Author Archives: nkingsl

3 Reflections on 9 Months of Working in Philanthropy

I’ve been working in philanthropy for 9 months. See below for a few reflections.

And ping me in the comments if you have any feedback or advice.

1. The Best Thing I Did was Pitch a Mission and a Strategy for a Fund

This might be idiosyncratic to me, but I think I would have been unhappy and perhaps ineffective if I had joined a philanthropic organization with a set mission and strategy in education.

For both the Arnold Foundation and the Hastings Fund, I submitted an investment plan that included mission, strategy, and estimated budget *before* I joined.

In this sense, the dynamic was more akin to a venture capitalist raising a fund than it was a foundation hiring an employee to execute an existing operational plan.

I wonder if this might be a better way to do philanthropy, whereby philanthropists are more akin to sole or limited investors in funds and projects (perhaps like Alphabet?) than they are uniform operational entities.

I think that this model would be more conducive to entrepreneurship, risk taking, and innovation – with foundation boards evolving into resource allocation bodies that increase or decrease investment across a portfolio of  funds that are each led by very autonomous executives.

Instead of only hiring employees and soliciting grant proposals, foundations should also seek proposals for issue based funds.

2. The Biggest Mistake I’ve Made (So Far) has Not Been Developing My Investing Skills Quickly Enough

At New Schools for New Orleans, one of my weaknesses was investing: I don’t think our school creation hit rate was good enough and there were a few projects we should have completely avoided. The organization is better at this now, but it was not my strength.

To prepare for a role where an even larger part of my job would be investing, I read a lot of books, talked to a lot of people, and tried to build a tight framework for selecting organizations.

And yet I still made some unforced errors. I brought projects to be approved for investment that, in hindsight, were not a great fit for what we’re trying to accomplish.

Specifically, the errors generally fell in a few categories:

  • The investment was best made at a local level: Given that we almost always work with local partners, we have to determine when we invest directly and when we rely on local leaders to make calls. A few times, I brought forth investments to be made at the national level that were really local decisions.
  • The upside was not high enough: A national foundation’s most limited resource is time. It is not money. There are only so many projects you can do diligence on and only so much time you get with your board. The opportunity cost for spending a lot of time on low-upside endeavors is very high.
  • The investment was not tightly enough aligned to achieving our goals, strategy, and expertise: There are a lot of good ideas out there, that, ultimately, should be funded by other foundations. I spent too much time on good ideas that weren’t in our sweet spot. I should have just quickly recommended that the entrepreneur talk to a more aligned foundation.

3. I’m Not Sure About How to Navigate Investment Structure

There are numerous ways to define an investment relationship. Some foundations act like VC firms and take a board seat. Some foundations are extremely operational and play a shadow management role, which can include everything from weekly phone calls to shared staffing. Some foundations write checks and then just monitor annual goals and benchmarks.

Any of these models can probably be effective in the right situation and disastrous in the wrong situation.

In my situation, I happen to have previously held the role of many of the leaders of our grantees (being CEO of NSNO); we work with leaders with very different experience levels (some have been CEOs for 5+ years and some are launching new entities); we work with leaders across very different local environments (some localities are in the infancy in their reform efforts and some are 20+ years in); and we work in localities with varying levels of foundation activity (in some places we are the primary funder and in others we are one of many).

And in every case I’m not actually living in the community where the work is taking place.

All of these variables make it difficult to adopt a singular structural approach to an investment relationship.

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Overall, it’s been a great nine months. I feel lucky to be doing the work.

The Challenge of Separating Emotional and Intellectual Agreeableness

There is a decent amount of research showing that agreeableness (as measured by the five factor personality test) is not always associated with strong professional outcomes.

Specifically, agreeableness can reduce results orientation and create opportunities to be taken advantage of by colleagues who better use power to achieve their desired ends.

That being said, agreeableness need not be all bad: to the extent that it helps cultivate large, loose networks, agreeableness is likely of use to leaders in attracting talent and coalition members, especially in the non-profit sector.

