New Profit is on a continuing journey to explore how it can best drive transformational and equitable change in education systems and beyond. In order to share its learnings and catalyze conversation, New Profit Managing Partner Alex Cortez has published a new essay on Systems Change and Parent Power in Education.

The premise of this essay is that, while education philanthropy has been catalytic in supporting innovations in learning, these innovations have yet to scale to transform education systems because education philanthropy, and more broadly education reform, tends to rely on a Field of Dreams as a theory of change, paraphrasing the movie’s iconic line, “if you build it, they will come.”

This theory presumes that if education reformers and philanthropists are righteous in their intent about addressing inequity and they are getting promising results, then that’s all it takes for others to broadly follow them into the field.

However, this theory of change has two crucial flaws.

• First, it presumes education systems are rational systems, when they are in fact political systems. If the innovations we want to scale require disrupting the status quo of money, power, interest and values, then systems tend to organize to preserve themselves against change.
• Second, efforts to change education systems often neglect to be representative of and responsive to the parents and communities they are trying to serve.

We will never achieve the scale of change we want in education philanthropy unless we are willing to take on systems change, which requires changing mindsets, relationships and power to, in turn, change policies, practices and resource flows in education. And we’ll never succeed at systems change unless we are willing to wrestle with our biases towards parents and communities, support them in developing and exercising their innate power, and recognize that they need to drive the agenda.

Success in this work is not about how we in philanthropy invite parents to OUR table. Rather, it is about the investment and effort we need to make in order to earn trust and credibility so that parents invite us to sit at THEIR table and contribute to a locally-driven agenda for change in their community.

This essay shares our work-in-progress journey on this, as well as the wisdom and guidance parent leaders in education have shared with us on how we work to earn a trusted, credible role with them.

We welcome your thoughts and feedback, and please feel free to share this. To view the full essay please use the e-reader below or click here to download.