|
Washington, D.C., often feels like a transient city. Many of the District’s residents—from Congressmen to contractors and college students—are only in town for a short period of time, and even the city’s most famous resident stays for no more than eight years. But it’s a misleading impression. Washington is home to many deeply-rooted families, as David and Katherine Bradley know well.
David Bradley was born and raised in Washington. When he and Katherine married, it’s where they settled down and where they would go on to raise their three sons. And it’s where, in 1979, a 26-year-old Bradley started his first business, The Research Counsel of Washington, Inc., with five employees and a promise to answer “any question for any company in any industry.”
The for-profit think tank soon changed its name to the Advisory Board Company, and, along with its sister enterprise, the Corporate Executive Board, eventually came to serve over 4,000 corporations, financial institutions, and medical service providers. Bradley eventually sold his ownership in the companies for a reported price of about $300 million.
That fortune provided the financial basis for the CityBridge Foundation. CityBridge was originally established in 1994 as the Advisory Board Foundation, a small, best-practices corporate philanthropy with a special interest in health-related projects in Russia, the Philippines, and South Africa. But to the Bradleys, something didn’t seem quite right.
“They had felt for some time that their philanthropy, while effective, was literally and figuratively all over the map,” says CityBridge executive director Andrew Lee. “David and Katherine wanted to bring CityBridge’s work home to Washington, D.C.—where he grew up, where they raised their kids and started businesses.”
Finding a niche
Beginning in the summer of 2000, CityBridge began a thorough study of the best practices for combating entrenched, multi-generational poverty. Katherine Bradley and her staff spent a year engaged in a “blank sheet” seminar, sifting through the dense literature on poverty relief. As they gradually whittled down their choices, they came to focus on education, then on early education, then finally on early education for low-income students. CityBridge had found its mission: to go into low-income areas and deliver the best possible students into K-12 schools.
“There wasn’t an obvious new role we should be playing in the K-12 market. We were very conscious of not duplicating other people’s work,” Lee says. Bradley candidly acknowledges that CityBridge’s research “backed [us] into the space.”
The study group was heavily influenced by the seminal research of Betty Hart and the late Todd R. Risley, which found that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with academic success later on in a child’s life. Their studies found that, by the age of three, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies twice the size of children whose parents were on welfare.
The data convinced Bradley that child development centers focused exclusively on safety and nurture were missing an enormous opportunity. What D.C. needs, she decided, was more rigorous early education, programs that would build the vocabularies and enhance the thinking skills of the city’s low-income preschoolers.
“Good early education pays dividends for the rest of a child’s life,” says Bradley. “All later education becomes remedial if you don’t do early education right.”
A hospitable environment
The more Bradley investigated, the better the idea seemed. A number of factors combined to make the District a uniquely hospitable environment for growing early education programs. For starters, the size of the primary target group—the population of three- and four-year-old children from low-income families—is fairly manageable, at just about 3,250 children. Moreover, D.C. enjoys a unique early education tradition—90 percent of D.C. public schools have pre-K funding, and charter school laws mandate funding all the way down to three-year-olds. And the city was willing to pay a generous $9,654 per pupil per year for pre-K students.
Perhaps most importantly, D.C.’s political leadership was eager to support innovative reforms. “There’s a unique moment in D.C. right now,” Lee notes. “With Michelle Rhee as Chancellor, the District is finally ready to think about serious reform in the D.C. Public Schools.”
Bradley worked to put pre-K at the center of the city’s education reform agenda. CityBridge helped fund the Pre-K for All DC campaign, which sought to elevate the profile of pre-K education during the 2006 mayoral election. In May 2007, the foundation organized a “research day” for the offices of the mayor and superintendent, bringing in experts and out-of-town officials to educate local policymakers. City Hall is now exploring pre-K options with a small planning committee—and stays in close communication with CityBridge.
After several years of research and one year of planning, in 2005 CityBridge launched the Early Years Education Initiative, a 5-year, $8 million commitment to build a robust market for excellent, early childhood, urban education in the nation’s capital.
Building on Success
As CityBridge mulled over how to implement its vision for early education, it considered launching a number of new programs. Then it discovered DC Preparatory Academy and KIPP DC, two high-poverty, high-performing charter school management organizations already working in the nation’s capital. “We were thinking about building up new programs, and found the ones we’d been dreaming of already existed,” says Bradley.
