New Foundations

Michigan nonprofits reinventing themselves and education 

by Douglas C. Drake and Chris Andrews
September 16, 2009

In an era of showdowns and shutdowns, politicians in Lansing don’t agree on much these days. But there is this: Michigan residents must be better educated to rebuild a robust economy.

Michigan needs more high school graduates, those who not only have diplomas but have employer-demanded skills in math and reading. Michigan needs more college graduates with associate’s or bachelor’s degrees. Michigan needs more scientists, engineers and other technically trained workers.

Principal Dr. Gabriela Gui of Detroit Institute of Technology at Cody High School, with students (from left) Mary Lindsey, Deshawn Austin, Donjanae Newson, and Jamar Cotton.

And yet the hurdles are high — and getting higher — thanks to shrinking budgets and short-term thinking. As state lawmakers raise the bar on student achievement via tougher graduation standards, other policies trip the students seeking to clear them. Tight budgets have prompted officials in most school districts to hold fewer days of classes — the 180-day school year has become a myth. The legislature has voted to eliminate the $4,000 Michigan Promise scholarships (although Governor Jennifer M. Granholm is still fighting to restore them).

Funding for universities has been a favorite target for budget cuts — double-digit percentage reductions this decade — leading to higher tuition even as families’ incomes decline. None of this will help Granholm achieve her goal of doubling the number of college graduates in the state.

All the bleak news coming out of the state Capitol only heightens the role of Michigan-based private and community foundations, which — while facing their own financial challenges — are rethinking their strategies for rebuilding lives and communities.

A big part of their efforts is directed at public schools.

The United Way of Southeastern Michigan has totally re-invented itself to focus on core priorities, including schools. It and the Skillman Foundation are key partners in an effort to turn large “drop-out factories” into smaller high schools where students are cared about and teachers are supported and held accountable.

The Mott Foundation, meanwhile, is sowing the seeds for “middle college and early college high schools,” college-campus-based schools that transition at-risk students into higher education. The Kellogg Foundation has always made Michigan a top priority, but is looking now to do more in its home state with a “place-based” strategy.

The landmark Kalamazoo Promise — paying for college tuition for Kalamazoo Public Schools graduates — has done more than write checks. It has helped sustain the region through economic crisis, nurtured regional cooperation and restored community pride. It has created a model for other communities across the country.

Here is a look at some of the key initiatives under way:

United Way: A new focus
The United Way of Southeastern Michigan has had a major change in direction. For decades an organization that largely distributed money to other organizations, the United Way board now focuses on three areas, one of them education. Its key goals are to have more children enter kindergarten ready to learn and more students graduating from high school and ready for college.

The United Way and its partners (Skillman, the Ford Motor Company Fund and the AT&T Foundation) created the Greater Detroit Education Venture Fund to support school turnaround networks in 30 southeast Michigan high schools that have graduation rates of 40 percent or less. It has initially focused on five schools, including two in Detroit.

So far, the project has raised $5 million from turnaround partners, companies that have helped create high-performing high schools in cities such as Chicago and New York.

Medicine and Community Health Academy science teacher Nasreen Jalili-Sabouni with students Frankie Holton and Walter Davis.

Cody High School in Detroit, for instance, is undergoing a massive transformation. The plan is to turn one large, under-performing school into four smaller high schools with a few hundred students each.

“Each of those small schools has its own principal, and the principal is better able to shape the culture of the school because he or she has only 500 kids in there,” said Michael Tenbusch, vice president of educational preparedness for the United Way.

The model also requires each teacher to be personally accountable for an “advisory,” a group of about 16 students the teacher will stay with all four years of high school. The teacher’s role is to get them from freshman orientation in high school to freshman orientation in college.

“There’s a saying, ‘Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,’ and that’s particularly true in urban schools,” Tenbusch said.

The United Way had intended to add an additional five turnaround schools next year, but that was before Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb decided to use $20 million in federal stimulus funding to put an additional 15 high schools in the pipeline.

“Our focus at the United Way is to make sure that our schools set the bar of excellence for the others to follow and then to be able to add value to that next group of 15,” Tenbusch said.

The turnaround model includes other changes in the culture. Teachers at the schools agreed to waive portions of the collective bargaining agreement to give the principals more latitude in replacing teachers who didn’t measure up, and to allow teachers to work longer hours.

The United Way is also pushing for the return of Teach for America teachers. That won’t happen, however, unless the legislature passes a law allowing alternative certification paths for teachers.

Skillman Foundation: No more tinkering
The Detroit-based Skillman Foundation was one of the earliest and biggest supporters of the Greater Detroit Education Venture Fund. The two Detroit High Schools — Cody and Osborn — that are being transformed are within the six neighborhoods the foundation is focusing its efforts on.

Foundation leaders have made a strategic change in the past few years — focusing on major overhauls of schools rather than “tinkering around the edges,” said Kristen McDonald, senior program manager for education. So the foundation stopped handing out grants for external programs such as after-school activities and tutoring. It became a major benefactor in the effort to redesign schools.