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Many times, I’ll be in a conversation with a colleague, grantee, or potential grantee and there will be a small war going on my head: part of me wants to nod my head, smile, and ask probing but pleasant questions – while another party of me wants to dig in very hard on everything that might be wrong about what we’re discussing.

I have a strong desire to be both emotionally agreeable and intellectually disagreeable.

Which begs the question: is it possible to be emotionally agreeable while being intellectually disagreeable?

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I’m not sure. But here’s some things I try to do:

  • Utilize processes that create a safe space for intellectual aggression (i.e., assigning someone to be the devil’s advocate in a meeting).
  • Using hedging phrases such as “I might have this wrong, but….” that soften the blows of intellectual aggression.
  • Trying to separate my empathy for a person with my disagreement with her ideas – so that my intellectual disagreeableness does not bleed into full blown personal animosity.

If you have any other tools, let me know.

I struggle to get the balance right.

Sometimes I feel like I’m too agreeable, and sometimes I feel like I’m too intellectually aggressive.

Quantitative Curriculum Adoption

*Note: I don’t have high confidence in my opinions on curriculum. The below is speculative.*

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I recently visited a high-performing charter high school that serves very low-income students.

During the visit, I sat in on a chemistry class. A student came over to explain to what they were working on and walked me through a problem that had something to do with converting moles to atoms.

To be honest, my initial internal reaction was: “who gives a f**k?”

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I did not expect to have this reaction. So I first tried to check myself on bias: did I think chemistry was not important in this setting because I have low expectations of poor students?

No.

While I do think that the cost of having to learn useless material is higher for students who are further behind, all told, my negative reaction to chemistry is broad: I wish I hadn’t been taught chemistry during my sophomore year of high school.

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I’m surely not the first person to wonder if advanced classes should be taught in high school. A recent New York Time piece made the same argument (but focusing on math instead of chemistry).

The opportunity cost of learning content that will never be used has been recognized by experts for decades, as there is a significant research base on the idea that most knowledge is not transferable across domains (i.e., learning chemistry does not help you learn literature).

But what I haven’t seen is a fleshed out formula about how we might go about making curricular decisions.

So here goes (it’s not rocket science).

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Creating the Curriculum Index:

  1. Analyze some mix of current and medium-term job forecast projections to get a back of the envelope idea of perhaps the top few thousand jobs high school students will be working in over the next decade.
  2. Then tag each job with the prerequisite classes a high school student would need to take to be on track to being prepared for that job upon exiting 12th grade.
  3. Job Skill Index: Create an index that ranks classes (existing or yet to be created) by the % chance that a high school student will utilize this information in the first 2-5 years of  her career.
  4. Core Thriving Index: Couple this an analysis with an analysis of the non-job knowledge, values, and skills that will be important in adulthood (moral living, mental health, appreciation of arts, personal finance, civic knowledge, etc.) – and tag these non-job learning objectives to high school classes.
  5. Rerun every few years.

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Potential implications:

My guess is that conducting the above exercises would lead to numerous additions to the high school curriculum (data-analysis, sales, marketing, project management, policy analysis, etc.) and the demotion of numerous classes (calculus, AP literature, advanced biology, etc.).

Additionally, it might lead to new classes, such as “sprints” – whereby students could take courses that covered the foundational concepts of a few classes (i.e., a science sprint could cover biology, chemistry, and physics in one year), which would raise the class score on the Job Skill Index and allow for student exposure to numerous fields without overcommitting to any specific field.

Duel enrollment in colleges and on-line courses could also allow for personalized specialization in the later years of high school, thereby avoiding the broad mandating of classes that score low on the index.

As a set of classes, Common Core would fair poorly as measured by the index.

Creating the index would also lead to many questions about tracking, as the probability of utilizing information will vary based on a student’s current achievement.

