Transcript: I think even some of the most, highly regarded schools like Kips schools they have an incentive system, I don’t know if it is quite as financial as the incentive you described, but even at DonorsChoose.org there are teachers who will come to our site and they will request Barnes and Noble gift certificate to give to each of their students who complete the project on time, or to give to students who get a certain grade and maybe it gets a little dicey if a student is straight-up getting paid, I guess I would feel uncomfortable about that, but some other incentives I think would be good. I think my dad once often to give me a 100 bugs, if I read this whole Russian history book and actually I only got till like page 50 and I couldn't go on any longer, but I guess I am not in the position totally attack incentive since my parents give me some to me.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: Well, just as in the quality of public schools, there is massive disparity and the compensation given to the public school teachers. I think there are still plenty of states were teachers make in the low 20s and then they are other communities especially wealthy communities were salaries can start in the 50s, yeah, I mean certainly I think we could put our money where our mouth is as far as showing teachers that they play this pivotal role in our country and where we find that money is good your guess as mine.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: Definitely, the girls in my class got better grades than the boys in my class, though I think I had a closer relationship with number of the guys in my class, just because both been guys that helps to create something of bond right off the bat. Yeah, and why that is, I don’t know, certainly, I can say there are a number of my students, a lot of my students I kept in touch with and they are probably equally split between guys and girls and even in terms the former students who are looked to bring on to the DonorsChoose.org team I can think of a couple former male students who I have in mind as people I want to join the staff team at DonorsChoose.org and couple of females students. So an equal member, but yeah, I am not a policy expert, I wish I could speak to what behind the guys getting/not getting, not do as well in school.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: Yeah, well DonorsChoose.org all about bottoms up, open source approaches to improving our public schools. One classroom at a time and there are number of people who actually support microfinance often in the form of Keyba [phonetic] and support DonorsChoose as well and I think that is because our both microfinance and Keyba specifically and DonorsChoose.org are premised on this notion that people on the frontlines can do really smart things with small sums of money and whether that is a Bangladeshi women who knows best how a $100 could start up a business or whether that is a teacher in American classroom who knows best how a $100 could help his or her students, the idea is the same that with the bottoms up approach, your microsolutions are going to be better targeted and more innovated, more sensitive to the needs of those students than any, than a top-down program. But that is said, I think DonorsChoose.org is just one piece, it is the bottoms up component of the over all picture which does need to include top-down smart policies. So, I don’t think we would propose an open-source bottoms-up approached to everything, but I do think that piece has been missing and in that regard DonorsChoose.org is really filling a void.

I'd have to defer to the policy experts, I am of embarrassed to admit that because I was in the classroom for five years and four of those years working on DonorsChoose.org, I don’t know as much as I should about the broader field of education policy, but my sense is that “No Child Left Behind” has imposed some reporting requirements which are really healthy. So, although some of the tests are kind of dumb and some of the test may not be a very good capture of students real learning. Nevertheless, it is really healthy for all public schools to be forced to look at whether they are leaving certain groups of students behind, whether they're exacerbating or closing the achievement gap, whether special education students are not catching up, and that requirement, I think has been really healthy, but I guess I have the same concern with the testing approaches I do with text books and that's that, they can be really boring and when I was teaching history there was one book that is called A History of Us by this author, Joy Hakim, I am do not even know how to pronounce last name, but he was the first riveting history textbook that I ever read and that is because it wasn’t written by committee, it wasn’t sort of written to it hear a certain regulations, this is amazing book and I think just as there is actually one reverent history textbook there could be a test that is not just written in really dry language by a committee of academics, there could be a test that is interesting, that really does a better job of capturing true learning and if we could emphasize that kind of quality in testing, then I think I would be especially in favor of imposing testing requirements across the board.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: Well, just speaking from personal experience, I met with parents with my students who were as committed to their kid’s education as my parents were to mine. I also met with the few parents who, if they had $400 to spend, would first spend it on a North Face jackets for their kid, far and above getting them books and I had parents who thought that if it was raining that was proper reason for their kid to not go to the school that day, just because there was rain out. And it was in mix, for all of the kids whose parents were just as committed as mine were, it is that you really want to focus on whether the public school is providing, is doing them justice, is doing those kids and their parents justice. Then for the students whose parents would buy a North Face jackets before they would buy their kid a book. It does show the challenge, because in those situations public schooling can only do so much if the kid is going home to a place that doesn’t really value homework and education. Yeah, I think there are really are some public schools, incredibly successful public schools that are inculcating a real educational ethic in their students. Kip schools would be just a shining example of schools where students aren't just given homework and taught imaginative ways, but they're really brought into a culture of education. So, if Kips any indication that there are times when the school can provide at least some of the educational ethic that every student needs if they're gonna go home and actually do their homework.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: I think I would ask to just speak to my students and my own experience and I had a really good number of students who went on to four-year colleges, some who went on to really really top-notch for your colleges, but I had a critical amounts of students who I cannot claim were graduating from high school with the skills they needed to be successful in the workplace, to make a family-supporting wage, so if I guess, I would have put the blame as much on myself, if my own experience any indication there are huge number of students being sent off into the world without the education that they really needed.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: The state of the public school system in our country I guess I would describe as totally varied, and that's sort of part of problem, there are so many communities, wealthy communities where public schools do provide a great education and do provide their students with all the resources that they need to learn, but then there are other communities where it's a totally different story and, in fact, the high school where I taught was not an example of a down and out dilapidated public school, the high school where I taught in the Bronx, Wings Academy had been pretty newly constructed, it was a great facility, compare to other public schools. We actually did have a decent amount of copy paper and pencils, but even at that kind of newly constructed public high school, I know that it was providing a different level of education than up in suburbs.

