Bridgespan Group and head of the firm’s Knowledge Unit. She was founding global publisher at Bain & Company and is author of numerous books for adults and children, including The Human Farm and The Good Garden, both tales of transformational learning.

Amy Saxton is a former Bridgespan Group manager in San Francisco. In March she was named CEO of Summer Search, a national youth development nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. Saxton previously worked with the Broad Foundation and began her career as a consultant at the Monitor Company.

More Than Good Intentions lays out a new approach to exploring and testing solutions to the thorny problems of global poverty. Yale University professor Karlan and his coauthor, IPA project associate Jacob Appel, have produced a book that is very readable, hugely useful, and often entertaining. Metrics geeks looking for a technical manual will be disappointed; those of us looking for a practical way to understand what works will not be.

Karlan and his colleagues at IPA are part of a new movement in development economics, a movement spearheaded by Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer and represented by a small army of researchers all over the world. As Karlan puts it, their work consists of a “two-pronged attack” on the problem of f nding the best solutions to poverty: 1) using rigorous evaluation methods akin to clinical research to test poverty solutions, both old and new; and 2) understanding problems and interpreting results using the lens of behavioral economics.

Karlan and Appel believe that understanding what works for poverty alleviation programs boils down to one deceptively simple question: “How did people’s lives change with the program, compared with how they would have changed without it?” The primary—but not only—tool that Karlan et al. use to answer that question is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In an RCT, a pool of subjects is randomly divided into intervention and control groups; the former gets the interventions and the latter does not. The two groups are fundamentally alike—both are measured before and after, and the impact is the difference between what happened to the intervention group and to the control group. RCTs are not new. The novel element here is the systematic and creative application of RCTs to test poverty solutions in the real world.

RCTs have their flaws, and there has been an understandable backlash against them. They can be expensive and complicated; perfect control groups are a myth; and results are too often too broadly interpreted. Yet Karlan is not doctrinaire about RCTs. He simply believes that you should measure from the beginning, measure the right thing, get good quality numbers, and make a case for what would have happened without you. One of the best examples in the book doesn’t involve an RCT, but instead a “natural experiment” in Kerala, India, in which areas without cell phone service served as controls for a study of how fishermen used their phones to find where to get the best price for their catch and increase their profits.

Both the work and book benefit enormously from the application of behavioral economics, which goes beyond the narrow utilitarianism of classical economics to examine how real people make decisions. Behavioral economists assume that we don’t operate on the basis of simple cost/benefit calculations, but have many different priorities, and that what may at first seem irrational often is not. Karlan and Appel use this approach as a tool to interpret results, make predictions, and come up with new ideas and hypotheses. In doing so, they draw on the strengths and flaws common to all of us and provide a respectful picture of the poor—not as some faceless other, but as us in different circumstances.

Given the overall clearheadedness of the book, one thing that puzzled me was the way that Karlan pulls his punches on microcredit. He reports that women entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka were often worse off after taking loans; that the poorer entrepreneurs in South Africa showed no effect from loans; and that even those entrepreneurs who did profits on consumer goods rather than reinvesting in their businesses. That said, he comments brightly that “it does not mean that … the enormous amount of enthusiasm [microcredit] has generated is necessarily misplaced.” Well, what exactly does it mean? Perhaps he’s just being nice, but if this methodology is as powerful as he’d have us believe, he should have something a bit more definitive to say about microcredit.

Still, More Than Good Intentions is a relentless and honest effort to find out what works and why. We really need what these new school development economists are providing. We’ve done far too many things that didn’t work for far too long. But it is not enough to show what works: The one missing element in Karlan and Appel’s fine book is a discussion of what it takes to turn research findings into real change. In a sector that does not yet channel resources toward impact, all that we learn about the behavior of the poor will be wasted unless we learn how to change the behavior of government bureaucrats, NGO executive directors, and the people who run foundations.

Kevin Starr is the managing director of the Mulago Foundations and the Rainer Arnholds Fellows.

But two common practices of major foundations—the design of specific solutions to social problems and the narrow focus on one pathway to a goal—are the equivalent of ordering the ocean to change shape. Just as men cannot control oceans, individual foundations cannot control social systems. Such an approach underestimates the vast power and complexity of the systems in which foundations are attempting to intervene.

