More on the people behind ReadyNation’s Global Business Summit on Early Childhood, November 1-2, 2018 New York City
Who is Robert Dugger?
Robert Dugger is the co-founder of ReadyNation and serves on the board of the Council for a Strong America. He began his career as an economist with the Board of Governor’s that oversees the Federal Reserve System, later serving as a senior advisor on banking and financial policy in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. From 1988 until 1992 Dugger worked as policy director for the American Bankers Association where he was involved with the development of the Resolution Trust Corporation in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis. He went on to become managing director of Paul Tudor Jones’s hedge fund, Tudor Investment Corporation, a position he held from 1992 until 2009. Dugger now runs Hanover Provident Capital in Alexandria, VA, while also serving on the boards of the Virginia Early Childhood Education Foundation and as the Chair of ReadyNation.
Tudor Investment Corporation and the Robin Hood Foundation
It is important to note Dugger’s ties to Paul Tudor Jones II, his employer for fifteen years. Jones created The Robin Hood Foundation in 1998. A 2007 feature in New York Magazine, “The Emperors of Benevolence: A Dossier on the Board of Directors of the Robin Hood Foundation where everybody either knows a rock star or is rich enough to buy one,” described the “anti-poverty” foundation as “one of the most influential philanthropic organizations of all time.” Robin Hood, associated with initiatives like the Harlem children’s zone, has only grown more influential.
During the organization’s annual gala earlier this month, over $15 million was raised in minutes as Jones, according to Bloomberg’s coverage of the event, enjoyed fennel-braised beef with Bill Gates.
New York’s first social impact bond drew a $300,000 investment from the foundation. Clearly Robin Hood could have access to almost limitless capital if Pay for Success opportunities around Pre-K open up in New York. The New York State Early Childhood Advisory Council prepared a 2012 report, “Using Pay for Success Strategies to Increase School Readiness.” The clock is ticking…
The Robin Hood Foundation has developed a sophisticated system of metrics to track the programs they fund, which means they have considerable infrastructure in place to take advantage of social impact investment opportunities. They have an exhaustive list of very specific equations aligned to education, work readiness, and health outcomes. You can review the equations here and/or watch the video summary. Thanks to blog commenter Laura Chapman for that lead.
Sara Watson and the Pew Charitable Trusts
Dugger and Heckman both served on the advisory board of The Pew Center on the States’ initiative Partnership for America’s Economic Success that launched in 2006. Dr. Sara Watson ran the program in her capacity as senior program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts. She has conducted extensive research in the pre-k investment space, including a 2014 analysis of Pennsylvania’s Pre-K Counts in partnership with ReadyNation and America’s Edge Pennsylvania. Below is a relationship map showing the connections between Dugger/ReadyNation and Watson/Pew. Click here for the interactive version.
During her tenure at Pew, Watson regularly joined Dugger to develop reports and speak at conferences promoting the economic impact of early childhood investments. Among these were presentations in 2007 in Washington, DC supported by PNC Financial Services; in 2008 to the Milken (Michael Milken, indicted junk bond trader and founder of K12, Inc.) Institute; the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington, DC in 2013; and a Pay for Success conference sponsored by the Pritzkers in San Diego in 2015.
Pew Charitable Trusts joined the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation in 2011 to spearhead a “results-first” initiative. It’s useful to know that Pritzker is also based in Chicago, and 2011 was the year BEFORE the first social impact bond came to the US. The goal of their initiative was to pressure states into adopting “evidence-based” approaches to funding social programs. States that participated agreed to a year-long analysis using return on investment as a key determiner as to whether a program would be included in the budget.
In 2016 “Results-First” joined the Urban Institute, The Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute in the Evidence-Based Policy Making Collaborative funded by the pension-busting, pay-for-success promoting John and Laura Arnold Foundation. Pew and MacArthur based their cost-benefit approach on work done by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, created by the Washington State Legislature in 1983. Sara Watson worked in Washington state in the mid-1990s as an analyst for the Family Policy Council.
