Me, this afternoon, in The 74:
The $750 million that Bloomberg’s foundation plans to spend over five years may seem like a pittance against the backdrop of a system that annually spends 1,000 times that amount, and especially as almost $200 billion in federal COVID aid is working its way through the system. Yet one lesson of decades of education reform is that relatively small amounts of money, well targeted, can leverage more change than larger but diffuse slugs of funding. Bloomberg’s $750 million isn’t small in any real sense — it’s a lot of money, and the kind of commitment that can tangibly change lives — but let’s hope this ends up being a down payment on a longer-term commitment.
It’s also an exciting jolt to a sector that needs it.
All this is why the lack of enthusiasm from the education reform and charter school world over the Bloomberg announcement was as noteworthy as the commitment itself…