The strategic philanthropy movement has been a positive influence in recent years by encouraging foundations to clarify their goals and regularly evaluate their progress. But it has also fueled practices that undermine the nonprofit sector’s impact, rather than amplify it. Too often, funders insist on controlling the ways in which social problems are solved. This is a move in the wrong direction.

To make steady forward progress solving problems in dynamic environments of complexity and uncertainty, foundations must shift from centrally planned, narrowly focused grantmaking strategies to more decentralized, diversified strategies that are better able to catch the waves of effective leadership, distributed wisdom, and innovation. There are two ways foundations need to let go. The first is to enable effective nonprofits to take the lead in designing solutions to social problems. The second is to diversify investments across multiple solutions or pathways to the goal. Let’s take a closer look at the problems with current practice in philanthropy.

Problem #1: Foundation-Designed Solutions

When solutions are centrally planned by people who are distanced from the real work in the field, the solutions are often poorly implemented. This is a classic principal-agent problem. The organizations tasked with implementation feel little ownership or passion for projects they didn’t dream up themselves. For example, in 2004 the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation made a grant to create the Legislative Education Project, as part of its California Education grant portfolio.¹ The project was a response to term limits and the loss of institutional memory in the state legislature. It was intended to provide a nonpartisan professional development forum for legislative staff to learn about the history and current status of California education policy. The foundation developed the idea and then invited a respected university research center to implement it. Unfortunately, the researchers weren’t able to keep the legislative staff engaged and satisfied with the programming, nor did they respond aggressively enough to complaints from participants about an imbalance between liberal and conservative viewpoints. Eventually, the Republican legislative staff refused to participate, and those who did participate gave only lukewarm reviews of the sessions. The foundation considered the project a failure and did not renew the grant.

Later on, some consultants who were marginally involved in the first effort approached the foundation with a different vision. They knew many legislative staff well and had thought carefully about how to modify the project. In 2006, Hewlett made a grant for this new version, which included the following changes: The consultants created a steering committee of legislative staff to guide the project and decide on session topics and format; they followed the interests of the legislative staff and focused the sessions on visiting school districts and schools, rather than on presentations from researchers; and they acted as conversation facilitators rather than presenters. This time, the project was a success. Over the past five years there has been strong bipartisan participation, with legislative staff reporting that the experience has improved their basic knowledge and helped thaw the partisan divide as well as identify areas of common interest for education policymaking.

The point is not that foundations need to do a better job picking nonprofit implementers, but that for the best results the implementers need to pick and design the solutions themselves. The key difference between these two versions of the Legislative Education Project was who owned the solution.

There is another way foundation-designed solutions can undermine effective implementation. When each foundation develops its own unique strategy for solving social problems, it becomes difficult for a grantee organization to have a coherent vision and strategy of its own. (Public charities with 501(c)(3) tax status must raise funds from multiple sources, as they cannot legally receive all of their funding from one foundation.) Implementation efforts suffer greatly when the nonprofit groups doing the work are pulled in 10 different directions, carrying out 10 different foundation strategies, to get adequate funds.

A similar phenomenon has developed with funding for public school districts nationwide. State and federal politicians, who control education funding, want to direct how the funding is used. So they create “categorical programs,” which allocate funding to school districts for specific purposes, such as textbooks, librarians, after-school programs, and teacher training. All these activities are important, but having hundreds of small, narrowly defined funding programs that support different parts of a school’s activities creates enormous paperwork and inefficiencies for school leaders and leaves them with very little flexibility to innovate and improve their student services.

The same holds true for foundation funding of nonprofits. The more that foundations dictate to grantees how they should solve social problems, the more they constrain the grantees’ leadership, expertise, and ability to innovate—and the more bureaucratic work they create for them.

Problem #2: Tunnel Vision

To avoid spreading funding too thinly, many foundations choose to invest in only one solution or pathway to their goal. Instead of letting 1,000 flowers bloom, they think they can afford just one variant. But focusing narrowly on one solution is a fragile strategy, particularly in complex, unpredictable environments.

