Thursday, September 23, 1999 in New York Times
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Long dismissed as the runts in the family of philanthropy, public schools and their students are getting fresh attention from high-profile donors plainly concerned about the nation’s academic future.
Rather than donating only to their college alma maters, the wealthy givers — including George Lucas, the film maker, Theodore J. Forstmann, the Wall Street financier, and Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble — are increasingly bestowing their largess on those individuals struggling just to make it through high school.
Their gifts were trumped last week by a $1 billion scholarship program for disadvantaged minority students announced by William H. Gates 3d, the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation.
And yesterday, Eli Broad, chairman of Sun America, a Los Angeles-based financial services company, said he was setting aside $100 million for urban school systems, primarily to help train superintendents, principals and staff.
Though the motives vary, the thread through all of these gifts is a conviction that government has been unwilling, or perhaps unable, to rescue the public education system and its students. Moreover, many of the donors believe that the success of their businesses — the source of their wealth — hinges on an educated work force.
“I think the national community has realized it isn’t enough just to give to higher education,” said Eugene Lang, who may have sowed the seeds of this movement when he adopted 54 sixth graders at a Harlem school in 1981 and committed to send them to college. “You’ve got to catch children before they fall into that abyss,” Mr. Lang said.
Though gifts to universities show no sign of abating — an annual survey tallied $18.4 billion in donations to higher education last school year, a national record — fund-raising consultants say that the broader spectrum of educational institutions, including elementary and secondary schools, have begun to attract the very rich.
In part, the donations have been driven by the need for a helping hand: Long seen as the responsibility of taxpayers, the problems and demands of the nation’s public school students increasingly seem to be too overwhelming for Government to address. At a time when politicians are unwilling to raise school budgets, the wish lists of principals have never been longer: billions of dollars have been requested to buy computers, reduce class sizes, retrain teachers and, perhaps most important, close the gap between rich and poor students.
“It’s a large, intractable problem that our government and public institutions can’t solve alone,” said Nancy Raybin, a management consultant who specializes in nonprofit institutions. “I think we’re seeing the philanthropists trying to get the money to organizations and individuals directly, without too much bureaucracy in between.”
In committing to provide $1 billion in college scholarships to the neediest high-school seniors over 20 years — with hopes of subsidizing at least 1,000 students a year — Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda, chose to do so not through a university or a group of universities but through the United Negro College Fund along with the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the American Indian College Fund.
By identifying talented but needy students before they reach college, Mr. Gates is following Mr. Lang, whose idea has been replicated in 64 other cities through the I Have a Dream Foundation, and Walter H. Annenberg, whose contributions to public education have exceeded $800 million since 1993.
They have been joined by many others.
Mr. Forstmann, the financier, last year committed $50 million to a $200 million effort that would permit at least 40,000 inner-city public-school students to attend private schools over the next four years.
Mr. Broad of Sun America, who had previously contributed to Mr. Forstmann’s private voucher program, said that almost all of his latest donation, the $100 million that he committed this week, would go to public schools. He said he had not yet decided how the money would be distributed.
The George Lucas Educational Foundation, founded by the creator of “Star Wars,” has spent $10 million since 1991 to help elementary and secondary schoolteachers find creative ways to teach students, largely through film and technology.
Mr. Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble, convened a campaign last year to raise $10 million for Brooklyn Technical High School, the public school from which he graduated.
And expanding a program that they began a decade ago, Michael R. Milken, the Wall Street financier who was convicted of six counts of securities fraud, and his brother, Lowell, will award $25,000 grants to 172 elementary and secondary schoolteachers next month — bringing to nearly $40 million the amount that the Milken Family Foundation has given to teachers.
Like Mr. Gates, who said he wanted to demonstrate that “private philanthropy can be part of making sure there is equal opportunity,” each donor has entered the educational arena for particular reasons — reasons that do not include having their names emblazoned on a college library (though in some cases, like Mr. Gates’s, the scholarships will bear the names of the donors).
In an interview conducted via E-mail, Mr. Lucas said he was trying to help students avoid the “frustrating” experiences that he had as a child growing up in Modesto, Calif.
“I was often bored,” he wrote. “I often found myself wondering, ‘Why can’t school be more interesting?’ ”
To that end, Mr. Lucas’s foundation is providing schools with 30,000 copies of a documentary he produced. The film, “Learn and Live,” profiles five innovative school programs, including a fourth-grade class at a California charter school that studies insect anatomy with an electron microscope.
Mr. Forstmann, a senior partner in Forstmann Little & Company, an investment firm, and the chairman of Gulfstream Aerospace, has said he intends to use his program, which would transfer students to private schools from public schools, as a wake-up call to force public schools to improve.
His initiative has been seen as an effort to establish a foothold for the school-voucher movement, which would use taxpayer money for private-school tuition, a proposition that has pleased parents whose children are languishing in inner-city schools but has angered teachers unions.
Mr. Gates has not escaped criticism either. Though praised by the president of the United Negro College Fund for raising the prospect of minting hundreds of minority Ph.D.’s, Mr. Gates has been criticized for excluding white students.
“If you give money to the public schools, you’re going to make the private schools unhappy,” said Peter Dobkin Hall, a senior research scholar at the Yale Divinity School who studies the history of philanthropy. “If you give money to particular groups within the public schools, other groups will feel left out.
“Philanthropy is, intrinsically, not even-handed,” Mr. Hall said.