Bezos – the latest philanthropist helping education

First Mark Zuckerberg, then Bill Gates, and now Jeff Bezos is the latest billionaire giving some of his Amazon fortune to education. Last week Bezos announced $2 billion dollars will be earmarked to help the homeless and to expand early-childhood education in low-income communities.

Calling it the Bezos Day One Fund, funding through grant applications will be available to nonprofit organizations that help homeless families. Bezos also  said he and his wife will launch an organization to operate a network of high-quality, nonprofit, free preschools (Strauss, 2018).

The Day 1 Families Fund will issue annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families. The vision statement comes from the inspiring Mary’s Place in Seattle: no child sleeps outside.

The Day 1 Academies Fund will launch and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities. We will build an organization to directly operate these preschools. I’m excited about that because it will give us the opportunity to learn, invent, and improve. We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” And lighting that fire early is a giant leg up for any child (Strauss, 2018).

As we have seen in the case of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire funding in education is not always successful. What makes Bezos’ support different is he is funding well-researched and successful programs (one based on a homeless shelter in Seattle, and the mounds of research supporting the effectiveness of preschool education. According to Day and Romano of the Seattle Times, Bezos spent over a year publicly soliciting suggestions for  short-term philanthropic strategies (Seattle Times).

This is all well and good, except he wants to start his own chain of Montessori programs. However, according to Mira Debs of the Yale Education Studies Program, “Mr. Bezos’s aim of creating his own network to run these preschools puts him in danger of falling into the trap of the “charitable-industrial complex,” following tech colleagues like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who have poured large sums of money into top-down educational strategies: saving Newark’s schools and improving teaching, gifts that have been shown to have a limited impact (Ravitch, 2018).

According to Day and Romano of the Seattle Times, Bezos spent over a year publicly soliciting suggestions for  short-term philanthropic strategies.

Robert Reich, co-director of Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, said Americans should view this with skepticism. “Big philanthropy, the kind Bezos is practicing, as well as Bill Gates, is a form of power,” he said. “It’s converting private wealth into public influence” (Seattle Times).

Advocates welcomed Bezos’ attention, approach and funds, noting the dire need to expand access to preschool, particularly in the low-income areas he plans to target. But there hasn’t been much research on whether Montessori programs, a model of schooling that encourages children to direct their own learning, improve outcomes for low-income students, said Steve Barnett, founder and co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) (Seattle Times).

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, a critic of Amazon and Bezos dismissed Bezos’ philanthropy as an attempt “to mitigate his image. While Nan Roman, chief executive of the National Alliance for Ending Homelessness said, “The magnitude of Bezos’ commitment has the “potential to put a dent in family homelessness,” depending on how it’s used” (Seattle Times).

Adding to the controversy is Bezos’ plan to create his own Montessori network. Debs says, “Instead of creating his own network, Mr. Bezos should consider funding schools that are already doing the work he admires. Consider the 50 public Montessori programs in Puerto Rico created by Ana María García Blanco beginning in 1990, programs that are now at risk of closing because of school reorganization efforts after Hurricane Maria” (Ravitch, 2018).

Rather, Debs says, Bezos should consider the work of Roslyn Williams, a Montessori educator who founded the Central Harlem Association of Montessori Parents in 1967,  “to create integrated Montessori preschools in New York. Ms. Williams argued that Montessori education should go from being the “the rich child’s right” to “the poor child’s opportunity”(Ravitch, 2018).

Harry S. Truman once said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

Hopefully Bezos can learn from his billionaire predecessors’ mistakes, and truly put this money to the programs he has outlined – without hubris.

These are my reflections for today.

10/05/18

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