For example, in 2001 the Hewlett Foundation launched a grant initiative focused on increasing the achievement of California’s K-12 students. The foundation chose state policy as the best pathway to the goal because it could help ensure that the state government’s many billions in education funding were spent more effectively. This strategy looked promising for a few years. In 2005, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger created a Committee on Education Excellence to develop reform recommendations. The committee, with other elected officials, requested research to determine how to make the education finance and governance systems more effective. In 2007, the research was completed. The governor declared 2008 “the year of education,” and he and a host of elected officials stood together with the researchers and pledged to work together to improve California education. The media coverage was extensive. It seemed as though the state was on the brink of a major overhaul of its school finance and governance systems.

The Hewlett Foundation chose a powerful leverage point in state policy change, but it made a mistake by putting all its eggs in one basket. When the state budget crisis began, the foundation was left without other pathways to achieve impact with this portfolio. There have been improvements in state education policy since 2008 and important progress has been made in building the state’s education data systems, but the school finance reform that once seemed possible has not been achieved.

The Hewlett Foundation is not alone in narrowly focusing on one solution or pathway to achieve its goals in a grant portfolio. A few other examples include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s high school grants initiative (2001-2005), which focused on creating small high schools as the pathway to higher student achievement;² and the Irvine Foundation’s coral initiative (1999-2007), which invested in afterschool programs as the pathway to higher student achievement.³ None of these strategies generated the results that were hoped for, even after investments of years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Neither extreme—letting 1,000 flowers bloom or putting all eggs in one basket—is likely to produce high impact. As private sector investors learned long ago, the sweet spot is in the middle: investing in a diversified portfolio that includes a range of possible solutions.

Collateral Damage

Besides undermining implementation and producing disappointing results, there are additional downsides to foundations trying to control exactly how social problems are solved.

Exerting too much control causes foundations to ignore highly effective programs and organizations. If a foundation’s strategy focuses on one specific way of solving a problem, then all other solutions do not fit that strategy and cannot qualify for funding, even if they produce great results. In this way, foundations are choosing control over impact. For example, there is extensive research showing that participation in a high-quality preschool program makes a huge difference in a child’s readiness to learn in kindergarten and in academic achievement later on. There is similarly strong literature on summer learning loss and the impact of extended learning time on the achievement of low-income students. But few of the nation’s largest education funders are making grants to promote these two well-proven solutions. Similarly, many nonprofit organizations with proven results, such as America’s Choice, Aspire Public Schools, Citizen Schools, KIPP Schools, the New Teacher Center, the New Teacher Project, the Success for All Foundation, and Teach for America, get passed over for funding by large private foundations. In fact, the 19 nonprofits that ranked highest in the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (i3) competition, which was based on evidence of impact, on average had grants in 2010 from only three of the nation’s top 50 education foundations before winning the i3.

Exerting too much control causes foundations to ignore innovation. During the time that the Hewlett Foundation was investing in the California education strategy with a focus exclusively on state policy, several innovative new approaches were developed that had the potential to dramatically increase student achievement. The Long Beach Unified School District’s MAP2D math program produced dramatic achievement gains for elementary students throughout the district, and now four other California districts are implementing the program and generating similar results. Long Beach and Fresno school districts formed a partnership to assist each other in achieving specific student performance goals, providing a much-needed alternative to the external assistance model used unsuccessfully by the state for years to turn around low-performing schools. More than 60 of the nation’s largest school districts created a data-sharing network called the Key Performance Indicators Project, managed by the Council of the Great City Schools, to benchmark administrative and academic costs and performance, identify high and low performers, and share best practices. Rocketship Charter Schools in San Jose created a hybrid schooling model that uses fewer teachers and more time with computers than traditional schools, generating impressive achievement gains for low-income students. And Roadtrip Nation, which helps high school students understand the real-life relevance of education, expanded its program into California. Unfortunately, none of these innovations aligned with the foundation’s California education strategy.

Perhaps the single highest impact grant that the Hewlett Foundation’s Education Program made in the past 10 years was to help launch the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare initiative. The objective was to make all of the university’s courses, lecture notes, and course materials freely available on the Internet. MIT’s pioneering effort helped spark what has become a global open education resources movement, enabling perhaps the most significant worldwide expansion of access to higher learning in decades. Today, more than 250 universities around the world have followed MIT’s lead, making the materials for more than 13,000 college courses in 20 languages openly available online. This investment proposed by MIT President Charles Vest—and the $120 million grant portfolio that followed—might not have been possible if the foundation already had decided on a specific strategy for how to use technology to improve education.

