High-Speed Fix

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Changing the world, Evan Marwell has discovered, is best undertaken on a tight deadline.

Marwell’s story is a rare one in the nonprofit world. Founder starts organization to solve one specific, measurable problem. Problem gets solved. Founder plans to shut the whole thing down in eight years.

Less than two years from his self-imposed deadline, Marwell is on track to finish the job he started in 2012 with his nonprofit EducationSuperHighway: to hook up every public school in the nation with high-speed internet broadband service.

To date, EducationSuperHighway has helped bring broadband service to 98 percent of America’s more than 98,000 public schools. It’s working on that last 2 percent, and it’s getting ready to power down for good in September 2020.

The effort has won support from the Gates and Draper Richards Kaplan foundations, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. And since 2012, the cost of broadband to American public schools has dropped by 85 percent, a welcome side effect of the charity’s work, which involved providing information so they could comparison shop.

The story of Marwell and his nonprofit offers an alternative map for solving problems through a charity, one with implications not only for social change but also for fundraising and staffing.

“For the vast majority of nonprofits, funders should ask them to define their mission in a way that it can be accomplished within 10 years” or some other limited time frame, Marwell says. “The benefits to an organization for doing it that way are really incredible.”

In addition to helping keep donors loyal for the duration, he says, the organization would be more likely to attract energetic employees with a sense of urgency — and to avoid mission creep — if it sticks to a finite goal.

Also, Marwell adds, “you can actually accomplish something, which is motivating to everyone involved. Imagine if you could apply this to a whole host of problems out there.”

‘Peanut Butter Through a Straw’

The secret to EducationSuperHighway’s success, according to its supporters, comes down to a single word: focus.

“Evan has been laser-focused,” says Joe Wolf, co-founder of the Learning Accelerator, an education nonprofit that gave Marwell’s organization $500,000 in its first year. “He has resisted the push and pull to do things other than what he has his mind set on.”

Marwell, 53, came to nonprofit work by happenstance. A Harvard Business School graduate and serial entrepreneur who had founded startups in telecommunications, software, and finance, he found himself seeking a new challenge at the turn of this decade.

Around this time, he read Bold Endeavors, by Felix Rohatyn, which recounts the stories behind large government projects such as the transcontinental railroad, Panama Canal, and rural electrification.

“The point he makes is that only government is big enough to pay for big infrastructure projects,” he says. “However, in each case, one person instigated it. They kept working at it until government money showed up.”

The book, and a conversation with a teacher at his daughter’s school in their home of San Francisco, lit a path to his own bold endeavor. Marwell, the child of two educators in Madison, Wis., and the product of public schools, had grown enamored of the Khan Academy, the free online education project started by Salman Khan. He asked his child’s teacher if she knew about it.

Yes, the teacher said, but it won’t work.

What do you mean? he asked.

The teacher explained the problem: She had asked students to watch a TED Talk on a classroom laptop and write an essay about it. For the first eight students, the video played perfectly. For the ninth student, the video slowed down. By the 10th child, the video stopped playing completely.

“They had lousy Wi-Fi,” Marwell says. Despite lots of computers in the classroom, he says, actually using them on the school’s sputtering internet connection was like “sucking peanut butter through a straw.”

Research soon revealed that the problem was widespread. Later, Marwell attended an event at the White House where President Obama and his chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, asked him and other CEOs for ideas on how technology could make America better.

When his turn came, Marwell piped up that the government should bring broadband to every public school in America.

Chopra objected: The federal E-Rate program, which poured $2.4 billion into schools every year for their technology needs, had that covered.

No, it doesn’t, Marwell said. Shouldn’t the government fix that?

“Here’s a little secret: The government doesn’t fix anything,” Chopra told Marwell after the meeting. Instead, he said, it gives money to nonprofits and companies that do the work. Maybe Marwell should start a nonprofit to work on this problem.

Raising Money Like a Startup

The founder approached his new organization like a start-up business; the group has raised just over $60 million in stages.

Like many start-up founders, Marwell dug into his own pockets in the beginning, chipping in $200,000. Then he sought $1 million in seed money from Learning Accelerator and Draper Richards Kaplan. Two years later, he secured a total of $10 million from foundations including Ford, Helmsley, and Bose.

Finally, starting in 2015, EducationSuperHighway sought a total of $50 million from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Salesforce.org, and others to carry it to the end of its life span.

Fundraising piecemeal, against specific milestones, is a system familiar to donors from tech and other businesses, Marwell says.

“He was smart enough to only raise what he needed. By the time they got to that big, hairy execution tranche, you wanted to put that money in,” says Anne Marie Burgoyne, managing director for social innovation at the Emerson Collective, an EducationSuperHighway supporter.

Burgoyne and Marwell were acquainted before Marwell started his organization (their daughters were friends), and she had worked at Draper Richards Kaplan.

“Evan brings an enormous amount of joy to his work,” Burgoyne says. “It makes people feel that they’re part of something that is eminently possible.”

He also inspires collaboration, she says. When meeting with Marwell, “he always comes with a list of questions. You just start to riff on things. He inspires you to be a big thinker.”

EducationSuperHighway’s expiration date proved helpful in getting foundations to pitch in, say Marwell and his supporters, because it meant they weren’t on the hook forever.

