I have followed the fortunes of Pittsburgh and its sometimes troubled, often embattled, and always fragile public schools since I left the city in 1989 to become the executive director of The George Gund Foundation in Cleveland. I was astounded to learn last week that three well-respected Pittsburgh-based foundations -- Heinz, Grable and Pittsburgh -- had taken the very public action of discontinuing all their grantmaking to the school system.
Their joint letter to the district makes clear their frustration in their dealings with the system and its current governance and leadership. However, their act of condemnation and withdrawal is a great disservice to the parents and students of the system, let alone the many administrators and teachers who work every day toward operating and improving the schools.
I have been involved for 14 years with the Cleveland public schools as a private foundation grantmaker, which followed 12 years of work with the Pittsburgh Public Schools while employed at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. My three sons were all educated in the Pittsburgh Public Schools; I served as a parent representative, vice chairman of a PTO and chair of the board's Magnet School Advisory Committee. I assumed other school-based and community-wide roles during my stay at the Allegheny Conference.
As a foundation fund-raiser for and grantmaker to two urban public school systems, it has been, and continues to be, my contention that the foundation world has the unique opportunity to support risk-taking, innovation and creativity in public institutions. We must be that small, though significant, resource that can stay the course, for better or for worse. I would never argue that either opportunity -- risk-taking or staying the course -- is easy. But it is the requirement for being effectively at the table.
What Heinz, Grable and Pittsburgh have done, frankly, is to cut and run.
I know what the argument is: This is the only way to get the school board's attention, and it could be that getting their attention in some draconian manner is necessary. But isn't that the role of the mayor and/or the state or, even more importantly, parents and citizens through a political process, rather than a few somewhat isolated folks sitting on their relatively nonaccountable piles of tax-exempt dollars?
Certainly, the state of Ohio's takeover of the Cleveland Municipal School District in 1995 sharpened this community's focus on the schools' deplorable state and the need for change. This focus led eventually to a new form of modified mayoral-controlled governance of the district. Two foundation executive directors led that charge by co-chairing a task force that, over several years, produced state legislation to that end. Even during that contentious and often despairing period, the Cleveland foundation community did not withdraw its support from the school system or the array of nonprofit organizations that served as critical friends of the district.
I would suggest that the withdrawal of foundation support in Pittsburgh seriously undermines the philanthropic community's capacity to be helpful if and when the community actively engages in similar discussions of school reform. It also sends a message to local and national philanthropic peers that there is cause to disinvest in this system at a moment, I would argue, when it is most in need of outside support.
The three foundations have attracted the attention of media and the leadership community. But I am afraid that the message to the folks in the trenches -- the teachers, parents and students of the district and the school board, however dysfunctional it may or may not be -- is that "it's our way or the highway."
The three grantmakers indicated their willingness to return to the fray if things get better. My question -- wearing a citizen, rather than a foundation, hat --might then be: Who needs fair-weather friends?
A hard-to-repress arrogance or, more accurately, a know-it-allness, comes on occasion to all with a foundation leadership assignment, myself included. Though issues of governance and leadership in the Pittsburgh schools are vitally important, it could be that this moment is also a wake-up call to the foundation community: New structures for building productive, lasting relationships with the Pittsburgh Public Schools need to be established. Where are the intermediary organizations that are always closer to the ground than the foundations, and are often staffed by competent, seasoned brokers who can operate to good result in the real world of the rough-and-tumble of public education reform?
In the world of journalism, there is an old saying among reporters: "Editorial writers are the people who come down from the top of the mountain to shoot the wounded."
It is unfortunate that these three well-intended Pittsburgh foundations may have produced a similar result.
E-mail this story 