Lessons from the Cutting Edge

Many cutting-edge organizations today have achieved high performance by using distributed decision making and rapid prototyping to test solutions. In the business sector, high-performing organizations are empowering employees to make decisions, design new solutions, and continuously reassess and improve systems and products. The success of the Toyota manufacturing process, which relies on decision making and problem solving by production line workers, is a classic example. More recently, Google has provided its staff with flexible time to work on new projects of their own design.

Some companies have gone beyond empowering their employees to engaging their customers in co-creating products through open innovation and crowdsourcing. Apple allows users to write applications for its iPhone, and Facebook does the same for its social networking website. Netflix recently held a public contest to improve its movie recommendation algorithm. The Linux computer operating system and the Firefox Internet browser are both open-source products that thousands of programmers helped create, and they are considered by many to be better functioning than comparable products from traditional companies.

In the nonprofit sector, Wikipedia uses a small staff and a massive global corps of volunteers to create an online encyclopedia with far more information than traditional encyclopedias that are produced by small teams of experts. Alcoholics Anonymous, a successful international movement with more than 2 million members, uses an extremely decentralized organizational model in which each local AA group is a self-governing entity. MoveOn.org, a nonprofit public policy advocacy group, asks its 5 million members to vote on its agenda and priorities.

In the government sector, market-based economies tend to be better than centrally planned economies at efficiently providing goods and services that people want. Leading thinkers in international development are suggesting a move away from centralized planning for development by aid agencies to a decentralized approach. ⁴ The Long Beach Unified School District, one of the most consistently high-performing, high-poverty school districts in the nation, has achieved its success by encouraging and nurturing innovations in local schools, evaluating carefully, and replicating models that work broadly throughout the district. In health care, some effective efforts at stopping the spread of dangerous antibioticresistant MRSA infections in hospitals have engaged nursing staff and other lower-level workers to help design solutions.

Then there is systems thinking theory, which suggests that effective changes in complex systems cannot be dictated by actors in any one part of the system—that lasting changes require many diverse actors and points of view to help produce solutions. Effective system changes also require flexibility and openness to watching how the system responds to an intervention and readjusting the approach. Donella Meadows, systems thinker and author of the best-selling book The Limits to Growth, explains: “Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable.” ⁵ Meadows concludes that dancing with systems, rather than trying to control them, is the best approach.

Last, proponents of design thinking advocate that the most successful solutions come from a deep understanding of the needs of end users. Rather than focusing too early on any one solution, the user-centered design process tests many different solutions quickly, eventually landing upon a solution after many rounds of user feedback and iteration. This process has produced highly innovative products as various as Apple’s iPod and Intuit’s Quicken financial software. Arnold Wasserman, industrial designer and design thinking pioneer, says: “Foundations are about 25 years behind the private sector. Cutting-edge businesses have long since recognized that powerful solutions come from continuous, rigorous research into their employees’ and customers’ needs and wants, from co-design with stakeholders, and from progressive iteration and prototyping toward ever better solutions.”

Why Is Philanthropy Stuck on Control?

Although reliance on top-down control is not exclusive to philanthropy, many attributes of the sector make it susceptible to this mode of operation. The feedback loops in business and government that create pressure for organizations to improve are missing in the philanthropy sector. Foundations are not set up to be accountable to shareholders or constituents. The private sector has standardized public information flows about profits and losses, but foundations don’t have good ways of comparing outcomes across different kinds of investments. There is little transparency in the philanthropy sector, so when funders do collect good data, it is hard for others to learn from it or to recognize trends. In addition, the power imbalance in the grantor-grantee relationship makes it hard for grantees to challenge funders’ plans and breeds a belief among funders that they know best. All these factors insulate foundations from honest feedback on their investment strategies, making it easier for them to maintain the belief that they can design the best solutions from on high.

We aren’t suggesting that foundations give up all control. In other sectors, the leaders of high-performing organizations typically set clear goals, create accountability mechanisms, and provide constant information flows to drive performance. They also provide the flexibility and support to allow those who are working in the trenches to experiment, innovate, and continuously improve. The leaders of these organizations have figured out how to be tight on goals and loose on means. If foundations want better results, they also should adopt a tight-loose approach.

