The Harold K.L. Castle Foundation—founded in 1962 by Harold Kainalu Long Castle, who took a lot of his wealth from Kaneohe Ranch and gave it to this private foundation to make Hawaii a better place—is in a unique position to both think about ideas on public education improvement, and also provide funds to invest in those ideas. Since inception—and nearly all of it since I was hired in 2003—the Foundation has made 345 grants totaling nearly $37 million to support K-12 public education.
In this video, I share my 20-year learning journey in helping the Harold Castle Foundation to deploy flexible philanthropic capital to help improve our state’s public school system. I want to first acknowledge and thank two of my mentors—past and current leaders of the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation in their own right in the 1990s and 2000s—Randy Moore and Mitch D’Olier, our board chair. They were the alaka’i in making the decision to invest heavily in public education. But my remarks in this video are my own.
It’s often hard to see what foundations do—in part because it’s our grantee organizations, not us, who actually get the work done and who deserve the credit. It’s also rare to criticize foundations because people want their grant money and they don’t always see what foundations have failed to get right. But this is beginning to change, particularly in public education. Critics such as the social scientist Diane Ravitch have begun to push back hard at the big philanthropic players in public education reform, asking questions like: what right do these unelected entities have to secure such influence over the nation’s education priorities? Such critics are now saying that many foundations fail to understand the true causes of underperformance in public school systems and that their solutions to these problems aren’t working.
My intent is to let you peek behind the curtain of one private foundation’s work in public education, to see the risks we’ve taken, the mistakes we’ve made, the successes we’ve had, and the assumptions that drove our work. The Harold Castle Foundation has partnered with the HIDOE and the UH statewide to build a strong leadership pipeline, to dramatically expand early college, to strengthen new-teacher mentoring, to raise teachers’ voice in statewide policymaking, to build capacity for high-quality project-based and ‘aina-based learning, to strengthen career pathways for students, and to build effective instructional leadership teams led by teachers. Our grants have funded technical assistance, training, evaluation, public policy advocacy, opportunities for peer learning, and support to spur innovations in teaching and learning.
Philanthropy has a limited set of tools to help spark lasting change at scale that can translate our righteous indignation about the yawning achievement gap into better learning outcomes for kids. But after much trial and error, the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation has figured out how to deploy those tools pretty well—especially when we stay focused and persistent, find allies from within the DOE while using data and outside pressure well, learn and adjust along the way, avoid political landmines, and use our dollars to de-risk and spread new approaches.
With Aloha,
Terry George
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