With a Hefty Education Grant Come Equally Great Expectations

Gates Foundation Provides Money, and Mandates

Irasema Salcido opened the first Cesar Chavez school in 1998. Now she's working to expand and improve the program with the help of a Gates grant. (Photos By Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)

Irasema Salcido's heart raced when she pulled the letter from a stack of mail in her Capitol Hill office. She tore open the envelope.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pleased to award the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools a grant in the amount of $1,570,000. . . .

Salcido rocketed into her staff's offices to share the news. She had landed what thousands of other nonprofit organizations are chasing: a Gates grant. One of the world's largest charitable foundations, the most important sponsor of efforts to improve U.S. schools after the government, believed in her seven-year-old educational experiment.

That moment in September 2005 marked the launch of a partnership between a Harvard-educated daughter of migrant farm workers and a charity built on the fortune of a billionaire Harvard dropout.

If all went as planned, two Cesar Chavez schools would become four. Then four might become more. With that jackpot letter, the Chavez school motto -- "Sí, se puede! Yes, it can be done!" -- seemed to have become "Yes, it will be done!"

"I thought, 'Well, Gates, they're probably going to give us the money, and we're very thankful, and that's that,' " Salcido recalled.

But Gates money doesn't just come with dreams. It also comes with demands.

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With nearly $32 billion in assets and more coming from investment guru Warren Buffett, the Gates Foundation is a leading sponsor of global health and economic development initiatives. In the United States, the foundation focuses on upgrading libraries and public education. In the school arena, it seeks to raise high school graduation rates and prepare more students, particularly minorities, to go to college.

"America's high schools are obsolete," Bill Gates argued in a speech last year in Washington. "Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting -- even ruining -- the lives of millions of Americans each year."

The Microsoft founder has the means to do more than complain.

Overhauling schools is all the rage among the entrepreneurial nouveau mega-rich, such as personal computer pioneer Michael Dell, Netscape founder James Barksdale and home builder Eli Broad. But the Gates Foundation is lavishing unprecedented sums of money on the effort. So far, it has awarded $1.5 billion in grants to improve secondary education, including $285 million last year. Richard Colvin, director of Columbia University's Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, called the foundation an "unparalleled force" in U.S. schools. "They are going to change the high school experience for tens of thousands of kids," he said.