Research history

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## What happened

In the early 1900s, schools for Black children in the rural South were badly underfunded by white-run county boards. In 1930 the average county still spent 39 cents per person on salaries in Black schools for every dollar it spent in white schools. Booker T. Washington, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, sought Northern donors to build better schools, and Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago businessman who built Sears, Roebuck, agreed to help. After six pilot schools near Tuskegee around 1913 and 1914, the program spread across the South. Between 1912 and 1932 it helped build 5,357 schools and related buildings, such as teachers’ homes and workshops, in 15 states.

The fund’s rule, as the economists Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder summarize it, was to help “only where help was wanted.” Rosenwald money came only if Black residents and local governments put in money too, and together they paid most of the cost. The fund set standards for light, ventilation and sanitation, and it required desks, blackboards and books. It concentrated on physical things that county boards could not easily shift to white schools.

It worked. Aaronson and Mazumder found that rural Black students with access to a Rosenwald school completed more than a full extra year of schooling, with gains in literacy and test scores too. They estimate the schools explain close to 40 percent of the narrowing of the Black-white education gap in the South for children born between 1910 and 1925. The gains were largest in the most disadvantaged counties.

The building program ended in 1932, the year Rosenwald died. He had required his fund to spend all its money within 25 years of his death, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund dissolved in 1948.

## Where it sits in the system

On the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **structure** (level 3). Each school was a building, but the deal changed what county school systems built and paid for, because public money and upkeep were part of the match. Requiring local demand and contributions also put the community, not the donor, at the start of every project, the opposite of the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/).

In a 1929 essay Rosenwald wrote, “I am opposed to gifts in perpetuity for any purpose.” His fund is an early answer to what Charitology calls [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/).

The program worked inside segregation rather than against it. Washington’s strategy of putting education and economic progress first brought deep conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. The schools show what building within the system achieved, not whether challenging it directly would have achieved more.

## What carries over

Matching can multiply money and build ownership, but it can also screen out the poorest places, so a match needs a plan for those who can’t meet it. A fund with an end date has to spend where it can do good now. How fast philanthropic money should be spent is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/).

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    "body": "\n## What happened\n\nIn the early 1900s, schools for Black children in the rural South were badly underfunded by white-run county boards. In 1930 the average county still spent 39 cents per person on salaries in Black schools for every dollar it spent in white schools. Booker T. Washington, the principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, sought Northern donors to build better schools, and Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago businessman who built Sears, Roebuck, agreed to help. After six pilot schools near Tuskegee around 1913 and 1914, the program spread across the South. Between 1912 and 1932 it helped build 5,357 schools and related buildings, such as teachers’ homes and workshops, in 15 states.\n\nThe fund’s rule, as the economists Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder summarize it, was to help “only where help was wanted.” Rosenwald money came only if Black residents and local governments put in money too, and together they paid most of the cost. The fund set standards for light, ventilation and sanitation, and it required desks, blackboards and books. It concentrated on physical things that county boards could not easily shift to white schools.\n\nIt worked. Aaronson and Mazumder found that rural Black students with access to a Rosenwald school completed more than a full extra year of schooling, with gains in literacy and test scores too. They estimate the schools explain close to 40 percent of the narrowing of the Black-white education gap in the South for children born between 1910 and 1925. The gains were largest in the most disadvantaged counties.\n\nThe building program ended in 1932, the year Rosenwald died. He had required his fund to spend all its money within 25 years of his death, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund dissolved in 1948.\n\n## Where it sits in the system\n\nOn the [depth scale](/method/#depth) this is **structure** (level 3). Each school was a building, but the deal changed what county school systems built and paid for, because public money and upkeep were part of the match. Requiring local demand and contributions also put the community, not the donor, at the start of every project, the opposite of the [Missing Voice](/diagnosis/missing-voice/).\n\nIn a 1929 essay Rosenwald wrote, “I am opposed to gifts in perpetuity for any purpose.” His fund is an early answer to what Charitology calls [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/).\n\nThe program worked inside segregation rather than against it. Washington’s strategy of putting education and economic progress first brought deep conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP. The schools show what building within the system achieved, not whether challenging it directly would have achieved more.\n\n## What carries over\n\nMatching can multiply money and build ownership, but it can also screen out the poorest places, so a match needs a plan for those who can’t meet it. A fund with an end date has to spend where it can do good now. How fast philanthropic money should be spent is [Open Problem 12, the Payout Question](/open-problems/the-payout-question/).\n",
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          "id": "missing-voice"
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      "depth": 3,
      "era": "1912–1932",
      "kind": "success",
      "lessons": [
        "Matching grants can multiply a gift and build ownership. Over time the fund’s share of a school’s cost fell from about a quarter to 10 to 15 percent, with local people and governments paying the rest.",
        "In a system that tends to redirect money away from the people it is meant for, funding things that are hard to divert, like buildings, desks and books, protects the gift.",
        "Matching has a cost too. Communities that could not raise their share could be turned down, so a match can favor the places that need help least.",
        "A fund built to spend itself out can move fast and avoid outliving its purpose."
      ],
      "place": "Rural South, United States",
      "sources": [
        {
          "note": null,
          "publisher": "Daniel Aaronson and Bhashkar Mazumder, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago working paper 2009-26, published in the Journal of Political Economy 119(5)",
          "title": "The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement",
          "url": "https://www.chicagofed.org/-/media/publications/working-papers/2009/wp2009-26-pdf.pdf",
          "year": 2011
        },
        {
          "note": null,
          "publisher": "U.S. Congress",
          "title": "Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Schools Act of 2020 (Public Law 116-336)",
          "url": "https://www.congress.gov/116/plaws/publ336/PLAW-116publ336.htm",
          "year": 2021
        },
        {
          "note": null,
          "publisher": "Holly Roose, BlackPast.org",
          "title": "Rosenwald Fund Schools (1912-1932)",
          "url": "https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/rosenwald-fund-schools-1912-1932/",
          "year": 2011
        },
        {
          "note": "The author is Rosenwald’s grandson and biographer.",
          "publisher": "Peter M. Ascoli, Philanthropy magazine (Philanthropy Roundtable)",
          "title": "Julius Rosenwald’s Crusade",
          "url": "https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazine/julius-rosenwalds-crusade/",
          "year": 2006
        }
      ],
      "summary": "A Black educator and a Chicago businessman started a program that built nearly 5,000 schools for Black children in the segregated rural South, with local communities and governments paying most of the cost. Economists later found the schools explain a large share of that era’s gains in Black education.",
      "title": "The Rosenwald schools"
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