“After-school and tutoring programs are very critical to many children’s success, but if you have a failing school, an after-school program isn’t going to make it a high-performing school,” McDonald said. “It’s our hope that those sorts of programs continue, but we are no longer funding them because we don’t have the grant-making budget to do it. We feel if we are going to actually turn things around, we have to look at the infrastructure piece.”

McDonald noted that Granholm proposed state support for converting large high schools to smaller ones through a 21st Century Schools Fund, but it almost immediately came under attack in the legislature and never came to fruition.

“Typically what you do is start these things, [then] government comes in and funds its completion. That [government] piece is not there,” McDonald said. “There is no ability at the state to feed innovation.”

So Skillman, like other foundations, is looking for its own ways to foster innovation — and reward success. With its “Good Schools: Making the Grade” initiative, Skillman hands out $100,000 awards for high-performing schools and awards of up to $50,000 to improving schools.

Skillman leaders have found that school officials are using the awards differently as the Detroit Public Schools’ financial problems have worsened. “The schools were using them to buy ‘Smart Boards’ and computers and those kinds of things,” McDonald said. “But we started to see in the last year or year-and-a-half as the budgets have gotten tighter and tighter, those schools are using that money for basics like professional development. Even the high-performing schools are needing to use it to supplement training and curriculum and do things that they normally do inside their regular budget.”

Kellogg Foundation
The Battle Creek-based W.K. Kellogg Foundation is strengthening its commitment to Michigan, said Tony Berkley, deputy director of education and learning.

“We’ve always made grants in Michigan, but our challenge is to get even more resources into our home state and to do it in a more coherent and strategic fashion so that we can have a larger impact,” Berkley said. “Education is one of the keys to that strategy.”

The Kellogg Foundation is changing its strategy to a more place-based approach to grantmaking. The idea: focus resources on a select set of communities in order to have a greater impact. Berkley said the foundation is looking at establishing an emphasis on Detroit, its home community of Battle Creek, and urban areas in other communities in the state, including Grand Rapids.

The foundation’s educational emphasis will be on communities with higher proportions of low-income families and children of color — two groups that face barriers to educational success. Priorities will include early childhood development, reading preparedness by fourth grade, and high school graduation.

The Kellogg Foundation is also providing money to support the work of officials in state government or other agencies that manage programs. It has given a $400,000 grant to the Council of Michigan Foundations to help the state in its work to apply for some of the billions of dollars available in federal Race to the Top funds, President Obama’s educational reform initiative.

“We are helping the state be more competitive with other states for Department of Education grants,” Berkley said.

Grand Rapids: Bringing services to schools
In Kent County, the Grand Rapids Community Foundation has concluded that success comes to those who show up. Chronic absenteeism has been a huge problem in some of the Grand Rapids area schools, and foundation leaders say providing services in schools is an important part of the solution.

For the past three years, the foundation has partnered with other organizations in the community, as well as the state Department of Human Services, to create and support the Kent School Services network at six schools. Mental health services are available through network 180, the Kent County community health authority. Spectrum Health provides nursing services, and dental services are offered on site to children through the Cherry Street Health Services.

“We knew that we could put money into classrooms, and we could do all kinds of different things, but if kids weren’t in school, then learning wouldn’t happen,” said Roberta King, vice president of the Grand Rapids Community Foundation. “The attendance numbers for the schools that participate are really greatly improved. They (parents) are able to keep kids in school, and there’s a lot less absences.”

Diana Sieger, president and CEO of the foundation, said the services network has succeeded because of a strong partnership of about 30 organizations. The foundation has contributed $1.5 million to the project over the past three years and expects to continue its support.

“We know that that isn’t going to be an area the schools are going to be able to support,” she said. “Our commitment is, number one, because it works, and number two, because of the fact that the budgets are shrinking for schools.”

Mott Foundation: Making kids college-savvy
The Mott Foundation has been a pioneer in the area of Middle College High Schools, high schools that are based on college campuses, enabling students to earn college credits and become college-ready. They also are designed to create within students the expectation that they will go on to earn college degrees and acquire training and credentials that will lead to good-paying jobs.

The Mott Foundation launched the effort with the Mott Middle College High School (on the Mott Community College campus) in 1991 and now is providing support to expand the effort across Michigan and around the country. There are now 12 Middle College or Early College (schools where students are likely to earn associate’s degrees) programs in the state.

The schools draw students who are at high risk of dropping out. The students are referred by social workers and counselors, pastors and probation officers. The schools extend to a fifth year, and by graduation day students are often well along the way to their associate’s degree.

“We are kind of stretching out high school, and then we are introducing college, and we are helping the students successfully tread those waters together,” said Dr. Chery Wagonlander, principal of the school and director of the Center for Technical Assistance that helps other Middle College and Early College programs developing in Michigan. “When they leave us, they really are college-savvy, and they take a college transcript away with them.”

