The Ballmer Group recently announced a big gift for the youngest children in its home state of Washington. The grants, which total $43 million, will focus on “building, strengthening and diversifying the state’s early childhood education workforce,” according to the announcement.
Founded in 2015 by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie, the Ballmer Group funds economic mobility and opportunity work, with a focus on children and families. Increasing access to quality early childhood education is clearly one way to do this, as research demonstrates that early care has multiple lifelong benefits. One recent study found, for example, that children who attended preschool were more likely to go to college than those who didn’t, even though both groups had similar backgrounds.
In the face of all the evidence that quality early education can transform lives, we’re doing all we can to make sure every child has access, right? Wrong. The U.S. early education system is in crisis, and the pandemic made it worse. Last year, early care measures included in the Biden administration’s Build Back Better legislation were scrapped. The administration is determined to try again this year, and advocates are pushing ECE initiatives at the state and local level, as IP reported.
Philanthropic support for ECE has also lagged, but as IP pointed out in the brief “Giving for Early Childhood Education,” there are signs of increasing commitment. For years, philanthropy leaned toward higher-profile funding areas like K-12 and healthcare, but more funders are turning to early childhood, including the Heising-Simons Foundation, Ben and Lucy Ana Walton’s Zoma Foundation and Blue Meridian Partners, which counts the Ballmer Group, the Gates Foundation and MacKenzie Scott among its partners. Other major ECE funders include Annie E. Casey Foundation, Buffett Early Childhood Fund, Pritzker Children’s Initiative and the Kellogg Foundation.
The Ballmer Group has stepped up for early childhood education, among other ed priorities, as IP reported last year, and its recent $43 million commitment is zeroing in on early educators. Ballmer will provide $38 million to the University of Washington for high school internships and early education scholarships to make access to the field more affordable and increase diversity. The gift will also support two endowed doctoral fellowships and two endowed professorships, as well as a staff person to recruit and retain students of color. An additional $4 million will underwrite Child Care Aware of Washington’s advocacy work, and $1.65 million will support Pathwaves WA’s fellowship program for leaders of color working in the area of early childhood policy.
As the foundation explained in its announcement, “Ensuring access to high-quality early childhood education requires a deep, diverse field of excellent early learning educators and services.”
Diversifying the early ed workforce
My Brother’s Teacher, one of the University of Washington programs Ballmer is funding, aims to diversify the early learning workforce by providing mentoring, internships and scholarships for students pursuing careers in early ed. The program, which is part of UW’s Cultivate Learning program, recruits male Black and brown high school students from Seattle Public Schools, who then participate in college coursework at North Seattle College and paid summer internships in Seattle’s early learning programs. My Brother’s Teacher also receives funding from the Stranahan Foundation, Seattle Promise Program, and the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) Levy of Seattle Public Schools. Cultivate Learning was formed with a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The number of Black male educators in K-12 education is vanishingly small, as IP has reported, even though research underscores the benefits to Black students (and to all students) of having even one teacher of color. Just 7% of teachers are Black, according to the Pew Research Center, and about 2% are Black men. The number of Black early educators is even smaller — less than 1% — and they earn just 76% of what their white counterparts do, on average, according to the Center for American Progress.
William White, the founding director of My Brother’s Teacher, is one of those Black educators. As a teacher in Virginia and Washington, D.C., he was one of a small number of Black male educators in the schools where he taught. For White, the scenario was familiar: The first and only Black educator he had in elementary school was his kindergarten teacher, and he had only a handful of teachers of color after that. “That’s part of the reason there aren’t more Black male teachers,” he said. “For kids it’s, ‘How can I go into a profession where I don’t see myself?’ Another factor is that Black male teachers are typically put in disciplinary roles. It’s like we’re just there to discipline the kids, not to actually help them grow.”
White, who earned his Ph.D. in special education (with a focus in early childhood education) at the University of Washington, has directed My Brother’s Teacher since its founding in 2020. Not all of the high school students White recruits for the program want to work in early education, at least initially, he says. They often want to teach older kids, or have different aspirations altogether, but when they participate in the early education internships, many find that they like working with young children and change their minds.
He emphasizes the importance of providing teachers of color for the youngest children, citing research by Johns Hopkins that points to the benefits of having a Black teacher by third grade. “I always put it out to students that the sooner you get in front of little kids, the more impact you’ll have,” he said.
My Brother’s Teacher participants (called MBT Fellows) start their internships in 11th grade, and when it is time for them to apply to college, White and his staff support them through the process, help them apply for scholarships and provide ongoing mentoring. But White begins recruiting young males of color as early as middle school. Younger students participate in service learning projects, and White makes sure they are exposed to role models — including himself.
“I’m helping them see that this is a pathway they can take and have an impact,” he said. “I always tell students, ‘I want you to be the teacher you never had.’ I asked a student recently to give me an example of a teacher he really liked, and he couldn’t think of a single one. That deters kids from going on to college, because they think that school is boring, not for them. But when they see me, I did high school, I did college – four degrees later, and I love what I’m doing. They see that and they’re like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s possible for me.’”
More than scholarships
Recruiting students early and providing scholarships to mitigate undergraduate and graduate school debt will only go so far to expand and diversify the early ed workforce. Dismally low pay and often poor working conditions are major barriers that keep many talented students from pursuing early ed. According to a report by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, ”Despite their important, complex labor, early educators’ working conditions undermine their wellbeing and create devastating financial insecurity well into retirement age.”
The Ballmer Group acknowledged these barriers when it announced the new grants: “More work than scholarships alone will be required to increase the number of people entering early childhood education and bolster the number of people of color teaching in the field.… Only with long-term system change can we ensure that scholarship recipients are moving into a career that values the importance of their work.”
That’s why the foundation is also allocating funds to support more fundamental changes in our system of early care. A portion of the recent round of funding will go to Child Care Aware of Washington, which advocates policies to improve “teacher retention, pay and professional development,” according to the announcement. It also supports Pathwaves WA’s fellowship for mid-career professionals working in early education policy in Washington state.
In a 2019 blog post, Terri Ludwig, Ballmer Group’s president, argued that philanthropy alone can’t solve the early education issue. “We need to inspire significant public investment,” she wrote. “That’s why one of our strategies is to invest in strong state advocacy to stimulate policy changes that can broaden opportunities for young children.”
Given Steve and Connie Ballmer’s wealth — he is currently worth close to $90 billion, according to Forbes, making him No. 10 on the 2023 list of the world’s billionaires — the foundation’s commitment to ECE is significant. This funder can move tremendous sums to the cause, and hopefully, we’ll see further focus on policy and structural change in years to come. Those involved clearly understand what is at stake. In her post, Ludwig pointed to evidence of the benefits of ECE and concluded, “Given the data, it’s baffling why our nation underinvests in our little ones.”
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