Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 4 | An Interview with Marta Tienda, page 4 (low bandwidth)

CR: Now let’s turn to the world of foundations. You have served on a number of prominent foundation boards—including Carnegie Corporation of New York—and you are also the recipient of foundation grants. I think you have a unique perspective on this not-well-understood American institution, the foundation. How important do you think foundations are? Are they “levers for change” in our society, as many say? Are they important institutions that deserve the support and protection of the tax exemption they currently have?

MT: I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to serve not only the Corporation but also on the boards of the Russell Sage, Kaiser and W.T. Grant foundations as well as on the board of the Jacobs Foundation of Switzerland and have some insights as an academic who has sought and won foundation grants.

From my perspective, the importance of foundations—where they are indispensable—is that they can afford to take risks as well as trail blaze, set standards and study issues in ways that our government, for instance, cannot. Second, foundations have the organizational capacity for change and for maintaining institutional memory, qualities that are not endemic to government, particularly at high levels, because they’re constantly churning with political shifts and currents. Foundations have a vision, a mission. At the Corporation, we have revisited our mission many times and asked, what did Andrew Carnegie really want to do? Even in setting our spending rules we keep asking, where are we going? Are we still being true to the mission that our founder gave us?

In the same way that Supreme Court justices interpret the Constitution, the board of trustees at a foundation also interprets a foundation’s mission within the contemporary period. What does it mean today versus what it meant when the institution was founded? And while supporting projects that further the mission, how do foundations make the most effective use of their limited resources? To answer those questions, foundation trustees and staff must do quite a bit of strategic planning.

But with focus and strong leadership, foundations can make a huge difference. At the Russell Sage Foundation, for example, the area of behavioral economics was something that was nurtured. At first, the staff of Russell Sage was seen almost like a band of renegades. Behavioral economics? People asked what that was. Now it’s a very established part of how social scientists think about the combination of psychology, economics and individual behavior that transcends any one of those single fields alone.

At the Corporation, support for different aspects of education at different times in the foundation’s long history has always been the key to fulfilling Andrew Carnegie’s mandate to promote “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” Take the Corporation’s current work in teacher education: it’s always been accepted that teachers are trained, that it’s just something that happens. But we’ve also taken for granted that the training was good enough to produce high-quality teachers who can provide effective education to all students, which is not the case. By working with schools of education through the Corporation’s Teachers for a New Era initiative, the foundation is helping the schools to improve, to do better in training and nurturing the best possible teachers, who studies have shown to be the most important factor in student achievement. It’s a long-term undertaking.

The data also shows us that teacher expectations have a lot to do with how a child performs in school. Foundations can support that kind of research and learning and truly make a big difference in how people craft programs and policies, and in how successful interventions get implemented.

CR: You’re saying that foundations have the capital and the patience to support such projects?

MT: Yes, they do and they have the flexibility to decide, for example, that they will work on an issue for five years or ten years and stay the course. That’s hard, not to look for the quick fix. Redesigning urban high schools, which is also a top priority now for the Corporation, is a difficult problem to tackle, but it hasn’t stopped us from investing millions of dollars in big cities, including New York, with its large, comprehensive highs schools that have not been the most productive or efficient or produced the best educational outcomes for students. If institutions like the Corporation turn away from problems like that, who will take them on?

Another important role for foundations is their emphasis on public policy—you can’t be any more strategic than trying to have influence in that arena. And one way to have that kind of influence is through the support of research and scholarship targeted toward specific problems. Policymakers need that kind of information to develop effective programs and policies, but in academia—the main source of the type of research I’m talking about—professors don’t often think about how they can play a role in the public policy dynamic in this country or about the more far-ranging implications of their work. They just carry out the scholarship or the science, have it published and then the work ends. But foundations can help with the follow-through. It’s like tennis: if you just hit the ball and you don’t follow through, you don’t know where the ball is going to go. Foundation support for research—and its dissemination—can help get the results into the hands that can do the most good with it, help to connect academics and policymakers so that high-quality, effective research findings can be used to arrive at solutions for the problems that beset society—or at least, to start along that road.

CR: Dissemination is critical in your view?

MT: I always tell my students that if you don’t write down what you think or what you learn, you can have the most brilliant idea of the century but it will get lost. Many foundations have made getting the word out an integral part of their mission because what good does the most valuable research do if nobody knows about it? But the success and importance of foundations doesn’t rest on one single factor. Leadership and vision are paramount—there’s just no substitute for them. They set the tone, the direction and the priorities, but no single person can be responsible for that alone, especially in larger organizations. After serving for a number of years on foundation boards, it’s clear to me that a well-balanced board is important because it adds perspective. A good board is a working board that is there to support the senior staff and the entire leadership of a foundation, but it also doesn’t just sign off on everything because then there’s no value added.

The government doesn’t realize what an ally it has in the foundation world. Foundations really do buttress many government programs, which in countless cases have been implemented as the result of foundation-supported research or models. Foundations are the nation’s partners in addressing many of its most critical problems, and will certainly continue in that role for years to come.

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