New Leader at Carnegie

Stanford's Tony Bryk, a member of Education Sector's research advisory committee, was recently appointed the new President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Many people don't realize just how influential Carnegie has been since it was chartered by an Act of Congress in 1906. It developed the Teachers Annuity and Insurance Association, which become the TIAA in TIAA-CREF, the giant educator's retirement and insurance company. It founded the Educational Testing Service, ETS, which publishes the SAT, GRE, and AP tests. It sponsored the Flexner Report, which completely revolutionized medical education in America, moving medical schools from a group of semi-professional, unregulated institutions with dodgy, inconsistent standards and questionable quality to the much more uniformly high-quality, well-regulated institutions we have today.

The Carnegie classifications, which put higher educaiton institutions into categories like "Research I," "Research II," "Comprehensive / Master's"," etc.(they've since altered the names) remain the dominant way of categorizing colleges and universities, and define the research status hierarcy that institutions try to climb. It played a signficant role in the discussion that led to the creation of Pell grants in the early 1970s. Former Carnegie president Ernest Boyer's books High School and College, published in the 1980s, were very influential and remain (somewhat depressingly) accurately description of the challenges those institutions face.

Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation's history suggests that higher education is arguably more subject to positive influence via philanthropic/foundation initiative than K-12. This is partly a matter of scale and governance. The vast majority of college students attend one of about 3,500 two- and four-year colleges--compared to 90,000 schools--with more concentrated governance and control. But I also think higher education is inherently more sensitive to the things that philanthropies are in a position to change: public perception, the consensus of research--information, in other words. Colleges are also intensely status- and peer-conscious, so if you can leverage a few key actors, the rest will follow of their own accord.

Most education philanthropy focuses on K-12, because those challenges seems more urgent, but I think that many organizations--particularly the big new foundations getting into the game--are missing a chance to make a lasting difference in the higher ed arena. If they achieve only a fraction of what the Carnegie Foundation has over the last century, it will be time and money well spent.

Update: A reader points out that refering to the Carnegie Foundation as a "philanthropy" is confusing, since it doesn't give out money like, for example, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (an ES funder), but rather does most of its work in-house. Good point, I was thinking about non-profit policy-focused organizations generally, many of which operate with some mix of in-house and sponsored work, but that wasn't clear.

The reader also notes that the Carnegie Foundation developed the "Carnegie Unit," which is still the standard way that high school courses are categorized and measured. When someone says that high school students who want to go to college should take at at least three "units" of math, four English, etc., etc., they're talking about Carnegie units. Apparently this was an outgrowth of the development of TIAA -- they needed a standard way of measuring how many courses teachers taught. This illustrates a larger point--also inherent in the story of the Carnegie classification of colleges and universities--which is that defining the way things are measured often has more lasting influence than the measurement itself.