Author Archives: wrenchinthegears

Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Part One Here for the introduction and parts two, three, four and five. Feature image is from this New York Times article. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) has been a key player in outcomes-based contracting test cases emerging in the Bay Area over the past five years (here for more […]

I spent quite a few hours over winter break exploring various aspects of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s (SVCF) operations and have prepared a series of posts documenting what I have found thus far. This series is intended to provide context for my previous research on Pay for Success pilot programs being rolled out in […]

The scope of my research has expanded greatly since I began this journey five years ago. My starting point was standardized testing. At the time I was under the naive impression that withholding student test scores could in and of itself  forestall the closure or “turnaround” of neighborhood schools in Philadelphia. During the spring and […]

Featured image from OpenPTrack, body-based cyberlearning tools, developed as part of an NSF grant “Promoting Learning Through Annotation of Embodiment (PLAE),” Dr. Noel Enyedy, co-principal investigator. On December 11, 2018 the National Education Policy Center’s e-newsletter confronted the growing backlash against “personalized learning” in general and Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning in particular. Unfortunately, instead of […]

This post is the second in a Q&A exchange on social impact bonds and pay for success finance with UK blogger Privatising Schools. The focus of this post is Big Picture Learning. For additional background on Big Picture in Philadelphia check out my previous post here. Privatising Schools: Question 8 Let’s look at a specific […]

After a bit of a break, I am finally getting back to the Trans-Atlantic dialogue I had going between myself and UK blogger Privatising Schools. This post is the first in a Q&A series about social impact bonds and pay for success finance. Privatising Schools: Question Seven A key focus of your research is the […]

Hewlett Packard: The Tech Titan Few Education Activists Talk About Increasingly people are casting a wary eye in the direction of Silicon Valley, concerned about the power its billionaires wield over public education and society generally. While Gates, Zuckerberg, Hastings and Bezos have grabbed much of the spotlight, there is another tech influencer with a […]

We are living through desperate times: populations dislocated by climate catastrophe and dispossessed by state violence. Many are attempting, unsuccessfully, to navigate economic systems grounded in low-wage, disposable labor and insurmountable debt. The cost of living continues to rise, especially in cities where wealth is concentrated in the hands of speculative investors. Stable housing is […]

This past week will go down as an auspicious one for social impact investors and a foreboding one for the targets of their interventions: toddlers, job seekers, the unhoused, and those with mental illness. On November 1, 2018 corporate executives, military officers, athletes, and faith leaders converged on New York City to discuss the impending […]

Note: It appears the Futures Investment Initiative website was hacked at some point on October 22. 2018 and taken offline, so some of the embedded links below may not work. In the meantime, you can access information about the event via an archived Wayback Machine link here. Advisors list for the event here. Against the backdrop of a dismembered […]