Education reform in America stands at a pivotal moment filled with opportunity and potential. After years of stalled progress, policymakers, philanthropists and practitioners alike are eager to rebuild momentum and ensure access to excellent education for every child nationwide.
In this conversation, we sit down with Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to explore the organization’s mission, the most promising opportunities for education philanthropy and the long-term strategies required to drive meaningful change in Ohio and across the nation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Photos courtesy of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
Q: What is your mission?
Petrilli: Our mission at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is to promote educational excellence for every child in America and in our home state of Ohio. We pursue this mission in several ways. Through rigorous research and practical analysis, we help educators and policymakers make better decisions at the national, state and local level. We also incubate new ideas, innovations, organizations and visionary leaders to advance educational excellence nationwide.
In Ohio, we advocate for sound policies related to standards, assessments, results-driven accountability, equitable funding, school choice and other important education reforms. We also strive to serve as a model charter school authorizer and to share our lessons across the country.
Q: Where do you see the most promising philanthropic opportunities in 2026?
Petrilli: Without a doubt, the greatest opportunity right now is with the new “education freedom tax credit” included in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which is slated to launch in January of 2027. The initiative provides individual taxpayers with a dollar-for-dollar credit on federal income taxes for donations up to $1,700, which can be used to provide scholarships to private schools or for tutoring for public school and charter school students.
The tax credit has the potential to unlock billions of dollars in new charitable donations for educational choice, but philanthropic organizations can help accelerate its growth. Most importantly, they can support the “scholarship-granting organizations” charged with collecting donations and transferring them into scholarships. These organizations will need to develop expertise, marketing campaigns, effective accounting practices and more, all of which philanthropies could assist with.
Many civil society organizations can participate as scholarship-granting organizations, from Catholic dioceses to Boys and Girls Clubs to private school networks. This is a significant opportunity for private foundations to step up and make a meaningful difference!
Q: What key challenges and opportunities should donors keep in mind when considering their support for education reform?
Petrilli: Education is a long game. Not only does it take 13 years of school to turn illiterate five-year-olds into ready-for-the-world high school graduates, but our education system is also notoriously difficult to change. Yet change is possible with consistent, steady, urgent pressure. As a country, we made dramatic progress from the late 1990s until the early 2010s, thanks to bipartisan reform efforts and hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic support. Poor children in America made particularly strong gains.
Unfortunately, progress stalled a decade ago, before plummeting during the pandemic. Now, it’s going to take a renewed effort to make progress again, via school choice, accountability, reforms to the teaching profession and more. Politicians are easily distracted, but patient and persistent engagement from philanthropy can help get us back on track.
Q: What risks or constraints should donors be paying closer attention to?
Petrilli: Don’t ignore policy! It’s understandable that donors will start investing in education by supporting local schools or school systems. However, on-the-ground reforms can easily be sidetracked by adverse policy at the local, state or federal level. Even well-intentioned policy efforts can create burdens or unintended consequences, impacting both charter and private schools. A small investment in policy organizations can protect investments in local school support and improvement.
Q: What feels underfunded but high-leverage?
Petrilli: Efforts to support high-achieving low-income (HALO) students. These are the young people with the greatest chance of harnessing education to climb the ladder of upward mobility and achieve the American dream. The young people most likely to lead our breakthrough technologies, start transformative businesses and provide future leadership of our country and communities are those with exceptional natural talent.
Unfortunately, very little is being done to cultivate that talent, especially for children from low-income and working-class families. A few years ago, those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute led the National Working Group on Advanced Education, which offered dozens of concrete ideas for supporting HALO students. We’d love to see philanthropists step up and make this a priority.
Q: If you were directing grant dollars today, where would you focus?
Petrilli: If my focus were a particular geographic region, and I had to pick one focus area, I would invest in high-quality charter schools. The evidence of charters’ edge in boosting student outcomes, especially in urban areas, continues to grow. Despite the steady rise in charter school enrollment, these schools still need philanthropic support. That includes funding growth and replication efforts; investing in policy organizations to improve the legal and regulatory environment and recruiting high-performing charter networks from other cities or states. The Charter Schools Growth Fund is excellent at supporting such efforts nationwide and would be an outstanding partner.
Q: What are the latest developments or strategic priorities for your organization that you would like to share with our community?
Petrilli: At the Fordham Institute, we believe that rebuilding the bipartisan education reform movement is the only way to get school improvement efforts back on track. We need leaders from across the political spectrum and at all levels of government to embrace accountability and parental choice, challenging interests that fail to prioritize student needs. To that end, we recently launched a new Substack newsletter, SCHOOLED, to restart the ed reform conversation. It’s a platform for sharing ideas and vigorously debating solutions to our schools’ most pressing problems. Check it out!
The coming years offer philanthropic donors a unique opportunity to align policy changes with meaningful impact. New federal incentives, such as the education freedom tax credit, could significantly increase private giving for educational choice. Targeted investments in scholarship-granting organizations, policy infrastructure, high-quality charter schools and programs for high-achieving low-income students are essential to ensure lasting results. Continued philanthropic engagement will remain vital to renewing reform momentum and broadening access to quality educational opportunities.
If you would like to learn more about the Thomas B. Fordham Institute or how Philanthropy Roundtable supports K-12 education, please contact Pathways to Opportunity Program Director Stephen Allison.