Civic leaders and politicians have said it a lot better than I could, but even for those people who don’t have kids in the public schools, I think were all invested as a country and the state of public education and whether you're business man and you want to heir employees who are literate and can compute really effectively, you need public schools to be great. If you just believe in our democracy and you want an informed electorate, public schools are in your interest and I think our country is dependent on public schools, whether or not you personally have a kid in the public school system.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: Well I think the Libertarian party candidate for president about 4 years ago, advocated replacing the public school system with DonorChoose.org and having just private match-up between donors and classroom. We do not agree with that at all. If anything we hope that DonorsChoose.org is going to be a prompt, a nudge in the side of the public school system to improve and to start delivering these materials and experiences that students need and to make it easier for teachers to innovate. Half of the projects on our website go beyond what you would expect the government to provide. The field trip to Washington DC to see the supreme court argue a case, the salmon hatchery or the set of owl pellets to go along with reading Harry Potter and learning about owls, but another half of the projects on our website do make the reader say, “damn, I can't believe that a teacher is having to go to a private website and ask for paper or ask for set of dictionaries,” so that’s exactly the reaction we want to elicit in our visitors and our donors. When we survey their donors 60% of them said that they where more interested in public education reform as a result of their website experience at DonorChoose.org, because it was there that they had their first really vivid personal connection to what’s going on in public schools and low-income communities. It was much more politically energizing than reading a statistic in newspaper article and I think that’s one reason why 22% of our donor said that they where likelier to vote in an election or in education budget referendum as a result of their experience at our website. So, it is not that we intend to replace the public school system. It's that we go to do something right now about all the kids going without the resources they need to learn and in the process, we think that we are going to push or nudge or frustrate the public school system into improving and into delivering the resources that students need.

Question: Why did you leave teaching to start DonorsChoose.org?

Transcript: During my first year of teaching, I noticed that my colleagues and I were always having the same conversation in the teachers lunchroom about books that we wanted our students to read, we would talk about feel trip that we knew what really excite our students about the subject matter, we would talk about art project we wanted to do, if only we had certain arts supplies. Most of us would going to your pockets to buy copy paper and pencils, but all that really great ideas that we came up with for projects that would bring learning to life, never went beyond the teachers lunchroom, because we didn’t have any access to funding and at the same time that my colleagues and I where griping about that state affairs, I figured there were a lot of people who wanted to help and prove our public schools, but they were just getting skeptical about writing a $100 check to a big institution and not really knowing how their money was spent. So, I figured if we could match up teachers like us, who had these great ideas, for exactly the resources that their students most needed, along with donors who can come from all walks of life, and maybe somebody would only have $10 to give, but they would have a chance to really be a philanthropist and choose a project that spoke to them and see where there money was going. So it was in the teachers lunchroom that the idea came.

DonorsChoose.org is a website, where public school teachers can post classroom projects that need funding, it could be $200 classroom library, it could be $1000 field trip, it could be $400 set of butterfly cocoons and then donors can come to the website and choose the classroom project that they want to support, knowing that not only are they going to see exactly where their money's going, but they are going to hear back from the classroom, that they choose to help in the form of photographs and thank you letters.

Well I had the idea for DonorsChoose.org and my mom made desert for my colleagues, and I put this dessert in the teachers lunchroom, and I told my colleagues who ever eats this dessert has to go to this newly created website and ask for whatever it is most want for your students right now, and eleven of colleagues, ate my mom’s dessert, and they went on to the website and they submitted the first eleven projects to DonorsChoose.org and the health teacher, she wanted baby think it over dolls, which are life size, light weight dolls that cry 3 in the morning and show a teenager what it would like if they had a kid, and art teacher she wanted to do a quilt-making project, and I could see right there, that if you take this kind of open source approach, and enable people on the frontlines to come up with microsolutions, for the very people they serve, they are going to come up with smarter ideas than any kind of top-down program. We are still trying to figure out what compels donors to pick certain projects on our website. I was talking to a donor just the other day, who I was really interested in saving the salmon in specific Northwest and you'd never think there would be any project on DonorsChoose.org matching that area of interest, but he typed in keywords "salmon" and up came five projects on DonorChoose.org having to do with Samoan. The top one was from teacher of an island of Alaska who said that all of her students where native of Alaskans, and that she was 45 minutes away from the nearest store by airplane and that her native Alaskans students had recorded folk tales and written recipes and written stories about salmon, and her students needed to print their work in color, and for that they needed to color printer, that was a request on her site, and there was a second project from an Oregon teacher, a high school teacher who had created a salmon hatchery and he needed waders for his students to maintain that hatchery and here was a person who was coming to our site, saying that they wanted to find out about salmon projects and they are actually were results for that. That gives you an example of the long tail, of match-ups happening at our site. There are lot of parents of autistic kids who come to our site and they search for projects for autistic students. We know there are some donors who want to fund in their own hometown, a lot of our donors want to contribute, where the need is greatest. They want to support students who come from low-income communities. We are still struggling to figure out, what is going on in donors minds when they pick certain projects, some donors come because maybe a relative has died and they want to support a project that honors their relative, you know, maybe their relative was a painter and so they want fund a painting project, that really kind of fascinating seeing the match-ups and we’re trying to just figure out what the dynamics are.