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The benefits of beginning with a more quantitative approach to curriculum would be numerous:

  1. It would bring clarity to why and when we teach vocational knowledge. While some might cringe at teaching sales in high school, the truth is that sales and Algebra II are both predominantly vocational skills (if anything, sales probably provides more insight into our condition than does Algebra II). If we are going to teach a vocational skill in high school, we should have a good idea why we’re doing so.
  2. It would bring clarity to the non-vocational purpose of school: By defining what adults need to thrive, and determining what of this can be taught by schools, it would help harness the high school experience to increase the probability of adult thriving.
  3. It would help us understand trade-offsEven if we decide to offer a class that will only benefit a minority students of the long-haul (and there might be good reasons for doing so), there is a difference between a class benefiting 1% of students and .001% of students. Understanding these differences would allow us to make better decisions.
  4. It would serve as an automatic trigger: Conducting this exercise every few years would force to have conversations about what should be taught. It would help prevent us from relying on hundred year old assumptions that have been mostly developed by content experts (who always overvalue their content).

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Creating and adopting these indices  via public debate and democratic adoption would slow them down immensely and subject them to political considerations.

Some will consider this a feature while others will consider it a bug that needs to be fixed.

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In case you’re curious, see here for broad labor category projections from BLS:

Screen Shot 2016-03-28 at 8.57.31 PM

 

Meditating Away Education Reform

I am at my best when:

  1. I work out at least 45 min 6 days a week.
  2. I have 0-1 drinks five days a week and 2-3 drinks on at most two days a week.
  3. 90% of my calories come from whole grains, fruit, vegetables, and seafood.
  4. I meditate at least 10 minutes a day.

I do not believe in diets or 90 day exercise regimes or anything like that, so my effort is spent trying to tweak my life to make the above livable long-term habits.

I am improving but have a long way to go.

As for meditation, I started meditating in law school and even lived in McLeod Ganj for a few months, where I worked with the Tibetan Government In Exile.

But I find it very hard to meditate daily, especially when so much of my life is structured around quick and / or deep mental bursts.

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Recently, a friend recommended the app Headspace, which I have started using.

So far, the meditation techniques are fairly basic (I’ve only done the first four), but, despite (or perhaps due to) their simplicity, I find the mental barrier to begin meditating is lower with the app.

I hope this continues and my practice improves.

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A common meditation technique is to let your thoughts float by as if they were clouds; to treat thoughts as separate from consciousness; to understand them as passing sensations.

This week, as I was meditating, education reform was on my mind, and as the app instructed, I let the thought of education reform float away.

It felt very good and, for an instant, fully dissociated me from the education reform tribe.

My guess is that this is an important habit to cultivate, that emotional separation is as important as intellectual separation when it comes to acting with empathy, reducing bias, and developing non zero-sum solutions.

An Idea for a Pay for Success / Social Impact Bond

pay

I’ve been in New Orleans all week, which is always great.

On Friday, I got some time with Stephen Rosenthal, my former board chair at NSNO.

He made the following argument:

  1. We spend ~150K to educate a child K-12.
  2. Then we send many of these children to college, where many of them drop out.
  3. Groups like KIPP to College and POSSE are demonstrating that spending another ~5K per kid can significantly increase the odds that a student will graduate from college.
  4. Right now, there isn’t much public funding for these programs.

He makes a good point: would you rather spend ~150K and have a ~10% chance of getting a student in poverty through college or ~155K and have a ~30% chance of getting a student in poverty through college?

While the numbers may not be exact, you get the idea.

So why not create a pay for success / social impact bond program?

Many cities and states have “promise” scholarships that guarantee free or near free in-state tuition for qualifying students.

Why not allocate a portion of these funds to providers who are only paid for each marginal student in their program who graduates college above baseline completion rates?

A provider could then raise debt based on an investor’s belief that the provider will help students through college.

If the provider works, it receives money from the government, the debt is paid off, and college completion rates go up.

If the provider fails, tax payers lose nothing.