Stronger Grantmaking Approaches

Several forward-looking foundations have chosen strategies that relinquish control over solutions to social problems. They are tight on goals and loose on means. Below are three promising approaches.

General support for effective organizations and leaders | Some foundations are focused on providing general support to nonprofits and individuals with proven track records. General support funding promotes effective implementation by supporting grantees’ own strategies and allows them to invest in their organizational infrastructure and capacity. This approach is naturally diversified, because each grantee may have a different way of achieving a foundation’s ultimate goal.

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF) is a good example of this approach. The foundation’s goal is to help economically disadvantaged young people become independent, productive adults, as measured by outcomes in education, employment, and reduction of risky behaviors. The foundation’s approach is to identify high-performing youth service organizations with effective programs and growth potential, and to support the entire organization rather than a few projects. Using this model, EMCF supported the scale-up of the Nurse-Family Partnership, a home visitation program that improves the health and development of mothers and children in low-income families. EMCF went one step further in rationalizing this funding approach. In 2008, the foundation raised $81 million in growth capital for three of its grantees (in addition to its own investment of $39 million). The funders agreed to use the grantees’ business plans as the basis for their grants and agreed to use the same terms, conditions, reporting requirements, and performance metrics for the grants. Nancy Roob, EMCF’s president and CEO, described the foundation’s approach: “We are committed to doing everything we can to get coordinated co-investment right, and to do so in a way that frees grantees to focus more sharply on execution, helps funders realize larger and more rapid social returns on their investments, and benefits more of America’s youth.” ⁶

Other foundations focusing primarily on general support for organizations and leaders include Ashoka, the Draper Richards Foundation, the Mulago Foundation, New Profit Inc., Sea Change Management, the Skoll Foundation, and the Sobrato Family Foundation. In addition, the Boston Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation have made substantial investments in general support, although it is not their sole focus.

A related investment strategy is to fund leadership development and professional networks. A few foundations using this approach include the Brainerd Foundation and the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation. These foundations provide flexible funding to help leaders further develop their skills, capacities, and professional networks to create high-impact solutions.

Community-designed strategies | Another promising investment approach is to rely on community-designed strategies, which do a better job than foundation-designed strategies of harnessing distributed wisdom for solving tough, systemic problems. These foundations fund strategies that are developed collectively by nonprofits and other stakeholders in the field.

For example, in 2007 the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals launched ASPCA Partnerships, a grantmaking initiative with the goal of increasing the live release rate of animals from shelters to 75 percent. ASPCA picked 10 communities and asked stakeholders in the animal shelter system to collectively design a set of strategies to achieve the goal. In Austin, Texas, the partnership’s pilot community, this initiative boosted the live release rate from 45 percent to 69 percent in four years; in Spokane, Wash., the rate increased from 50 percent to 64 percent; and the other communities have made substantial improvements as well.

Other examples of foundation-supported, community-designed strategies include the Community Clinics Initiative funded by the California Endowment to attain health equity for underserved communities in California; the Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which has used community-designed strategies to address health, malnutrition, and other social problems in developing countries and in the United States; and the New Mainstream strategy funded by the Columbia, Heller, and Kellogg foundations and others to make California a national leader in developing a sustainable food system.

Fostering innovation | Other foundations are focusing on innovation to achieve high impact. This approach holds the promise of making giant leaps forward in solving social problems, but it also requires funders to be comfortable with failure.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, for example, was launched in 2003 to support organizations using innovative techniques to solve health problems. The foundation funds projects in stages, so it can assess progress and better understand which projects merit longer-term funding. Some examples of the foundation’s pioneer ideas include building the world’s largest repository of genetic, environmental, and health data; the Games for Health Project, which develops digital interactive games to teach health concepts and motivate healthy behavior; and stock markets that can predict the next influenza hot spot, to avert the next global pandemic. Although some projects may fail, Paul Tarini, director of the program, says: “That’s okay, actually. We needed a place where the foundation could explore. We don’t go into projects thinking each project has to meet with instant success; we go into them understanding their risk profile.”

