Philanthropic Community Research Articles

Lessons from Denver: The Pay for Performance Pilot

Denver's Pay for Performance pilot was the most ambitious experiment in teacher compensation ever attempted. The verdict: test-based for performance doesn't work. Mr. Gratz, who led the research team for the first half of the pilot, reports on the improved plan that grew out of it. TEACHERS IN Denver recently approved a historic revision to the teachers' contract, in which compensation is linked, in part, to student success in the classroom. If voters fund the proposed contract in fall 2005, it could mark a new era in which teachers and communities formally accept a range of indicators that can be used to determine the compensation of individual teachers. Denver's Pay for Performance pilot, from which the new contract plan emerged, was jointly run by the district and the teacher association, supported by the business and philanthropic communities, seriously implemented (though not without problems), and thoughtfully reviewed. It forced significant improvements in the way the district does business -- improvements demonstrated both in aggregate student achievement and in the opinions of participants -- and led to the formation of a joint task force to develop a new plan for teacher compensation. The recently accepted plan is not a test-driven for performance plan, based on the experience of the pilot. Instead, it takes into account both successful teaching and service to the school community, an approach that entails a much broader assessment of performance than was piloted. It addresses problems identified through the pilot as well as long- standing issues and concerns felt in Denver and many other communities. The Denver pilot also demonstrates why, even with thoughtful pilot leadership and broad support, a strict for performance system -- where performance is defined as student achievement -- is an inappropriate model for education. Indeed, Denver's pilot was a resounding success not because it proved the efficacy of for performance in education based on test scores, but because of how it was run, what was learned, and the highly significant vote of teachers to abandon the common steps and lanes approach to compensation in favor of a new four-point strategy. At the same time, the pilot demonstrates how attempts to gauge student achievement with precision or to tie teacher performance to student achievement can create reverse incentives and negative consequences for all parties. Thus the experience of the pilot provides powerful information both about what is useful and about what is not. It thereby opens up new possibilities even as it closes the door on others. I draw the conclusions I express here from research and from my own experience in Denver, leading the research team for the first half of the pilot. A Brief History of Merit Pay and Pay for Performance Variously called or pay for performance, financial incentives have been used in some forms of business for many years. These incentives have also been tried -- without much success -- in school districts dating back nearly 300 years. They revived as recently as the 1980s. Definitions are fluid, but is often seen as a system in which merit is determined by a supervisor, whereas performance is supposed to be a more objective measure. In many instances, however, and performance may both be determined by a test, by some demonstration of teacher skill or knowledge, or by student achievement. No uniform definition exists, so arguments for and against are often confused. Historically, and performance have often been used interchangeably, making it difficult to determine the content of a particular program or experiment by the name used to describe it. As early as 1710, teachers' salaries in parts of England were based on their children's scores on examinations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This practice had grown by the mid-19th century and was incorporated into the English system of education in 1862 as part of the Revised Education Code, where it remained for more than 30 years. …

Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America

After World War II, U.S. policy experts-convinced that unchecked population growth threatened global disaster-successfully lobbied bipartisan policy-makers in Washington to initiate federally-funded family planning. In Intended Consequences, Donald T. Critchlow deftly chronicles how the government's involvement in contraception and abortion evolved into one of the most bitter, partisan controversies in American political history. The growth of the feminist movement in the late 1960s fundamentally altered the debate over the federal family planning movement, shifting its focus from population control directed by established interests in the philanthropic community to highly polarized pro-abortion and anti-abortion groups mobilized at the grass-roots level. And when the Supreme Court granted women the Constitutional right to legal abortion in 1973, what began as a bi-partisan, quiet during the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson exploded into a contentious argument over sexuality, welfare, the role of women, and the breakdown of traditional family values. Intended Consequences encompasses over four decades of political history, examining everything from the aftermath of the Republican moral revolution during the Reagan and Bush years to the current culture wars concerning unwed motherhood, homosexuality, and the further protection of women's abortion rights. Critchlow's carefully balanced appraisal of federal birth control and abortion policy reveals that despite the controversy, the family planning movement has indeed accomplished much in the way of its intended goal-the reduction of population growth in many parts of the world. Written with authority, fresh insight, and impeccable research, Intended Consequences skillfully unfolds the history of how the federal government found its way into the private bedrooms of the American family.

Growth in Conversion Foundations: Implications for Health Education

A dramatic trend in health care today is the sale of nonprofit service delivery organizations to for-profit businesses. The monies from these sales are frequently used to create nonprofit foundations whose goal is to benefit the community's quality of life. The rapid growth in the number of these “conversion” foundations, their ties to the local communities, and their interest in broadly addressing the underlying determinants of health have great implications for health educators and present specific challenges for the discipline of health education. Health educators can offer valuable skills to these foundations, including the ability to make community assessments more valid and comprehensive; ensure that funded activities are community driven; assist with planning; foster a vision of foundation practice that promotes collaboration and coalition building; and aid with evaluation of work of both the foundation and its grantees. The challenges for the discipline of health education include fostering institutional ties between health education and public health organizations and conversion foundations; developing undergraduate and graduate level curriculum on foundation philanthropy; providing internships at foundations; developing continuing education on the philanthropic community; establishing mechanisms for foundations to access professional health educators; and developing scientific literature on the public health impact of conversion foundations.