Patty Murray, a democratic senator from Washington state, crossed the aisle to collaborate closely with Lamar Alexander on the Every Student Succeeds Act, which included Pay for Success provisions. She also teamed up with Paul Ryan to push bi-partisan legislation, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking act, that would greatly expand access to program data, including student-level data on the nation’s children.
Sara Watson served as Executive Vice President of America’s Promise in 2012, the year it released a study promoting the use of Pay for Success Finance for workforce development programs. Page six of the document notes that in addition to relieving pressure on state and federal budgets, early childhood social impact bonds will be able to be bought and sold by investors, traded worldwide and aggregated into asset-backed securities.
In 2014 Watson joined ReadyNation as their global program director. ReadyNation International is doing work in Romania, Uganda, and Australia. Members of their taskforce promote the investment potential of early childhood interventions to bodies including the United Nations and the World Bank. In 2016 they held an invitation-only event with representatives from Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Romania, and the United Kingdom in Marbach Germany. The gathering promoted “business activism” in the early childhood space and featured speakers from the World Bank, KPMG, and Bain & Co. Are these the people we want making decisions about our children’s care? People who see toddlers as human capital? Their education as an investment opportunity?
Absolutely not.
As I noted in my previous post, Pay-for-Success promoters are the sort who would elect NOT to feed hungry children unless they can make a return on their investment. Dugger/ReadyNation, Jones/Robin Hood, and Watson/Pew are not organizing business leaders to SOLVE global poverty. Rather, they are organizing business people to maximize the profit that can be extracted by strategically managing poverty and the securitized debt associated with public program service delivery. Their plan is to enrich the funders and non-profits that are willing to play the data-dashboard game, at the expense of humanity.
Previous posts about the ReadyNation Global Business Summit on Early Childhood:
Pre-K Profit: ReadyNation Hosts Global Business Leaders in New York City This November: Link
Making Childhood Pay: Arthur Rolnick, Steven Rothschild and ReadyNation: Link
Galton and Global Education Futures Forum: Scientific Racism Looking Backwards and Forwards: Link
Heckman and Pritzker Pitch Apps as Poverty “Solutions” Yielding A 13% Rate of Return: Link
The Chicago School of Economics and George Soros: New Theories for An Impoverished World: Link
Eight years (2012) or thereabouts and so far not much success !!!
Ok, six then !
This is a devastatingly clear and comprehensive addition to your work on monetizing the worth of human beings as viewed by profit seekers. I first encountered the “quality of life” metric in connection with eldercare. I was astonished to see that Robin Hood migrated the concept to preschool. I think I am most concerned that the investors and non-profits are working out of plain view of a larger public, and especially in education where critical inquiry seem to be concentrated on testing, charters, choice, teacher walkouts and ESSA, except for its support and subsidies for pay-for-success and other for-profit ventures. In any case, thanks for al you are doing. Your visuals are wonderful. In another life I would sign up to learn about the data and formatting required to generate them. I think that your work needs a much larger audience. You might consider sending this to Robert Reich.
Thanks so much for your kind words and the lead on the Robin Hood metrics. That was a real find. I agree that Pay for Success is not getting the attention it should. I think very few people have Heckman, Dugger, and Rolnick on their radar. It is difficult in highly partisan times to expose such a vast enterprise that is a fully bipartisan effort (in fact in some ways it is perhaps a bit more in the camp of the Democrats). So many have a vested interest in allowing this to move forward, and I fear the non-profits and higher ed folks will continue look the other way and draw their paychecks as the iPlay “smart” tables roll into preschools. Not sure exactly how much time we have, but things seem to be moving very quickly. If you know anyone in DC, hoping to make it to this on Thursday and would love company. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pay-for-success-making-the-new-100-million-fund-work-to-improve-lives-tickets-46554736470
Executive X: “Buddy! Hey, nice work, you really got something good going on here with this Robin Hood schtick… But, seriously, you couldn’t pay me to wear that costume.”
Paul Tudor Jones: “Oh yeah? Everyone has a price.”