Other examples of this approach include the Knight Foundation’s Media Innovation Initiative; the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media & Learning initiative; and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Advancing Innovation Processes to Solve Social Problems initiative. Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, recently said, “At Rockefeller, we’ve learned that innovation techniques like crowdsourcing, design thinking, and user-driven innovation can tap new sources of knowledge … engage thinkers and doers from around the world in solving problems together … and then scale new ideas and best practices from one village to five, then to 500, then around the world.” ⁷

Another related approach is using incentive prizes and competitions to spur performance and groundbreaking innovations, such as the X Prize Foundation’s competitions for technological innovations, the Broad Foundation’s Prize for Urban Education, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top competition for statewide education reforms.

Of course, as funders shift away from more prescriptive approaches and toward general support, field-developed strategies, and innovation, it becomes tougher to predict what kind of solutions will be generated by their investments. But as Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, recently said: “It is incredibly liberating to admit you don’t know the answer. Then you don’t have to go out and pretend and say, ‘I am the foundation, I have an idea, and I have the money.’ Instead you can afford to say, ‘I have some money, here’s the problem we’re worried about, do you guys have any ideas?’” ⁸

The fundamental question is whether foundations are ready to relinquish some control to increase their impact. We think this change is long overdue.

Kristi Kimball has served as a program officer for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Education Program since 2004, where she has been responsible for more than $75 million in investments aimed at improving student achievement in California, increasing arts education, and reforming political overnance in California.

Malka Kopell has worked for the last 30 years to develop collaborative relationships between government and the people it serves. She has served as a program officer for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the Conflict Resolution and Special Projects programs. Kopell founded Community focus, a California-based civic engagement organization, and was the founding managing director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University.

Or are they? During the last decade, non-state actors have become increasingly involved in international educational development, and large private foundations have emerged both in the West and the global South. Meanwhile, basic assumptions have gone unanalyzed, says Prachi Srivastava, assistant professor in the School of International Development & Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. Srivastava found in a literature review that private foundations are being idealized as neutral, efficient, and effective—but no one is actually monitoring their impact.

For one thing, private foundations are not neutral. They are often set up to promote certain values and aims. The Open Society Institute, for example, is a significant player in educational development with an explicitly political agenda, says Srivastava. Research in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that maintaining colonial control in Africa was an underlying motivation of the Phelps Stokes Fund.

One of the good things about private foundations is that they don’t have to go through official developmental assistance channels. This frees them up to act directly and quickly. It also means that they are not bound by international conventions. Citizens of developing countries can challenge the decisions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the United Kingdom Department for International Development through the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the Accra Agenda for Action, and other means. Private foundations generally act outside that international structure. “They’re large concentrations of wealth, largely unaccountable to the public,” says Robert Arnove, professor emeritus at the Indiana University School of Education, “and I think ultimately what they’re doing can be considered corrosive to democracy.”

Lack of centralized data and scholarly attention means that the evaluation of private foundations is left in their own hands. Can foundations replicate successes? Can they scale up? Do they reach the poorest of the poor? Are they more effective than government programs? “We just don’t know,” says Srivastava. The No. 1 recipient of grants from American foundations in 2008 wasn’t Uganda; it was Switzerland. Other top 20 recipients included England, Canada, Germany, Australia, and France. As to where that money goes after it reaches individual organizations, those data aren’t publicly available. And information on American private foundations is comparatively abundant, says Srivastava. “We don’t know anything about what’s happening with Indian foundations, or South African foundations, or Brazilian foundations.”

The people who started these foundations “get heard quickly by governments, by U.N. organizations, and by large donors.” But concrete information is missing. Scholars should be listening, too.

Prachi Srivastava and Su-Ann Oh, “Private Foundations, Philanthropy, and Partnership in Education and Development: Mapping the Terrain,” International Journal of Education and Development, 30, 2010.

The 20 essays are all by writers under age 40. Some are practicing artists, others are arts administrators; there are essays by academics, management consultants, bloggers, screenwriters, educators, and, in one case, an MIT-trained physicist who hosts the Discovery Channel show Time Warp. Clapp wants to disseminate these viewpoints because he believes that the arts sector is in crisis—that it “suffers from an insecurity complex and operates from a position of fear.”

The most compelling essays are those that call for reform in how arts organizations are run, are supported, and engage artists and audiences. Some authors criticize arts programmers for their insularity, funders for their cautiousness, marketers for their conventionality, and arts educators for their dogmatism. Others write about the mismatch between abundant arts programming and a shrinking audience.

