By Seattle Times staff

Greg Coy has plans to visit 20 Washington elementary schools, wielding both a stick and a carrot.

In one hand, Coy will carry a copy of each school's state test scores as proof of poor performance.

In the other, he will carry a checkbook.

Coy is on a mission from the Discuren Charitable Foundation, a small family foundation in Seattle: Seek out the state's worst-performing schools and ask, "What can I do to help?"

In an era of unprecedented private giving, philanthropists big and small are taking up the cause of K-12 education. They're adopting schools, reform movements and entire school districts.

But this isn't cut-the-check-and-walk-away charity.

This brand of philanthropy is personal and has attitude: Expectations come with the cash.

Thanks to Bill Gates, Paul Allen and other high-tech titans, Washington's surge of wealth puts it at the epicenter of the movement.

Gates is spending hundreds of millions on school reform, using 10 Washington school districts as a petri dish. Allen was a one-man band for charter schools, contributing $2.7 million to last month's failed ballot initiative. And Seattle businessman Stuart Sloan is lavishing millions on a single Seattle elementary school.

Beyond Washington, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist spent millions putting a school-voucher initiative before California voters, and Former Netscape CEO James Barksdale gave $100 million to his native Mississippi to boost a statewide reading initiative.

All those zeros have sparked new ways of thinking about the role of private money in public education. Where it leads is anybody's guess.

"I think everybody is still sort of at the stunned stage," said Anne Farrell, president and chief executive of The Seattle Foundation. "We're at the beginning of what will be a huge philanthropic groundswell."

Focus of giving changed

Universities, private schools and neighborhood public schools have long benefited from donations of money and time. But giving to K-12 education as part of a broader reform agenda is new.

The movement can be traced to the 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk," which declared a crisis in public education, and to a 1993 gift of $500 million from philanthropist Walter Annenberg targeting school reform.

Americans donated $27.5 billion to education last year, up 8.5 percent from 1998, according to the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel.

Seattle's Alliance for Education, a private nonprofit group that raises money for Seattle schools, has seen donations soar from $600,000 in 1995 to $11 million last year.

When it started five years ago, the Alliance was funded almost entirely by corporate donations. Individual donations now make up more than half of the Alliance's contributions.

"I have a sense we're building something entirely new here," said Alliance President Robin Pasquarella.

The focus of giving also has changed. Traditionally, donors did what Pasquarella calls "Band-Aid giving" - patching a broken system or making feel-good contributions of computers even though teachers lacked the technical support to use them.

"They're random acts of kindness," she said. "There's nothing wrong with that. ... It just doesn't change anything."

Now philanthropists are more strategic, and want a return for their donated dollars in the form of improved education.

Small programs, too

While gifts from Gates and Allen grab the headlines, a number of smaller programs are being funded by a new generation of philanthropists who are drawn to children's causes.

At Aki Kurose Middle School Academy in Seattle, students who are suspended don't just get sent home or to detention. They go to a special class where counselors help them sort out the cause of their behavior.

Students at Rogers and Sacajawea elementary schools in Seattle are involved in a hands-on math program credited for a surge in test scores.

The two programs are among more than a dozen education-related initiatives funded through Seattle's Social Venture Partners, a 2-1/2-year-old organization.

The group's 265 members kick in at least $5,000 a year each, then together pick recipients.

But their giving doesn't stop there. Like many new-style philanthropists, they roll up their sleeves and get involved with the programs they fund.

Their expertise is as useful as their cash, said T.J. Cosgrove, program manager with Pioneer Counseling Services who oversees the Kurose suspension program.

Social Venture members are helping Cosgrove create a business and marketing plan to pitch the Kurose program to other schools. They will stick with the program for at least four years, perhaps longer, to determine the best way to get results, said SVP's executive director, Paul Shoemaker.

"Do we know how to increase test scores? No," Shoemaker said. "Our approach is to stay away from what we don't know and stick with what we do."

Molly Hanlon is a new-style philanthropist who views donations not as gifts but as investments.

She and her husband, Michael, an early employee of Amazon.com, formed a family foundation to focus on children and education. They also give through Social Ventures.

They don't have children, but Molly Hanlon credits two of her teachers with launching her toward a degree in math and a job in high-tech. Her mother is a teacher.

She now devotes full time to philanthropy. She spends about 10 hours a week coordinating a student-tutoring program at Northgate Elementary in Seattle, and serves on a Social Ventures committee that determines how grant money is distributed.

"I want to know the money we give is going to make a difference, so I want to learn all about the system," she said. "How can my money best be leveraged?"

And she wants to make sure her donations are a help, not a burden.

"How can I say I know what's best for a school when I don't have an education degree?" she said.