The philanthropic community as a gift economy

AbstractThe ethics of fundraising derive in a most basic sense from the purposes and ideals of philanthropy. We can think of philanthropy as a „gift economy”︁ in which fundraisers facilitate the movement of gifts among donors and recipients. Through sharing our gifts we create community among all participants.

"No Striving for Glory Here": An Essay on Women and Leadership in the U.S.S.R.

The mission of our visit to Moscow and the Republic of Estonia over a nine-day period in December, 1984, was to meet with women in public life and with members and staff of the Soviet Women's Committee to continue establishing a dialogue on matters of mutual concern to women in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. A word about the history of this project and how our particular delegation was assembled. The Women's Dialogue--U.S./U.S.S.R. is co-convened by Colette Shulman, a researcher, consultant, and journalist based at Columbia University who specializes in Soviet-American relations, and Phoebe Cottingham, Assistant Director for Social Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation and board member of and Foundations/ Corporate Philanthropy.' For about two years Shulman, Cottingham, and others had been developing a program under which Soviet and American women could come together on a fairly regular basis to discuss issues affecting women's lives. Under the auspices of and Foundations/Corporate Philanthropy and with additional financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American conveners and a small planning group composed largely of women from the organized philanthropic community had established links with the Soviet Women's Committee, the prestigious official organization based in Moscow that handles contacts and exchanges between the Soviet Union and women's groups in other countries.2 By late 1984, three exchanges had taken place both in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and the co-conveners had received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to plan a next visit by American women. The Soviet Women's Committee had invited the Americans to send a small group for informal discussions about a topic emerging from the preliminary exchanges.3 The topic, Women and Community, was to focus our meetings on how, where, when, under what circumstances, and related to which issues women today are serving as public leaders in the two societies. Selected by the co-conveners, our delegation included a scholar of Russian folklore, who served as staff for the project; three women from foundations; a vice-president of Independent Sector (an alliance of organizations concerned with encouraging voluntary, philanthropic, and not-for-profit community activities); a magazine journalist (the editor-at-large of Working Woman); a city councilwoman from Minneapolis; two state legislators from Iowa (then the co-chairs of the women's caucus in the Iowa legislature); and me, the director of a university-based research center that studies women's participation in U.S. politics and government. We had in common interest and expertise in contemporary American women's activities in the local community and the larger public world. We all wished to learn about the U.S.S.R., especially to understand more about Soviet women's experiences and perceptions of their place in public life. We were aware in advance that we would encounter a highly selected and very small segment of Soviet womanhood; we did not expect the Soviet Women's Committee to introduce us to dissidents or to people who would publicly express doubts about their country's social, political, and economic systems. We assumed correctly that the Committee would organize our itinerary to impress us with exemplary institutions and with their best

The changing role of private philanthropy in health affairs.

Since World War II societal changes have fundamentally altered the very special position held by private philanthropy in the health area. The expanding expenditures for health services by the private and public sectors now dwarf those of philanthropic insitutions. Yet the need for private philanthropy has not diminished. Indeed, given some of the problems that may be created by large-scale public-sector support, private philanthropy may prove to be even more imporant in the future. But to respond to this changing state of affairs, the philanthropic community and the nation's health institutions will have to recognize that private philanthropy has become a relatively scarce national resource. To continue to play a major part in health affairs, philanthropic giving will have to become well targeted on select national and regional priorities, moving away from the more broadly scattered approaches reflecting the needs of the earlier parts of the century.

Social Service and Social Legislation in Edwardian England: The Beginning of a New Role for Philanthropy

Many historians have written about the impressive social achievement of the last Liberal Government which sat in Britain from 1905 to 1916. Prominent among them is Bentley Gilbert whose Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain importantly expands. Maurice Bruce's excellent survey The Coming of the Welfare State. Much of this work has emphasized the political maneuverings for legislation which increased the economic security of millions of British citizens. This paper takes a different, supplementary approach. It is an attempt to understand the impact of the Liberals' social reform program on a part of the philanthropic community which had asssumed an important role in meeting the problems of poverty. The focus is on the provisions for social welfare made by voluntary and statutory agencies in order to clarify the beginnings of their successful partnership which today operates in the Welfare State. David Owen, in his monumental study of English philanthropy, has rightly characterized the modern role for voluntary agencies as “Junior Partner(s) in the Welfare Firm,” but he has wrongly stated that this role was recognized only after the First World War. The voluntary-statutory partnership in social welfare was formed during the Liberals' legislative revolution from 1906 to 1911: voluntarists who were affected by it understood its signficance for their work.The welfare measures of the post-Second World War Labour Government gave final recognition to the fact that in Britain social development was no longer to be the by-product of economic development, and that the State must plan comprehensively to meet social needs rather than filling in the gaps left by private effort. In a very real sense the proposals of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, given shape in this new age by a Fabian disciple, William Beveridge, became the foundation of British policy. But the social legislation enacted by the Labour Government was implanted in ground haphazardly prepared by previous measures which provided for specific needs, but often with little reference to related questions.