Last year’s graduating class entered Mott Middle College with a 1.6 grade-point average and left with a 3.2 grade-point average. The average graduate had 19 college credits.

Wagonlander said that for a new Middle College to succeed, it requires support for a planning year and either state or foundation support for the first three years of operations because it takes that long to establish a stable student body.

“There’s a need for technical support and coaching in order for the schools to be sustained,” she said. “The Mott Foundation has been right up there on the front lines, nationally respected for how much they have supported and understood that we’ve needed to do the outreach, the research for sustainability.”

Kresge Foundation: Fewer buildings, more impact
From its creation in 1924, the Kresge Foundation was most known for making building grants. But under the direction of new president Rip Rapson, the focus has changed dramatically — with an emphasis on a few key areas, including education. It has also created a Detroit team that focuses on the challenges the city faces, including improving its schools.

Kresge is making a push nationally to increase the percentage of college graduates — which the foundation considers vital to the U.S. remaining globally competitive. “If we build a library or a gym at a college, are we going to change as many lives as if we can get thousands of kids into college?” asked William Moses, program director for the educational work at Kresge. “That’s our rationale [for changing approaches].”

Moses said that while the effort is national, the Kresge Foundation plans to focus special attention and resources on a few states. One of those could well be Michigan. Because high-paying manufacturing jobs were available for decades without the need for a college degree, the college-going culture isn’t as strong here as in many other states.

Moses said that while Michigan has a relatively low percentage of college graduates, it has a high percentage of residents who have some college experience — who, in other words, are already part way toward a degree.

“We want to make choices that makes sense, and Michigan has a lot of challenges,” he said. “I think that geographic areas make a lot of sense, and I think Michigan has to be near the top of our list, if not at the top.”

Kalamazoo Promise: A game-changer
The Kalamazoo Promise is the gold standard — in Michigan and across the nation — when it comes to philanthropic support of education.

Anonymous benefactors agreed to pay full tuition at public universities and community colleges in Michigan for students who attend Kalamazoo public schools from kindergarten through graduation, and pay partial tuition for Kalamazoo high school graduates who spent part of their time there.

The Kalamazoo Promise has already paid out $11 million in college tuition for more than 900 KPS graduates. Meanwhile, enrollment in the Kalamazoo Public Schools has increased by 15 percent, in sharp contrast to declines in many urban school districts.

“Our vision is a greater Kalamazoo community that will be a world leader,” said Janice Brown, executive director of the Kalamazoo Promise. “You can feel it, you can see it. People talk about it.”

Only a piece of the puzzle
While foundations play a vital role in developing many innovative ideas that can fundamentally change public education and offer real hope for individuals, their communities and the entire state, they can’t do it alone. Far from it.

“Foundations can’t replace state funding,” warns Rob Collier, president and CEO of the Council of Michigan Foundations. “The needs are huge, and we are dealing with finite resources, so it’s all about collaboration, and it’s all about leveraging our resources.”

“Even in the best of times, they can’t run government,” said Jeffrey D. Padden, president and CEO of Public Policy Associates, a Lansing-based consulting firm that provides support to state and national foundations on projects ranging from prisoner re-entry to school services, including a Kent County project to bring an array of social services into some of the schools.

“Their mission and resources allow them to fund experimental approaches and demonstration projects. It’s up to governmental institutions to bring them up to scale with broad implementation.”

While foundations are committed to having a greater impact, they face their own financial constraints. Their portfolios took significant hits during the financial markets meltdown, leaving officials with belt-tightening decisions of their own.

The Kresge Foundation, for instance, spent $181 million on grants last year, but that amount is expected to fall to about $160 million this year. It will spend another $15 million in other program-related investments, including no-interest loans.

Foundation executives emphasize that they are only part of the solution to improving schools.

“We would never have the money to pick up what the state has dropped. Foundation money is very small compared to government money,” said Jack Litzenberg, senior program officer for the Mott Foundation.

McDonald, of the Skillman Foundation, said the work to improve schools is inextricably linked to efforts to revitalize neighborhoods. “A neighborhood will never be a thriving, great place to raise a child unless the schools in the neighborhood are strong,” she said. “And the schools are never strong unless the neighborhood around them cares about the kids.”

Foundation leaders also have an important role in standing up publicly for the needs of children, whose voice isn’t always heard in Lansing.

“It’s very important to mobilize business leaders, child advocates, community leaders and other folks with a stake to make sure that the budget isn’t balanced on the back of children’s programs,” said the Kellogg Foundation’s Berkley.

“Part of our support is just ringing the bell and working with grantees and others to represent the voices of children.”

Douglas C. Drake is director of health, human services and philanthropy at Public Policy Associates, Inc. Chris Andrews is senior editor at Public Policy Associates, Inc.