Like any donor, corporate philanthropy departments today want to know that their investments in their community have an impact. It’s not about altruism (although giving back does feel good); instead, it’s about driving long-term, lasting change.

Cheryl Kiser, managing director of Babson College’s Lewis Initiative, opened the panel with the recent discovery of a worrying trend:

For over 25 years, corporate philanthropy professionals had indicated that their #1 funding and volunteer priority was education. In the last two years, however, Cheryl noticed in surveys of the field that in general corporate philanthropy departments were suffering from what she called the “3 F’s”: They were Frustrated, they felt Fatigued, and they worried that they had Failed in their attempts to truly invest in educational systems and drive progress. Read the rest of this entry »

Collaboration across sectors is at the core of the Boston College Center’s new initiative to help business more effectively contribute to solving the problems of education in the United States. But bridging the usual competitive divide between companies will be just as critical to successfully delivering value to an enterprise more important than any single company. Read the rest of this entry »

Young writers are often advised to “write what you know.” An imagined perspective can never match real-life point of view when trying to tell an authentic story on any subject.

So if you want to know what the story is with the mystery of successful business investment in education, IBM’s Stan Litow is your man. As a product of the New York City public schools, an education activist, a former deputy chancellor of New York’s school system and IBM’s vice president for corporate citizenship and corporate affairs and president of the IBM International Foundation – the point man in its efforts to improve education – Litow has lived this saga on both sides. Read the rest of this entry »

At the Center’s 2009 International Corporate Citizenship Conference, Tony Wagner provided an energetic lesson on what’s wrong with education in American schools. Speaking during the final keynote session on business and education, Wagner began by explaining that “in education we frequently start with solutions to problems we don’t completely understand.” He labeled this phenomenon “answer-itis.” Read the rest of this entry »

These days it seems everyone – every business, every employee, every politician, every taxpayer – is consumed with surviving the economic downturn. But a new paper from the Boston College Center looks at why business must not let this crisis divert attention from addressing an even greater threat to economic and social stability: a failing American education system. Read the rest of this entry »