"Hedge-Fund Guy" Emails Support to School Reformers: A Conversation with Whitney Tilson

It's sunset over Manhattan, and from the 35th floor of a Park Avenue skyscraper the vista is pure gold. The soaring buildings are bathed in the deep rich colors of, well, money. As visitors take their seats in the sedately cavernous room, a slim, middle-aged man is pacing in front of a large projector screen with a picture of a black child and the words, "A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform. " (www.arightdenied.org) If it is a jarring juxtaposition, it is meant to be. The slim man in the gray suit is there, at a meeting of the New York chapter of the Young Presidents' Organization, to talk about something that many of these financiers and business people don't often talk about because they can afford not to: fixing public schools. "I'm Whitney Tilson," he says, as if the 60-plus individuals in the standing-room-only meeting didn't know. The 46-year-old hedge-fund manager (he has a Harvard MBA and is the founder and managing partner of T2 Partners LLC and the Tilson Mutual Funds) writes a regular column on value investing for Kipliriger's, is a CNBC contributor, and in 2007 was named one of 20 "Rising Stars" by Institutional Investor. In his "free time" (his words), he has become one of the education-reform world's most prolific gadflies, creator of an infamous and widely read e-mail shout-out about education reform. Tilson was also a cofounder of Democratsfor Education Reform, is a board member of KIPP NYC, and is friend and champion of education reform glitterati from Joel Klein to Wendy Kopp. With very little fanfare, and none of that introduction, Tilson launches into a PowerPoint presentation that might best be described as bringing rich people to the Jesus of school reform.It is at times riveting, at times scary. "Spending for education has skyrocketed," he says, throwing a chart on the screen with lines running at decidedly different trajectories, "driven mainly by a tripling of the number of teachers. " But despite all this money, he tells his audience, our various performance indicators -- he quickly explains NAEP, ACT, SAT -- are all flat. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "We've stalled," Tilson says. "Teacher quality has been falling rapidly. Our school systems are dysfunctional. " The "scary part," Tilson tells them, is that "the longer kids stay in school the farther behind they fall. " It's "terrifying," he says. "Game over by age 10. " The audience is with him, transfixed, if unnerved, by one devastating fact after another. "We have spent trillions of dollars and we have almost nothing to show for it," says Tilson, who moves through the show quickly, with a practiced gait. "All of this dysfunction comes with enormous costs and horrible consequences," he says, "Over $260,000 is lost for each high school dropout. " These are numbers that this crowd gets. All the News . It is fascinating to see Tilson in action. His soft-spoken manner and easy smile bear little resemblance to the passion of his words, especially his e-mail blasts. "Hedge Fund Guy Single-Handedly E-Mails Obama to Victory" was a headline on Alexander Russo's blog in September of 2008. "Reformy Cheerleader Sends Massive Emails" wrote Russo last year. Tilson's e-mails, which began as something he sent to a few friends, now arrive in some 4,000 digital mailboxes two or three times a week, with 8 to 12 education-reform news items each. He is famous for his breathless "STOP THE PRESSES! " to announce good news, which means anything good about charter schools, vouchers, teacher evaluations, reform superintendents, mayors, senators, or presidents -- as in "Mathematica just released the most comprehensive and rigorous study of KIPP ever . and the results are STUNNING! " (June 25,2010). Or "GRADING THE TEACHERS: Who's teaching L.A. 's kids? " (August 18, 2010). They get your attention, but there's also plenty of substance behind these headlines. Tilson is as much a shrewd news aggregator as he is an opinionator. …