An organization that helped lay the foundation for private school choice plans to honor two well-known education philanthropists who supported it from the beginning.
The Children’s Scholarship Fund plans to fete Eli Broad and Julian Robertson with its Champion for Children award at its annual gala on May 15 in New York City.
Broad founded both SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home. He now the heads the Broad Foundations. He and his wife, Edythe, have donated more than $4 billion to philanthropic causes and pledged to give away 75 percent of their wealth. Among other things, they back an annual prize for the nation’s top charter school organization and efforts to improve public education in Los Angeles. Broad recently announced his retirement.
He was part of the Children’s Scholarship Fund’s inaugural advisory board and helped launch the program in L.A. In its first year, the parents of more than 54,000 children applied for 3,750 CSF scholarships awarded in Los Angeles.Julian Robertson is a philanthropist, environmentalist and investor. In 1980, he founded Tiger Management, a large hedge fund, building it from a capital base of $8 billion to more than $23 billion.
Since then, he founded the Robertson Foundation which supports environmental, medical and educational causes. (Full disclosure: It also supported redefinED’s work in the early years.) Like Broad, Robertson was a member of CSF’s inaugural advisory board. He helped implement its Charlotte, N.C. partner program, which has invested nearly $10 million in approximately 7,500 scholarships for low-income children in Mecklenburg County.
Ted Forstmann and John Walton founded the Children’s Scholarship Fund in 1998 to give partial scholarships to low-income students to attend private K-8 schools.
Tampa venture capitalist John Kirtley worked with the Children’s Scholarship Fund of Tampa Bay in 1998 to give low-income children privately funded scholarships. That effort was a predecessor to Step Up For Students, which publishes this blog.
Three years later, state lawmakers created the Florida tax credit scholarship program. It’s now the largest private school choice program in the nation. Step Up helps administer the program, which provides scholarships to more than 100,000 low-income and working-class students.
