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Posted on Thu, August. 23, 2007

Education Foundation gets support from valley companies

A year-old foundation attempting to improve San Jose's school system is enlisting the help of valley companies and has already raised $3.48 million.

On Sept. 14, the Silicon Valley Education Foundation will sponsor its fourth public forum in a series of six, this one called Investing in Education: Why Private Dollars Matter.

The list of panelists is an indicator of the support that the foundation has been able to rally in its short existence. Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe Systems Inc.; Michael Kirst, professor of education and business administration at Stanford University; and Alberto Ibarguen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will discuss the challenges and successes they have had trying to improve Silicon Valley's education system. Mike O'Farrell, former vice president, community affairs at Applied Materials Inc. will deliver the introduction. Rep. Zoe Lofgren and representatives from Flextronics International Ltd. based in Singapore, Cisco Systems. Inc. of San Jose, SanDisk Corp. of Milpitas and Nvidia Corp. of Santa Clara on the guest list.

The fact that Santa Clara County has 34 school districts allows for a lot of local control of education, but it also makes it difficult for businesses and others to help improve the overall system, says David Cohen, managing editor and a member of the community action committee at Hitachi Data Systems Corp. in Santa Clara. And businesses are becoming more and more aware of the importance of that system.

"You don't have a workforce if you don't have an education system," Cohen says. His organization has provided financial support to the foundation since its inception. Hitachi says it has been pleased with the foundation's ability to forge consensus among participants in the effort and with its success in developing programs.

"The forum has developed a series of things that yield very positive results," Cohen says. One of those is a program in which teachers can apply for $500 grants to do innovative school projects. Another is a new Web site the foundation is about to launch that will allow teachers, people in industry and others to load lesson plans that can be used and improved by local teachers and those as far away as Africa.

"The distribution mechanism becomes irrelevant," says Muhammed Chaudhry, president and CEO of the Education Foundation.
Chaudhry says businesses are concerned that their investments in education don't get lost in the system. "We're targeting the business community and how they can invest in education to make an impact," Chaudhry says.

The valley is moving towards a "knowledge economy," Chaudhry says, one based on innovation rather than jobs requiring repetitive tasks. So science, technology, math and engineering education take on increasing importance. And that's not lost on industry.

But businesses and foundations are becoming a little more particular about where their dollars go.

"At the Knight Foundation, we're really shifting from a family that's doing charity work, where giving is an end unto itself, to an organization of doing social investing, which has a different set of expectations and requirements," Ibarguen says.

His foundation is meeting in San Jose in September and will consider a multi-million grant to the Education Foundation.

The Knight foundation has already given $2.1 million to be used over five years.

Companies realize the long term impacts of investing in science, technology, engineering and math skills education now, Chaudhry says.