Bradley was impressed with the two programs’ established records of success. At DC Prep's original middle school campus, which serves grades four through eight, students who have attended for three years are twice as likely to be proficient in reading and three times as likely to be proficient in math as their peers in traditional public schools. At KIPP DC, part of the nationally acclaimed KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) network of schools, the first class of alumni entered 5th grade scoring in the 23rd and 34th percentile in reading and math, respectively; the same students scored in the 71st and 94th percentiles at the end of their 8th grade year.
The challenge, Bradley realized, was to ensure that students from the pre-K programs made it to these already outstanding middle schools. As a result, CityBridge has committed to building three elementary school sites with KIPP DC, and plans to establish five pairs of early elementary and middle school campuses with DC Prep by 2015. As Lee explains, KIPP and DC Prep were a natural fit; both have great track records, fantastic leadership, and effective teacher recruitment policies.
Since 2006, CityBridge staff has worked intimately with both schools, even serving on their boards. The goal is to create early childhood and elementary feeder schools, which will provide the District’s schoolchildren with a strong foundation as they begin middle school. Ultimately, CityBridge would love to see excellence over a “complete education continuum” for D.C. students, stretching from pre-school to high school.
“We realized there’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” Bradley admits. “We gave up direct control to better spot good ideas and help them grow.”
Training the teachers
Bradley wanted to make certain that the plan was viable in the long run. It was great to have a receptive policy environment and reliable partners. And it was good that facilities and funding were available. What was missing, however, was human capital. The District needed to attract top-notch pre-K teachers.
“Great education really comes down to who it is in front of our children every day,” says Bradley. “Although everything matters—buildings, curriculum, pedagogy—nothing is as important as the teachers. Across the nation, our best teachers have tended to go to our wealthiest areas; our least-qualified teachers, to our lowest-income areas; and within our low-income areas, the least-of-the-least qualified teach the youngest children. CityBridge’s work in Washington aims to change that paradigm and match the best teachers with the youngest, lowest-income children.”
“We picked one geography, one specific age group, and a city where funding is reasonably good,” notes Lee. “Furthermore, we had a strong research base, so we didn’t have to re-prove what was already proven. And we were very judicious in picking partners—being very clear about how we want to work with them and striving to utilize what they already do well.”
Bradley decided to collaborate with the nation’s premier teacher development program, Teach For America (TFA). In 2006, CityBridge helped launch TFA’s first pre-K teacher placement initiative. TFA founder Wendy Kopp had initially been skeptical that corps members would be interested in the program, but much to her surprise, over 30 percent of TFA applicants indicated that they would like to teach pre-K. Such unexpected enthusiasm has led TFA to plan to place 500 teachers in pre-K classrooms across ten cities by 2010, an effort towards which CityBridge has donated an initial $765,000.
CityBridge has also worked with Jumpstart, a nonprofit that trains college students to work with at-risk four-year-olds. Assessment data suggests that Jumpstart children make significant progress toward becoming ready for school. With CityBridge’s support—$1.25 million over five years—the number of D.C.-area Jumpstart corps members has swelled from 85 to nearly 400.
And, last but not least, CityBridge has donated $632,000 over three years to Georgetown University with the goal of making Georgetown a leader in pre-K teacher training. The Early Childhood Teaching Excellence Partnership combines intensive weekend coursework with in-classroom observation and coaching, and has secured a $4.6 million grant from the Department of Education to expand the program and test its effectiveness. The grant will be matched dollar for dollar with public and private contributions, and the Partnership expects to expand to nearly 100 participants in the 2008-09 school year.
Taking the Long View
Bradley is eager to see CityBridge embark on Round II of its Early Years Education Initiative. In the meantime, she intends to continue supporting the education reform agenda of Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee. Above all, she counsels others working in the field not to give up. “Don’t be timid, or tire out too quickly when you’re working on core problems of poverty or education,” Bradley says. “These problems have been around a long time precisely because they are hard to solve. Here in D.C. we’ve had a broken education system that has pushed many funders to make investments outside of the traditional school day. I think it’s just been too hard, and too complicated, and too disheartening to try to make progress in the center. But isn’t that what the philanthropic community should be doing? Working and staying committed in that hard place where progress is difficult? We all need a long-term perspective, and since we funders are generally using our own money, we should be able to take risks, have a long-term vision, and stay with the tough problems as long as it takes.”
|
