Giving Compass' Take:

• The Detroit Children's Fund plans to donate millions of dollars to four charter schools in the city, with the hope for improvement to the school model. 

• The author notes that significant attempts to improve struggling schools have produced mixed results. How will this donation be any more effective? How are education philanthropists ensuring that their contributions toward charter school improvement are meaningful? 

• Read more about opportunities for donors in charter school funding. 

If nationally renowned charter school networks won’t come to Detroit, the city will just have to grow its own.

That’s the idea behind a philanthropy’s latest bet on K-12 schools in Detroit. Over the next two years, the Detroit Children’s Fund plans to give $3.5 million to four charter schools, hoping that instructional coaches, new technology, and retention bonuses for educators will help provide a model for improving schools in Detroit.

Efforts to woo nationally renowned charter organizations to Detroit have been unsuccessful so far, in part because the city’s existing schools are already underenrolled.

So the Children’s Fund is embracing the more complicated work of directly improving schools. Major attempts to turn around struggling schools have produced mixed results so far. The Children’s Fund, which is affiliated with the Skillman Foundation, hopes to build on that research — and produce better results for students in the process.

The project comes as many policymakers in Michigan are pushing to expand state funding for all schools in the state, especially those with more students who are at risk of falling behind.

The Children’s Fund is donating directly to charter schools that it thinks could meet its definition of excellence, but aren’t quite there yet. Its staff believe that roughly 1 in 10 Detroit schools are “high quality” based on their test scores, teacher turnover, and other measures.

Previous philanthropic efforts to bolster Detroit’s charter sector have produced checkered results. In 2009, four foundations spent $13 million to help open new charter high schools. Four of the 11 schools closed within a decade — some collapsing abruptly — and an architect of the project acknowledged last year that it didn’t come close to reaching its goals for student achievement.

Read the full article about funding charter schools by Koby Levin at Chalkbeat.