In the first essay, Brian Newman, former CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, declares that the nonprofit arts sector is grossly overbuilt and woefully undercapitalized. As a result, it is incapable of coping with the way technology has altered how individuals create, share, and participate in arts experiences. His bitter medicine for the sector is to admit that more arts groups need to merge and “many more organizations need to be shut down entirely.”

In her essay “Please Don’t Start a Theater Company!” Rebecca Novick encourages artists to “operate as bands do—coming together to play a few gigs, then dissolving as people’s interests diverge.” Novick implores established arts organizations to invite younger artists to bring innovations to their institutions, and she warns funders to “stop advising young artists to replicate the standard nonprofi tmodel.” David McGraw, a professor of arts entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa, also criticizes foundations that reward arts organizations for longevity rather than creativity. Like Novick, he suggests that more support go to artists who create multiyear projects.

The potential for philanthropists to be heroes or villains is a clear theme here. In an essay co-authored by Ian Moss and Daniel Reed, an arts blogger and a management consultant, technology is hailed as a 21st-century arts funder’s best friend. They argue that a “guided crowdsourcing” approach to arts funding would vastly expand the number of artists and the amount of artistic product that could be evaluated. If grantmakers harness the wisdom of crowds, they argue, philanthropists may be able to make funding decisions that are not only more informed, but more equitable as well.

Although some of the 20Under40 authors believe that dysfunction in the traditional nonprofit arts sector can be remedied, others are ready to abandon the nonprofit paradigm altogether. Elizabeth Lamb, a curator in Portland, Ore., presents a case study of successful online art stores and a gallery and apparel shop that have taken a customer-centric approach to their programming.

Reinventing the arts and arts education is not just about new business models. In the collection, there are punchy essays about the way art school students are graded, why contemporary dance is losing its expressive power, and why 21st-century arts educators should teach computer programming.

Of the 20 selections, several cover old ground in predictable ways: testing in schools means less time for arts classes; preschoolers need art too. Although much of the book is dedicated to expressing frustration with the status quo, there is a high level of optimism about the future. That optimism is grounded in a faith that technology can be used much more creatively; that nonprofit and for-profit business models can be successful; and that Gen Xers and Millennials are going to get their art fix with or without established arts organizations.

Although the anthology showcases a rising generation of arts leaders, two established leaders make cameos. Diane Ragsdale, a former arts program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, laments that “what’s killing this field is that people are beginning to leave it. People make it into large institutions and get stuck in middle management jobs with no access to power and no opportunity to try new things.” This critique is echoed by arts consultant Eric Booth: “We talk a good game about collaboration and openness to new ideas in the arts, but the input from our younger professionals is neither sought nor honored as regular practice.”

20Under40 puts new ideas from younger professionals on the table. Now the question is: Who will pick them up?

Marc Vogl is a program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation managing grants to San Francisco Bay Area arts organizations and developing strategies to promote next generation arts leadership. Vogl served on the Obama Campaign’s Arts Policy Committee, and was the 2010 recipient of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Award.

Dispensing Kindles and other e-readers in the developing world may seem like a fancy solution to a low-tech problem. But Worldreader founder David Risher, a former Amazon executive, says the big goal is to drive down “the cost per book read to the absolute lowest it can be.” Reading selections in many village schools are too limited and, he adds, often too Western to engage young readers. If donated books gather dust in the back of classrooms, they do little to engender a love of reading.

“Lack of access to books has been solved by e-books,” says Risher, noting that thousands of titles are available as digital books. “But there’s no market-driven plan to get e-readers to the developing world.” Worldreader, strong on corporate experience, intends to “prime the market pump,” he says, “and put thousands of books into millions of kids’ hands.”

The infrastructure for supporting e-readers already exists in much of the developing world, thanks to a network for connecting and charging mobile phones in even the most remote regions. E-readers use the same network to download books. During Worldreader’s trial in a village school in Ghana, students used an existing solar charging station to power up their Kindles, which were donated by Amazon. Their comfort with mobile phones and texting meant students had little trouble using e-reader features such as an online dictionary or text-to-speech capability. Because the devices include a built-in light source, students were able to introduce family members to a new activity: reading at home after dark.

