Sloan, the founder of Egghead Software and former chairman and chief exectutive of the Quality Food Center grocery store chain, became embroiled in controversy when he decided to support a deficit-plagued public school. His funding carried the implicit message that the school itself, its teachers, administrators, students and parents all fell short of some ideal, and the school’s interests resented it.

In 1998, Sloan started giving $1 million a year to T.T. Minor, a public elementary school in an inner-city neighborhood that he glimpsed each day en route to his office. Sloan wanted his money to be spent on pre-kindergarten classes, longer class days, smaller classes and after-school help. But instead of being grateful for the support, a faction of community activists feared that Sloan was attempting to gentrify the neighborhood. When seven teachers and the principal transferred to other schools, rumors circulated that Sloan’s initiatives were to blame. (Whether Sloan had anything to do with their decision to leave remains unclear.) Paul Hill, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, says, “If you want to do something that the system isn’t doing, then you’re going to run into resistance.”

Since the upheaval, student test scores have improved dramatically, and the new principal ascribes the uptick to the changes that Sloan funded. However, Sloan’s next step drew still more backlash. Assuming that educators could be more successful if they started from scratch, Sloan and his foundation established an entirely new public school dubbed, appropriately, the New School. What did not sit well was the attempt to reduce expenses by moving the New School into an underutilized building occupied by an alternative school instead of constructing a new building.