This is the big debate in education philanthropy right now.
There are two camps: the “fix the system” people and the “replace
the system” people. There are philanthropists who only want to help the
system get better, and they only invest through public-school districts. And
then there is a group of philanthropists who don’t believe the system
can be fixed or should be fixed, and they only invest in alternatives to the
system, like voucher programs or charter schools. There are a few, like the
Gates Foundation, that attempt to be a bridge. When I was at Gates, our belief
was that if your long-term goal is to provide quality schools for all kids,
then you have to do both. One of our main educational initiatives was to start
new small high schools. It was mostly an outsider approach, and it was pretty
successful. Of the 1,200 new schools, 80 percent of them are going to be good
to very good. That’s a high rate of success. But we only reached, with
those schools, 3 percent or 4 percent of American high-school students. You
look at that and you say: “O.K., that was a good investment. It’s
going to stick; it has lots of sustainability — but it won’t grow
to scale fast enough.” If you want to make a real impact, you have to
work inside the system, too.
Vander Ark lays this out in a group interview on how to make the biggest difference in education philanthropy, but that basic dictum applies in all sorts of other fields too. If you want to instigate political change within the United State, you’re far better served by pushing for it within one of the two major parties than to start or support a third-party that’ll likely never win any significant elections. Institutions often survive out of their skill at self-preservation, not necessarily their skill at intended tasks. And the ones that have been around for long enough are very good at it. Within the myriad, intertwining narratives of The Wire is a constant insistence that this is the way institutions perpetuate themselves, and that any institution will eventually turn against those whom it serves. Any reform has to be predicated upon accepting that fact, and Mr. Ark does just that.