It’s not quite as bad as Marion Barry embracing vouchers, but is it necessarily a positive development that the United Way has selected dropout prevention as one of its three key initiatives? As the Washington Post reports,

The United Way of America, alarmed at the nation’s fraying safety net, will announce today that it will direct its giving toward ambitious 10-year goals that would cut in half the high school dropout rate and the number of working families struggling financially.

Curbing the dropout rate certainly deserves attention from the nation’s charitable donors, but the chances don’t appear high that a mainstream, let’s-all-get-along group like the United Way will tackle the underlying problems that lead to massive educational failure. Will the charity push for rigorous state standards or even national standards? Will it work to put pressure on failing school districts by supporting charter schools and other forms of parental choice? Will it tangle with recalcitrant teachers’ unions? Such actions are hard to imagine, which is why savvy observers should get ready to watch a whole lot more private money go down the tubes.

Although details are still murky, this plan out of Denver, inspired by Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 and New York’s New Visions for Public Schools, seems promising.

The key here will be to keep these schools sufficiently insulated from district regulations. It’s unclear whether they’ll be charter schools, contract schools, private schools, or some hybrid thereof. But as long as they’re truly free to experiment with non-traditional schooling methods—e.g., extended learning time, college-prep culture, rigorous curricula, no-nonsense discipline, variable teacher pay—these schools could make a real impact in the Mile High City.

It’s great to see these bureaucracy-busting approaches catching on around the country.

Photo by Flickr user stevenm_61.

I’ll admit to watching some of last night’s Hollywood-glitzy American Idol Gives Back show. Hey, you don’t have to be under ten (like my nieces) to appreciate the talents of Miley Cyrus, or to enjoy Robin Williams pretending to be the winner of “Russian Idol.” (Best joke: his father won “Anti-American Idol” in 1978.) A cynic would argue that the production was a platform for big stars to flatter their sense of generosity. But I’m not a cynic—I was a camp counselor after all—and I even teared up at a couple of video segments showing kids living in awful conditions around the world.

The event raises gobs of money for the “American Idol Gives Back Foundation,” which then forwards the funds to a selection of charities. That’s all well and good. But I couldn’t help but notice that the two recipients they picked that were most related to education were the Children’s Defense Fund—an old-style, true-blue liberal advocacy group—and Save the Children—and old-style, true-blue liberal charity. “Venture philanthropy” this is not.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised; this is Hollywood. But it would have been fun to see some money go to KIPP, or Teach For America, or anything with a more systematic, strategic approach than the after-school programs and book drives that these older charities have been implementing for decades. Maybe next year American Idol could give back... to the future.