Jonathan Wareham, professor and director of research at ESADE in Barcelona, Spain, has been studying Worldreader’s early efforts. The low cost of distributing digital books offers great potential to improve literacy, he says, but the idea is not without challenges. Technical issues will be the easiest to solve, he predicts. “Getting the supporting ecosystem around the device itself is where the work is.”

To gain traction, Worldreader needs to create “a system of content, distribution, pedagogy, administrative, cultural, and political support. These challenges are nothing less than massive,” Wareham admits. “You go in expecting to address literacy, and you end up trying to rewrite cultural rules.”

Teachers may find e-readers easier to adopt than classroom computers because they don’t call for a wholesale change of teaching methods. “Teachers already know how to use books,” Risher says. Compared with technology initiatives like One Laptop per Child, Worldreader “is trying to solve a narrower problem,” he adds.

Nor is Worldreader interested in pursuing a brick-and-mortar solution. Risher applauds global school-building initiatives like Room to Read, but says his organization is focusing on “the other side of the same coin. When people come together to learn, they still need access to books—as many as possible.”

Ideally, those books will include culturally relevant titles by local authors. Worldreader is encouraging local publishers to digitize their book lists, which can then be sold online internationally. “We want to make sure they understand this is an economic opportunity for them,” Risher says, emphasizing that digital book sales is not a business Worldreader wants to get into. “We want to be the catalyst to help make it happen.”

Worldreader’s start-up costs have come largely from Risher and his co-founders, along with in-kind donations from Amazon and other businesses. Fundraising will be required to grow the lean organization, which currently operates from Seattle and Barcelona. There are plenty of unknowns, Risher admits. “We don’t know the cost of e-readers in five years. We don’t know the scale we will get to. We do know that Moore’s Law is on our side. The cost continues going down.”

Worldreader expects to learn more from its next round of testing in Ghana. Will children read more if their reading choices are virtually unlimited? Will the novelty wear off once students get used to e-readers? From firsthand observation, Risher is encouraged. In a village in Ghana, he says, “I’d watch kids read one book, finish, then ask if they could download another. That’s magical.”

If volunteering makes such a difference, are students doing it primarily to pad their résumés? Handy and an international group of researchers administered a survey in a dozen countries, including Belgium, South Korea, Australia, and Finland, to find out. “Very few people will tell you, ‘I volunteer for myself.’ So what we tried to do was to elicit responses by asking questions about the benefits of volunteering,” says study co-author Ram Cnaan, a social work professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “And regardless [of the question], we found that the No. 1 reason among any group of volunteers is ‘I want to do good.’”

Students did not rate résumé building as their top motivation to volunteer in any country. Altruistic and value-driven motivations always came first. Also, volunteering is no more frequent in the countries where service is assumed to be most useful to the volunteer (primarily Canada and the United States). The highest participation rates—more than 80 percent—were in India and China, where service doesn’t help a student get into a university. Canada and the United States follow closely behind with participation rates in the high 70s, and Croatia and Japan bring up the rear.

These results please Sarah Jane Rehnborg, associate director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas at Austin. When Rehnborg surveyed 1,500 students for a different study, she didn’t ask whether they were padding their résumés—“It’s a somewhat cynical question”—but 94 percent responded that compassion toward people in photograph by Nick De La Cruz need was their motivation for serving. “And even if people are serving to build a résumé, I don’t know that that’s bad,” Rehnborg says. “One of the ways you learn about what you want to do is by getting out there and doing it.”

One strong finding of Handy and Cnaan’s study was that students who volunteer for selfish reasons do it less—they invest fewer hours in service and don’t show up as often. “If you’re motivated more by résumé, all you have to do is a little and it’s on your CV,” says Cnaan. He suggests to administrators that they “make the contract very clear to this type of student.” So do students volunteer just to pad their résumés? “Almost every student you talk with, when you probe for about five minutes, admits he or she was told it was good on the résumé,” says Cnaan. “It’s a major factor. But nobody volunteers only for egoistic motives—they won’t last.”

Femida Handy, Ram A. Cnaan, Lesley Hustinx, et al., “A Cross-Cultural Examination of Student Volunteering: Is It All About Résumé Building?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 39, 2010