Category Archives: Blog

I wrote the piece below in November 2015 during the lead up to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which passed the following month and cemented into place “Pay for Success” finance of education delivery in the United States. The Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools hosted that post, since I had not yet started my […]

I’m worried about universal pre-k. Let me repeat. I’m VERY worried about universal pre-k. I worried when Michael Bloomberg and John Arnold supported it in Philadelphia. I worried when I learned about social impact bonds and “pay for success” finance. I worry few people know about these new methods of intrusive pre-k data collection: vests […]

Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Part Five Here for the introduction and parts one, two, three, and four. Community foundations were established a century ago to aggregate assets from individuals, families and businesses and advance the activities of nonprofits operating in a particular geographic area, hence the “community” designation. The first example is generally considered to be The Cleveland Foundation, […]

Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Part Four Click here for the introduction and parts one, two, three, and five. In a 2013 interview for the Mission Investors Exchange publication, “Community Foundation Field Guide to Impact Investing,” Chief Giving Officer Ellen Clement Glass stated there had been talk of exploring impact investing as early as 2006, before the […]

Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Part Three Here for introduction and parts one, two, four, and five. Last year, the 800+ community foundations in the United States held a combined total of over $91 billion in assets and awarded $8.3 billion in grants. As non-profits are incorporated into the “evidence-based” impact agenda, it is important to keep […]

Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Part Two  Here for the introduction and parts one, three, four, and five. Not only is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) among the largest foundations in the country, it is also situated in the belly of the beast. The Bay Area is where vast amounts of venture capital have combined with […]

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 […]