Best Practices: A Top 10 List
The Business Week cover story has many related stories, including an interview with Bill and Melinda Gates, what corporations are doing, profiles of success stories and Top 10 Best Practices such as this one:
Offer school choice to poor kids
The Idea: The wealthy have always had a choice of where to send their kids to school. So with so many poorly performing schools in low-income neighborhoods, why not offer a choice?
Who's Doing It: The Walton Family Foundation, the charitable arm of America's wealthiest family, bankrolls thousands of scholarships that allow low-income kids to attend private schools, usually at the K-8 level. The foundation also is the nation's largest backer of charter schools. The Waltons have invested in over 500 charter schools, as well as in many charter-management organizations, which operate networks of charters.
The Payoff: Thousands of children have been given new options, and all these new charters have introduced more competition into public education. Unfortunately, many of the nation's over 3,000 charters haven't lived up to backers' promises. So now the Waltons are supporting efforts to increase the rigor and quality of charters.
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| Online Extra: Best Practices: A Top 10 List |
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Frustrated by the meager payoff from its traditional efforts to improve schools, a new generation of business philanthropists is developing innovative approaches to solving this seemingly intractable problem. The most effective business-developed approaches are being adopted by others, thus leveraging the impact of the initial investment. Here's a look at the 10 best approaches, including who's promoting them and how they're working out:
posted by Whitney Tilson at 9:12 AM
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