Ex-Microsoft CEO (No, Not That One) Giving Big to K-12

Don’t look now, but another tech billionaire is using his vast fortune to make a mark on K-12 education.

The Ballmer Group, created by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, has quietly committed more than a quarter-billion dollars to K-12-related organizations and projects over the last two years, according to an Education Week analysis.

The flow of money includes more than $100 million granted to organizations working to improve opportunities for children and families in poverty, as well as a $59 million investment in a for-profit software company seeking to ease the flow of student data between K-12 school districts and nonprofits.

“These grants place the Ballmer Group among the larger funders in K-12 education,” said Sarah Reckhow, an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University who tracks philanthropic giving in education.

They also reflect an approach to K-12 education that diverges in significant ways from those of other high-profile education funders from the technology sector, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Yes, the Ballmers have given more than $10 million to Teach For America, plus millions more to a handful of charter school networks. They are also big believers in the power of data and technology. And like Zuckerberg, the couple has structured their philanthropic organization as a limited liability corporation, rather than a traditional foundation. That means they can use the Ballmer Group to pursue a mix of charitable donations, for-profit investments, and political activity, all with minimal transparency requirements.

But to date, at least, the couple has not sought to fundamentally disrupt public education. They haven’t thrown their considerable fortune behind efforts to spread the adoption of personalized learning in K-12. And they haven’t focused on issues like academic standards and curricula.

Instead, the Ballmer Group’s known activity to date primarily reflects a “wraparound approach” to education, said Reckhow. It emphasizes the community context in which children grow up, and it relies heavily on people with extensive experience in the social-services field and deep roots in the communities where grants are being awarded.

“When you look at schools through a neighborhood lens, they look different,” said Nina Revoyr, the executive director of the Ballmer Group’s work in Los Angeles who previously worked for more than two decades in education and family mental health. “The idea is that the community drives change, and people from multiple sectors [should] come together to push towards better outcomes.”

$2 Billion Fund

Revoyr recalled the first time she met Connie and Steve Ballmer in 2016, when she was still working as the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Children’s Institute Inc., a nonprofit supporting Los Angeles families dealing with challenges related to behavioral health and trauma.

“I drove them around the housing projects in Watts in my Subaru,” Revoyr said of the Ballmers. “They didn’t have an entourage. They wanted to talk to people and meet folks who were affected by our services.”

Now worth an estimated $43 billion, Steve Ballmer got his start at Microsoft back in 1980, when he became the thirtieth employee hired by Bill Gates.

By 1998, he was the company’s president. Two years later, Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO.

Upon retiring in 2014, Ballmer bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. He and Connie, a former public-relations executive at Microsoft who is now a general partner at the youth-focused funding collaborative Blue Meridian Partners, established the Ballmer Group.

To fund the initiative, the couple has contributed more than $2 billion to a donor-advised fund at Goldman Sachs.

Their biggest known donation to date—$60 million to a national nonprofit called StriveTogether—embodies the Ballmer Group’s approach. StriveTogether focuses on reducing racial and economic inequality by bringing together school districts and groups providing services to children and families. The Ballmers’ grant aims to help the organization expand such partnerships and share what it learns with other youth-development organizations.

“We have witnessed the amazing power and possibility of intensive, inclusive community-based work,” said Connie Balmer, who has worked for years on early-childhood issues in Washington state, in a statement released at the time.

Increasing economic mobility for children and families stuck in intergenerational poverty is the overarching goal connecting all of the Ballmer Group’s work, Revoyr said. That means a wide-angle focus on everything from workforce development to criminal justice reform to support for those who have experienced trauma. Funding is often provided for general operating support, to help established organizations scale up their operations. And while the Ballmers have a national agenda, they are focused most intently on three regions of the country: Detroit, where Steve grew up; Washington state, where the couple now lives; and Los Angeles County, where the Clippers are located.

The Ballmer Group’s K-12 work, Revoyr said, fits into that broader context.

The organization does provide direct support to charter schools, including a $600,000 grant to a California-based nonprofit called Para Los Niños that also operates preschools and provides mental health services.

But the Ballmer Group has given much larger sums to outside-of-school groups providing educational support services, including a $30 million grant to a nonprofit summer-learning provider called Building Educated Leaders for Life. The Ballmers have also funded advocacy organizations, including a $525,000 grant to a nonprofit called InnerCity Struggle, which helped lead a successful campaign to change the way public education dollars are allocated in Los Angeles.

In addition, Revoyr said, the Ballmer Group has given directly to efforts involving traditional K-12 districts.

That includes a pair of grants totaling $16.5 million to the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an independent nonprofit that is working with the L.A. Unified district to improve 18 low-performing schools while keeping them under district management.

“It doesn’t always have to be about charters,” Revoyr said. “The vast majority of the kids we care about the most are in traditional public schools.”

Transparency Concerns

Revoyr was quick to note that the Ballmer Group’s strategy isn’t “reactive” to some of the challenges faced by other large K-12 funders in recent years. The organization has worked in partnership with a number of other philanthropies, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Blue Meridian network, she said.

Still, the Ballmers represent a “leading example” of a shift away from some of the biggest trends in edu-philanthropy over the past two decades, said David Callahan, the founder and editor of the digital news site Inside Philanthropy.

“For a long time, we had many philanthropists coming to education with a pretty narrow ed-reform agenda focused on schools and systems,” Callahan said. “What we’re seeing now is an important shift in the landscape, with more funders showing up and saying, ‘OK, we buy the idea that poverty matters.’ ”

That’s not to say everything about the Ballmer Group is different.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Steve Ballmer—a long-time tech executive and avowed “data geek,” in Callahan’s words—is, like Gates and Zuckerberg before him, interested in building up the data infrastructure in and around the K-12 sector.

The Ballmers have also gotten on board with the trend of merging charitable giving with venture-capital investments and calling it all philanthropy.

Those elements of the couple’s approach are reflected in their hefty investment in Social Solutions Global, to help the for-profit company develop nonprofit case-management software that will be able to integrate with the student information systems used by most K-12 school districts.

“We want to help raise the bar on the capabilities of software offered to social-service organizations,” the Ballmers wrote in a joint op-ed about the investment published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy last August. “It’s capitalism being given a chance to advance the complex work of addressing poverty.”

By structuring the Ballmer Group as an LLC, the Ballmers have certainly given themselves more levers to pull in service of their goals, said Reckhow, the Michigan State professor. But they also seem to have embraced the notion that billionaires working to reshape public policy and service delivery don’t need to be transparent about what they’re doing.

That could lead to profound conflicts of interest.

As with concerns leveled against the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, for example, it’s not hard to imagine the Ballmer Group providing campaign donations to a school board member who may ultimately be voting on contracts with a software company they’ve invested in, or a nonprofit they’ve helped fund.

Officials from the Ballmer Group, however, told Education Week they would not commit to publicly disclose all the organization’s grants, investments, lobbying work, or support for elected officials and campaigns.

“I don’t love the trend,” Reckhow said. “It would be really nice if we could move towards the expectation that if you’re going to work in this space, you share what you’re doing and operate transparently.”