Education
We are motivated by the principle that every child in this nation deserves the opportunity to receive an excellent education â which is, in turn, the foundation of our national strength.
The late economist Milton Friedman believed that America's broken educational system lies at the heart of our nation's troubles, and directed his own foundation to work solely on the promotion of market-based K-12 education reform. The Koret Foundation agrees with Dr. Friedman that educational bureaucracies have managed to maintain what he called âa tyranny of the status quo.â As a result, the strongest driver of improvements in today's public school system is a competitive pressure exerted through parental choice. We believe that the strengthening of an educational marketplace is the most effective way to improve our Kâ12 public education system.
At the core of Koret's education strategy is the policy work of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars who share a professional passion for education. Based at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the three pillars of the task force's K-12 policy recommendations are choice, transparency, and accountability.
The Koret Foundation supports the work of the Task Force that allows them to conduct original research and analysis, and facilitates their opportunities to meet and pursue collaborative work. Their research informs much of our grantmaking in the K-12 educational arena.
Our experience and hard data demonstrate that this works: The Koret Task Force has helped to shape the national discussion on K-12 educational reform. Koret-supported charter schools include the highest achieving charter middle and high schools in the State of California. Indeed, Koret supports the #1 highest achieving public middle school in the state, which currently earns 988 on the 1,000 point Academic Performance Index. By publicizing this data and sharing the models that produce it, Koret is working to promote replication and adoption of effective K-12 innovations.
In both K-12 education and at the collegiate level, we seek to influence education policy, to ensure smart parental choices, to support and replicate the highest-performing academic models, and to improve educational leadership.
