The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools

And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and mentors. In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.

The involvement by some of the wealthiest and most influential titans of the 21st century amounts to a singular experiment in education, with millions of students serving as de facto beta testers for their ideas. Some tech leaders believe that applying an engineering mind-set can improve just about any system, and that their business acumen qualifies them to rethink American education. “They are experimenting collectively and individually in what kinds of models can produce better results,” said Emmett D. Carson, chief executive of Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which manages donor funds for Mr. Hastings, Mr. Zuckerberg and others. “Given the changes in innovation that are underway with artificial intelligence and automation, we need to try everything we can to find which pathways work.”

But the philanthropic efforts are taking hold so rapidly that there has been little public scrutiny. Tech companies and their founders have been rolling out programs in America’s public schools with relatively few checks and balances, The New York Times found in interviews with more than 100 company executives, government officials, school administrators, researchers, teachers, parents and students. “They have the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power,” said Megan Tompkins-Stange, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “It does subvert the democratic process.”

Furthermore, there is only limited research into whether the tech giants’ programs have actually improved students’ educational results. One of the broadest philanthropic initiatives directly benefits the tech industry. Code.org, a major nonprofit group financed with more than $60 million from Silicon Valley luminaries and their companies, has the stated goal of getting every public school in the United States to teach computer science. Its argument is twofold: Students would benefit from these classes, and companies need more programmers.

Together with Microsoft and other partners, Code.org has barnstormed the country, pushing states to change education laws and fund computer science courses. It has also helped more than 120 districts to introduce such curriculums, the group said, and has facilitated training workshops for more than 57,000 teachers. And Code.org’s free coding programs, called Hour of Code, have become wildly popular, drawing more than 100 million students worldwide.

Mr. Hastings of Netflix and other tech executives rejected the idea that they wielded significant influence in education. The mere fact that classroom internet access has improved, Mr. Hastings said, has had a much greater impact in schools than anything tech philanthropists have done. “In our society as a democracy, I think it is healthy that there is a debate about what are the goals of public education,” Mr. Hastings added. Captains of American industry have long used their private wealth to remake public education, with lasting and not always beneficial results.

What is different today is that some technology giants have begun pitching their ideas directly to students, teachers and parents — using social media to rally people behind their ideas. Some companies also cultivate teachers to spread the word about their products. Such strategies help companies and philanthropists alike influence public schools far more quickly than in the past, by creating legions of supporters who can sway legislators and education officials. Another difference: Some tech moguls are taking a hands-on role in nearly every step of the education supply chain by financing campaigns to alter policy, building learning apps to advance their aims and subsidizing teacher training. This end-to-end influence represents an “almost monopolistic approach to education reform,” said Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “That is starkly different to earlier generations of philanthropists.”

These efforts coincide with a larger Silicon Valley push to sell computers and software to American schools, a lucrative market projected to reach $21 billion by 2020. Already, more than half of the primary- and secondary-school students in the United States use Google services like Gmail in school. But many parents and educators said in interviews that they were unaware of the Silicon Valley personalities and money influencing their schools. Among them was Rafranz Davis, executive director of professional and digital learning at Lufkin Independent School District, a public school system in Lufkin, Tex., where students regularly use DreamBox Learning, the math program that Mr. Hastings subsidized, and have tried Code.org’s coding lessons.

“We should be asking a lot more questions about who is behind the curtain,” Ms. Davis said. Mr. Benioff, the billionaire behind Salesforce, had a blunt message for San Francisco’s mayor and its schools superintendent. It was 2013, and the two city officials had approached Mr. Benioff hoping to persuade him to pony up a few million dollars to install Wi-Fi in schools and buy some classroom laptops. But the request seemed too penny-ante to the software mogul. “That’s when I had to say, ‘You guys need to think bigger!’” Mr. Benioff recalled in an interview in his San Francisco home. He urged the superintendent to imagine “what nirvana would look like” in his schools, if money were no object.

With that conversation, Mr. Benioff set in motion a transformation of the relationship between philanthropist and public education. He has emerged as a kind of personal venture capitalist to the city’s public schools — one intent on remaking a traditional school bureaucracy in Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial image. Mr. Benioff ultimately pledged $100 million over a decade to the San Francisco Unified School District through his company’s nonprofit arm, Salesforce.org. Unlike conventional benefactors, he is hands-on: School district administrators now submit an annual grant wish list to the Salesforce.org board for review. And Mr. Benioff dispenses not just money, but also management prescriptions. “He’s almost a public-sector V.C.,” said Richard A. Carranza, who was then the superintendent of San Francisco schools.

Mr. Benioff rejected the notion that his approach to education philanthropy was venture-capitalist-like. “We are not giving them a new religion,” Mr. Benioff said. “We are trying to work with them in a smart way and augment what they are doing.” The partnership with the district kicked off in 2012 when San Francisco’s mayor, Edwin M. Lee, asked Mr. Benioff to help the city’s middle schools. The mayor wanted to give students a better chance at landing tech jobs. And he wanted Mr. Benioff to pay for it. “I would like to give our kids the opportunity, when they graduate, to see themselves working at those tech companies,” Mr. Lee recalled telling Mr. Benioff.

The idea appealed to Mr. Benioff. At Salesforce, the leading maker of cloud-based customer-relationship management software, he had developed his own model of corporate philanthropy: donating 1 percent of company equity, products and employee time to community programs. A school project would let him test it on a larger stage. The district has used money from Salesforce.org to hire math teachers and develop a comprehensive computer science curriculum for prekindergarten through 12th grade. Funds have also gone toward installing Wi-Fi in middle schools and hiring tech coaches for teachers.

But Mr. Benioff’s “think bigger” mandate also led to culture clashes. Chief among these: He established a Principal’s Innovation Fund, which awards annual unrestricted grants of $100,000 to the principal at each of the district’s 21 middle and K-8 schools. The superintendent initially worried that principals might squander the money. In Silicon Valley, “they fully expect nine out of 10 of their innovations to fail,” said Mr. Carranza, who is now superintendent of the much larger Houston public school system. “We don’t have the luxury of failing with people’s kids.”

Administrators subsequently asked principals to select projects that fit with the district’s priorities. Principals have used the grants to start robotics clubs, provide English-tutoring programs for immigrant students and redesign a school library with hangout zones where children can sit with their laptops. Mr. Benioff said he knew that his methods pushed some administrators beyond their comfort zones. “You’d have the same issue at Salesforce if somebody from the outside came in and said, ‘We’re going to help you to blah-blah-blah,’” he said. “Bureaucrats would try to stop them.”

So far, Salesforce.org has provided about $20 million to the schools. By hiring additional teachers, schools reduced the average class size across eighth-grade math to 24 students from 33 — enabling teachers to give more individualized instruction, district officials said. “People think school districts are too bureaucratic, can’t be nimble and can’t innovate,” Mr. Carranza said. “We are proving that this is just not true.”

There are limits to Mr. Benioff’s approach: Most school districts will not be able to secure their own billionaire benefactors. But Mr. Benioff said he intended to keep working with local schools for decades to come.

Natasha Singer