 

You Need to Understand the Narrative of the Future *and* the Probability of Future Outcomes

Understanding the narrative of the future and the probability of future outcomes are both very important.

Your communications should be aligned to the narrative of the future and your actions should be aligned to the probable outcomes of the future.

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When charter schools were invented the narrative of the future was that they would be laboratories for innovation.

The actual probability set of the future included a reality where this was in fact the case, but it also included a reality where charters scaled to be much more than this.

As such, thoughtful charter school supporters invested both in innovation and in the infrastructure for scale (charter school management organizations).

This led to charters serving 10-30% of students in many cities, which surpassed the state goal of the existing narrative of the future.

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Currently, the narrative of the future is that a vibrant and significant charter school sector can be a positive for raising the performance of all public schools, with competition being emphasized as much as innovation.

Often time, Washington D.C. and Denver are held up as models of charters and districts working alongside each for the benefit of all.

On this blog and elsewhere, I’ve argued that all charter school districts are actually a better structure for increasing educational opportunity. While I do think this has shifted the conversation a bit, this message deviates from the current narrative of the future, and it tends not to go very far with local leaders.

As such, when I speak in communities, I don’t emphasize the creation of all charter school districts. I never lie about the fact that I support them, but I focus on the fact that cities like Washington D.C. and Denver are demonstrating that healthy traditional and charter sectors can operate alongside each other and that both are important.

In the short-term, very few cities will go all charter anyways, so focusing on developing a strong charter sector that serves 40-50% of children seems like a pragmatic next step.

And it aligns my communications with the most common narrative of the future.

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We don’t know what the future will hold.

It may in fact be the case that 40-50% charter market share proves optimal, or it could be the case that all charter districts end up being best for children.

As such, I think it’s important to invest in the infrastructure for a future where charters do serve all children in many cities. Supporting actions could include funding policy pieces, continued innovation in New Orleans, and a few other cities where communities are willing to make a push to 75%+ charter.

But I also think it’s important to align some investing with the current narrative of the future (which may end up being the future itself).

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In navigating the potential differences between the narrative of the future and the future itself, pragmatism and honesty go a long way.

You shouldn’t hide the ball, but you all shouldn’t use fourth quarter tactics during the second and third quarters.

As much as possible, you actions should be congruent to multiple likely outcomes.

Running the Numbers: Who Will Be the Education Base of the Democratic Party in 2024?

The New York Times just ran a piece titled: “Can Labor Still Turn Out the Vote?”

It raises some interesting questions about the future of the Democratic party.

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Total union membership is 14.8 million.

Private unions have 7.2 million members and public unions have 7.6 million members.

These numbers are going down.

Overall, declining union membership is being in large part driven by losses in the private sector:

UnionMembershipRates2015

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When it comes to teachers unions, numbers are also in decline.

ednext_XV_1_antonucci_fig01

Overall, teacher union membership is about 2.5 million.

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Charter enrollment, on the other hand, is going up:

charter enrollment.png

This year, there are more students enrolled in charter schools than there are teacher union members.

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To simplify a complicated issue: teachers unions, on average, do not support significant charter school expansion.

This may put them at odds with the millions of families who are enrolled, or who wish to enroll, in charter schools.

Of course, when it comes to politics, absolute numbers aren’t everything:

Screen Shot 2016-03-06 at 9.52.17 AM

This raises the  question: what would it take for charter school families to become more active? They will probably not be politicaly active at the level of unions, but in the near future they will be a sizable block, and their level of activity will affect Democratic politics.

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I’m fairly confident that in the 5-7 years charter school enrollment will reach 5 million students.

At that point, charter school parents will out number teacher union membership by 2-3X.

In a better world (for me at least), this would be a non-story, as there would be no divide between these two groups.

But, right now, there is.

All of which leads to the question, who will be the education base of the Democratic Party in 2024?

And what if it is the children of other union members (construction, hospitality, etc) that are enrolling charter schools?

What alliances will form?