Jim Bildner, CEO at Draper Richards Kaplan, and an EducationSuperHighway board member, says his foundation, which supports organizations that are just getting started, says more nonprofits these days are following a similar plan: target a finite problem to solve, solve it, and then shut down. “It has to do with understanding upfront what the end game is.”

Saving a Bundle

In addition to seeking donations from foundations and other private sources, Marwell and his organization pressed government officials to redirect public funds that had already been set aside for schools’ technology needs — notably, the federal E-Rate program, which began in 1996, when internet access was a problem. But by the 2010s, the biggest challenge for schools wasn’t web access but speed. “His approach was to find out where money sat in the system,” says Wolf, of Learning Accelerator. “There were a lot of funds that were poorly allocated.”

With the early support, Marwell first sought to build awareness of the problem: How many American schools and students were without adequate internet service.

In 2013, his organization built and launched the National School Speed Test, an online evaluation that allows students and others to test their school’s internet connections. It studied 35,000 schools with 800,000 students and discovered that only about 10 percent — or about 4 million kids out of 47 million in elementary and secondary schools — had enough bandwidth to use the internet effectively.

“Data became our secret weapon,” Marwell says. “We found out that the schools were spending $600 million a year on phone service,” an exorbitant figure in the age of email. He got into a fight on the phone with an official from the Federal Communications Commission, which administers E-Rate, who refused to believe the $600 million a year figure. Things got heated; the official hung up on him.

Marwell grins. “I got a call back a week later: ‘Yeah, actually, it’s more like $1 billion.’ "

State by State

In June 2013, the Obama administration launched the ConnectED Initiative to help it carry out its plans to give students and teachers more online-learning tools and opportunities. The FCC modernized the E-Rate program in 2014, which is also now funded more generously, capped at nearly $4 billion annually.

Other big challenges persisted: School districts had no way of knowing what other districts were spending on broadband, and they were paying heavily for their ignorance. In 2012, schools were spending a median of $22 per megabit, or roughly eight times what businesses were paying, Marwell says.

With the data it gathered, EducationSuperHighway created a free online tool that allowed district officials to compare their costs with those of other schools.

School districts also needed advice and expertise as well as help finding local vendors and crafting grant proposals for E-Rate funds. Online tools and efforts by EducationSuperHighway’s staff helped fill those gaps.

Through ConnectED, EducationSuperHighway worked with state departments of education. Ultimately, 49 governors agreed to support the nonprofit’s mission. (Kentucky did not participate because it didn’t need to: Its schools already have fiber-optic broadband, Marwell says.)

“They got the governors because they said, ‘Here’s the problem and we’re going to help you solve it.’ Not, ‘Here’s the problem, go get it,’ " says Bildner, the board member.

Marwell’s group publishes an annual “State of the States” report with detailed information about progress for each state, including downloadable one-sheet infographics.

But state education and technology officials often simply needed extra people to reach out to school districts and talk to lawmakers. Texas, for instance, has 1,237 public-school districts and charter schools with 5.2 million students but has only one staff member in the state’s education department who works full time to help schools with the E-Rate program, says Melody Parrish, deputy commissioner for technology at the agency.

“We struggle with outreach,” Parrish says. EducationSuperHighway lent some staff members to the effort, and with a few volunteers from the agency’s rural schools office, the group divided up the list of school districts, setting up conference calls with each. “They just said, ‘Let’s divide and conquer.’ "

The only glitches, she says, were coordinating communications with the governor’s office in the beginning, and some districts were distrustful when initially contacted by EducationSuperHighway.

“We told districts, ‘They’re not trying to sell you fiber; they’re trying to find out if you need fiber,’ " Parrish says.

EducationSuperHighway helped persuade Texas lawmakers to come up with $25 million in matching funds for money that districts raised locally. Now Parrish’s office and the nonprofit are working on the last 41 districts that haven’t applied for state funding.

“There’s still a bucket of money out there,” Parrish says.

Next Steps

When Marwell decided back in 2012 to close his organization in 2020, he had no idea if he’d be able to do it. But now, with the end in sight, he’s clear about what needs to happen as EducationSuperHighway winds down: About 2.3 million students are still working with inadequate internet, or none at all.

Burgoyne, of the Emerson Collective, says she’s impressed by the way Marwell is applying “gentle pressure” to the school districts that are holdouts: “Who wants to be the last person in America to give their school and their kids broadband?”

He’s also engaged in a delicate dance: keeping his 62 employees from jumping ship before the work is done while also helping them find their next jobs after it’s over.

EducationSuperHighway is also looking for a home for the data it’s collected. It wants to share what it’s learned about creating social change with people in philanthropy, government, and education.

Bildner, of Draper Richards Kaplan, teaches a class on social enterprise at Harvard and has brought Marwell in to talk about his organization, which Bildner calls “a nearly perfectly executed” example of the form.

He points to a perhaps less obvious reason for Marwell’s success with EducationSuperHighway.

“He made no enemies,” Blinder says — “even organizations that weren’t fully supportive of him at first because it threatened the status quo. He made them feel like this is a success because of your help. Every person around this problem was a hero for solving it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Joe Wolf is chairman and co-founder of the Learning Accelerator. He is no longer chairman.