Eli Broad Talks about Education with the Wall St. Journal
The August 28 Wall St. Journal featured a profile of Eli Broad, who talked about two of his philanthropic interests, education reform and the arts. The Broad Foundations focus on education, science and medicine, and the arts. Among the education initiatives the foundation funds are: charter schools, including both KIPP and Green Dot schools (each of which has a presence in LA), Teach for America, management training programs for administrators in urban areas, and a prize for large urban school districts that improve student performance.
Mr. Broad’s negative views of public education in Los Angeles explain why the Broad Superintendents Academy has only placed one person at LAUSD. “If we put 10 fellows in there, they’d leave because they’d have to work with a terrible bureaucracy, a regressive teachers union and a mayor that talks a good game but isn’t really interested in taking over schools,” he tells the Journal’s Naomi Schaefer Riley. He also suggests getting rid of education schools, which he believes have “the lowest ranking students at a university.”
In the video I posted, Mr. Broad suggests that American K-12 education was the best in the world in the ’50s and ’60s, but it deteriorated in the 70s and 80s. He believes this has had a huge negative impact on American competitiveness. His reform agenda includes: a longer school day and school year, incentive compensation for teachers (including differential pay for math and science teachers), a national math and science curriculum, public school choice, and charter schools.
The Journal article also mentions Mr. Broad’s belief in “the democratization of the arts” and his views on risk-taking and philanthropy.