Question: How much money have you raised?

Transcript: People in all 50 states, we call a donors citizen-philanthropists, because they come from all walks of life, and with $10 they can really be philanthropists and all told they have given more than 20 million dollars to classroom projects at DonorChoose.org. They brought a life 44,000 classroom projects that have benefited a million students from low-income families and so to think that this website that my colleagues helped to get off the ground and my students helped to get off the ground that 7 years later that, we've delivered materials an d experiences to a million kids. So, its really cool feeling. We’re starting the climb in terms of our impact on the whole picture. A million students is an actual percentage of all of the public school students in this country, but it’s certainly not the majority and we have a really long way to go, we won’t feel satisfied until we’re driving a 100 million dollars a year through our website, because so many teachers are still going into their own pockets to buy basic materials and so many classroom ideas are going unrealized, because teachers don’t a have way to innovate, don’t have to wait get funding for the projects that will really bring learning to life. So, even now I think we would probably still describe ourselves as just as starting the scratch surface of the problem. To get DonorsChoose.org to scale, we first need to increase the viral appeal of our website. To give you an example right now all of the project proposals on DonorsChoose.org are entirely written, it’s all text, we want to have photographs of the classroom viewable for the donor and we just launched photo-uploading technology. We want to extend that by digitizing the feedback that the donors receive from each classroom the thank you letters and the photographs that they would receive ought to be shareable via the web and that’s just sort of one slice of how we could make DonorsChoose.org much more viral beast than it already is. We need to make some improvements to our operations, we do a lot of work to ensure the integrity of our philanthropic marketplace, we validate each project before posting it, we fulfill the project, purchase some materials have them shipped to the classroom, rather than giving the teachers direct cash, we process these thank you letters with photographs and all of that work wants to be really labor-intensive and threatens to make DonorsChoose.org un-scaleable cause we spend all this time on each project, but by using technology we have managed to automate and streamline a lot of that work and enable a really small team, a really small operations team, to fulfill tens of thousands of classroom projects.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: Well, I was lucky enough to go to boarding school, for my high school years, and I had all the resources that I possibly could needed--squash courts and every book you ever would have wanted, every art supply. So when I started teaching in the Bronx I think I was especially able to see the disparity between the resources that my students had and what I had had, when I was in high school. So, that was the first thing that got me thinking about a solution to that situation. But I had some students who where rambunctious, but it was not as tough as, as the media makes it out to be. I had really good relationship with my students, it definitely took me a few months before I had my students respect. I think I got cursed out on my second of teaching, but that was the only time that happened and by the second half of my first year teaching, it did in fact turn out to be, I think, one of the challenging and fun jobs you can have.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: Well, I hope that during the five years, when I was a social studies teachers up in the Bronx that I was at least a little bit impactful on my students, and I think with me and my students it helped that I was pretty close to them in age, and I think it helped that I was just really excited to be teaching them and I think I hopefully infected some of them with my enthusiasm for the subject matter I was teaching and, you know, when I look back there were some really tough kids, a couple whom would write me birthday cards on my birthday, and do things that where really sweet which they probably never would have admitted to amongst their classmates, but I did get to experience that bond between teacher and students for five years and I think it was really what prompted me to start DonorsChoose.org, but in terms what it is about teachers is that has so many people citing them as their role models... I don’t know, I guess it’s just that they are like a junior of parent, always the one that the teachers who you really like.

Recorded on: 1/29/08

Transcript: I can remember first day of junior kindergarten where I got a little certificate for knowing how to tie my shoe. I was one of the few kids who could tie his own shoe, that was pretty cool, and maybe that set me off on wanting to do well, but it was really in high school, in boarding school, where my wrestling coach, was, was just an inspiration and he made me want to be a teacher one day, cause I figured if any kid ever looked up to me, the way that I looked up to my wrestling coach, I would have done my share in this life. His name was Mr. Buxton and other wrestlers and I have revered him. He was a lion of a man, he was kind
guy, he did right by his wife, I think that set an example to all of us young guys, but he was kind of a quiet strength that really helped us. I was going to boarding school and so when you are away from your parents during much of the year, those role models really mean a lot.

Recorded on: 1/29/08