Big donors with agendas

Many new-age givers promise that they won't dictate programs. But the checks are written with strings attached - agendas that express a preference for one reform over another.

Allen's support of the charter-school campaign is an example of a philanthropist trying to drive public policy. The Gates Foundation also has been open about its interest in schools, and offers a homegrown example of the possibilities and perils inherent in such giving.

The Gateses have committed $350 million to U.S. schools, a gift believed to be second only to Annenberg's. More than one-third of the Gateses' money will go to Washington schools.

It is philanthropy with an edge, pushing a platform of small schools and technology as keys to education reform.

While the foundation at first was reluctant to discuss its gift decisions, "we're more careful now about signaling what our own research and advisers and internal considerations have brought us to," said Patty Stonesifer, the foundation's president.

Some are troubled that so much money might buy control.

"What offends is the fact that (Gates) gets to decide what the schools' priorities should be without having to churn his billions through a democratic process the way the rest of us churn our thousands," wrote Barbara Dudley, former executive director of Greenpeace USA, in The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Agenda-driven giving is not new. Turn-of-the-century business titans like Carnegie and Rockefeller used private gifts to schools, libraries and hospitals to leverage public investments in the same institutions.

These days, the challenge is to make private gifts a magnet for more donations, both public and private, said Tom Vander Ark, who oversees education giving for the Gates Foundation. The trick is neither to replace public investment nor chill private giving, he said.

"We don't give (schools) quite enough money to do what we want them to do," he said. "They have to have some skin in the game."

But there is competition among givers. The Discuren Foundation is looking more to Eastern Washington rather than being a small, redundant player in the Puget Sound.

"We're just instantly outclassed," said Coy, whose foundation gives about $800,000 a year to education initiatives. "The little projects we're working on get sidelined."

Who sets the priorities?

The new wave of private giving has spawned a new wave of public questions: Who says our top priority ought to be computers in schools, or charter schools, or small schools? Do the wealthy know best where to take our schools? Why is a philanthropic agenda any more acceptable than a political agenda pushed by, for instance, a teachers union?

Supporters of education philanthropy say the money can help clarify what works in schools.

Many public schools are confused about their mission, said Frederick Hess, an assistant professor of education and government at the University of Virginia. Is it to get students ready for college? Jobs? Citizenship?

"One way to fix schools is to strip away some of these missions," he said. He says Annenberg's gift didn't come with enough of an agenda. "You could say Annenberg threw a half-billion dollars into the system and purchased $50,000 of total improvement," he said.

But others worry that donors have too much control, and gifts can heighten inequities between schools. The competition for grants can cause whiplash, with schools lurching from one reform to the next, said Paul Hill, director of the UW's Center on Reinventing Public Education.

"To have to be whoring after extra money, that can be a very disruptive thing," he said.

For their part, school officials say donors sometimes want too much too fast.

Seattle school case study

Seattle's T.T. Minor Elementary is a closely watched case study for the new philanthropy.

Stuart Sloan, former owner of QFC, pledged to spend at least $1 million a year for eight years to overhaul one of the district's most troubled schools, helping pay for uniforms, smaller class sizes and a year-round schedule. Early results of the 3-year-old experiment have been mixed.

Even if it eventually succeeds at T.T. Minor, skeptics question whether it could be broadly replicated.

Some wonder whether business-minded givers like Sloan have the patience for tangled issues like poor academic performance - or will grow frustrated and take their money elsewhere.

But others say philanthropy provides the seeds of change. Education reform will come from creating a messy marketplace of ideas that keeps pressure on schools.Many cash-strapped schools can't afford to wait for proof that philanthropy works. For them, the extra money offers the difference between a basic education and an excellent one.

Eric Benson, principal at Seattle's Nathan Hale High School, says private dollars fueled a program that puts freshmen and sophomores in small groups that stay with the same teachers for two years.

By every measure - grades, discipline, dropout rates, test scores - the $300,000-a-year Academy is proving its worth, Benson said. It would not exist without a yearly hunt for private grants.

Microsoft retiree Philip Welt and his wife, Norma Crampton, adopted the program through Social Ventures, and provide a significant chunk of the funding.

"When he stepped forward last spring, it was a godsend," Benson said. "If we're going to offer the program we think is best for kids, we're dependent on outside funding."

For Welt, judging the worth of his gifts means getting personally involved. He spends two days a week at Nathan Hale, helping immigrant students decipher their assignments.

Such intimacy gives donors a close-up view of problems, but some-times "people don't know how to regard you," Welt said. "There's that sense of `Do I have to do what Phil and Norma say?' "

He is launching a scholarship program for minority students at Nathan Hale but hopes to leave decisions about who will receive the money to school administrators.

"As I get smarter about philanthropy, I think that's a better plan. But I still have the desire to be involved ... to kick the tires."

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