Our Approach to Philanthropy | The Trump Foundation

'Philanthropic foundations can choose to play one of three roles: driver, partner or catalyst’ (Joel Fleisham)

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The responsibility for educational quality and achievement lies in the hands of the government and its agencies. Israel already invests more than 8% of its GDP in education and the education system operates in a centralistic manner. Nonetheless, alongside government there are numerous players in Israel that work hand in hand across the education system, taking on different roles. Typically they supplement and complement government activity, however sometimes they work independently of the government and even take critical and adversarial positions. These players include schools of education, teachers colleges, research and development organizations, intervention programs, school networks, teacher unions, advocacy groups, and many others. Largely speaking, if the government is mostly focused on the operations of education, the added value of these private entities is when they prove to be innovative, experimental and challenging.

The experience of countries that have managed to improve their performance in education in recent years indicates that success depends on the extent of alignment and coordination between the government and all of these entities and their joint effort toward common goals. A special role is reserved for philanthropy in the shared effort to improve education. In countries where there is a philanthropic tradition and infrastructure, foundations act as a catalyst for innovation. Foundations identify and disseminate best practices; they convene the players to agree on shared goals and measures; and they push wider circles of participants in pursuit of the focused objectives.

The specific role that a philanthropic foundation chooses to embrace is dependent on various considerations and circumstances. In his book The Foundation, Joel Fleishman writes: “Philanthropic foundations can choose to play one of three roles: driver, partner or catalyst”:

A foundation acts as a driver when its social goal is clear and can be realized through a practical strategy. The foundation analyzes the existing situation and formulates the plan for progressing from the current situation to the desired situation. The foundation establishes new organizations and mobilizes existing organizations in order to achieve the objective.
A foundation acts as a partner when there are well-established organizations or authorities that bear the responsibility for realizing the foundation’s objectives. In this case, the foundation shares with its partner the important decisions for formulating a strategy and together they support the organizations that put it into practice.
A foundation acts as a catalyst when it is not possible to design a practical strategy for realizing its objective. This is the case when many external variables operate in parallel and there are large gaps in knowledge and capabilities. The foundation supports organizations that operate in this field, hoping that some of them will succeed and that together they will generate momentum for driving change.

The Trump Foundation has adopted three strategies in order to advance the high-quality teaching of Mathematics and the Sciences in secondary schools in Israel: attracting talent into teaching, nurturing the clinical expertise of teachers and demonstrating support networks for quality teaching at scale.

Attracting Talent into Teaching

Philanthropy is unable to take responsibility for harnessing talented people to the teaching profession at scale. There are many elements that candidates take into consideration when thinking about a possible career in teaching, the majority of which are beyond the influence of a philanthropic foundation. Teaching becomes more attractive as salaries improve, public support is felt, policy implementation is stable and academic performance is on a positive trajectory.

Indeed it seem as all these elements are developing in Israel over the past few years, as the country has enjoyed a decade of economic prosperity and relative security stability. As a result, the government was able to sign new wage agreements with teachers and invest considerably in educational programs. Early signs of improvement are evident, with a slight increase in student achievement, more talented applicants for teaching studies, and a sense of public optimism.

This window of opportunity must be maintained with coordination and persistence in order to make a real impact on the attractiveness of the teaching profession and eventually on academic performance. As a philanthropic foundation, it is clear to us that we must engage with this subject as a catalyst in order to create examples for success and toencourage others to act quickly and determinedly.

We also hope that a change in the emphasis of the teaching profession from one that is industrial in nature to one that is more clinical, will make a positive contribution. In Israel, clinical professions such as medicine, psychology, social work and special education succeed in attracting excellence and their acceptance standards are high.

Nurturing the Clinical Expertise of Teachers

The Trump Foundation acknowledges that high quality teaching requires practical skills that manifest themselves in a classroom and school setting. These skills enable teachers to address each student in a heterogeneous class, to diagnose their abilities, to set high goals for each of them, to adapt individualized teaching methods, to monitor their learning progress and to provide them with continuous constructive feedback.

In Israel, teacher training and professional development traditionally takes place mostly in universities, teacher colleges and district training facilities. Their natural tendency is to establish knowledge of the subject matter and their training is generally conducted in lecture halls and on campuses outside of the work environment.

As a first step, the Trump Foundation will work with these institutions in order to help them embrace a student-focused teaching approach and to develop the building blocks required for professional development that is more practical and even clinical. At a later stage, the foundation will act as a driver with partners in order to link the building blocks and establish a center of expertise that will promote practical skills of teaching in Israel.

Demonstrating Support Networks for Quality Teaching At-Scale

Excellent teachers in the classroom are central to enabling each student to reach a high level of achievement. Nonetheless, high quality teaching cannot be executed in isolation by a miraculous teacher, as it requires support in the classroom, in the school, in the community and in the city. This support network includes a combination of practices, techniques, technologies, routines, collaborations, infrastructure and management.

Our first target in this regard will be to help develop the necessary professional infrastructure, including tools for diagnostics and monitoring of learning, student-centered communities of practice, improved personnel management practices and instructional coaching for teachers. Documented cases of success will be shared with the education system to generate interest. Later on, the foundation will operate as a partner with a small number of local authorities and school networks in order to demonstrate the successful implementation of all of the elements combined. The plan is to choose the partners through a competitive process and to focus on those who are interested and able to promote the teaching of Mathematics and Science. The goal of this process will be to demonstrate feasibility and to create examples for imitation and learning for others, with the hope and expectation that they will choose to operate in a similar spirit.