Kovner Foundation

Bruce Kovner

Bruce Kovner, born in 1945, graduated from Harvard with a degree in political science. He then went to graduate school in government, where he studied with political scientist Edward Banfield. Kovner dropped out of graduate school before finishing his dissertation, later telling the Wall Street Journal he was suffering from writer’s block. ¹

After trying several other professions, Kovner started financial trading in 1977 and in 1983 decided to create a hedge fund, Caxton Corporation. The fund was so successful that in 1995, it returned $1.3 billion to its investors. ²

Kovner told the Wall Street Journal in 1991 that while academic debates had “unresolvable ambiguity,” “the markets are elegant in their discipline. They tell you whether you are right or wrong unambiguously.” ³

School Choice Scholarships Foundation

At the start of the 1996-97 school year, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York offered to accept 1,000 low-performing students in the city’s public elementary schools. This led to the creation of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation, whose existence was made public in February 1997. The foundation, supported by $6 million grants, proposed to offer 1,000 students in the New York city public schools three-year, $1,400 grants to assist in tuition at private schools. Bruce Kovner was the foundation’s chairman, and trustees included prominent bankers and investors Peter M. Flanigan, Richard Gilder, and Roger Hertog. ⁴

“We are doing this because of the importance of making choice available to kids who don’t have real alternatives,” Kovner told The American Enterprise, the house magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, in 1997.  “The public school system hasn’t provided good opportunities for these kids, so we think the private schools should be given a chance to help out.” ⁵

The program was expanded in the 1998-99 school year with an additional 1,000 students receiving scholarships thanks to an additional $4.6 million in private aid. ⁶

In 1998 the School Choice Scholarships Foundation became affiliated with the Children’s Scholarship Fund, launched with $200 million in donations, including $100 million from Theodore Fosrtmann and John Walton. The fund announced it would spend $10 million on scholarships for New York City school children, including an additional $5 million raised by Kovner. ⁷

The School Choice Scholarships Foundation ended its scholarships after the 1999-2000 school year. In 2012, Brookings fellow Matthew M. Chingos and Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, who tracked the scholarship winners over the next decade, reported that there were 31 percent more Black students who had been scholarship recipients attending college full-time than a comparable group of Black students who did not get scholarships. ⁸

Grants to Cultural Organizations

In a 2015 interview in Philanthropy, Kovner said that he had” a near-religious experience” at age 15 when he heard the “Mars” movement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets.  “On that very day I began an exploration of classical music that never stopped,” Kovner said. ⁹

Kovner has been a member of the Julliard School of Music since 1995 and chair of the Julliard board since 2001. In 2006 he donated a collection of 139 manuscripts by what the New York Times called “masters of the classical music canon,” including manuscripts by Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Franz Schubert. ¹⁰ In 2013 Kovner donated $60 million to Juilliard to endow the Kovner Scholarship Program, which pays tuition, room and board for 52 students at the school each year. ¹¹

Julliard received $5.4 million in 2019 from the Kovner Foundation. Other seven-figure grants went to the Metropolitan Opera ($2,000,000) and Carnegie Hall ($1.5 million). ¹²

Support for Charter Schools

In a 2011 speech, Kovner said he became a supporter of the Institute for Justice (IJ) due to its support of school  choice. At a speech for the 20^th anniversary of the institute in 2011, Kovner said, “The School Choice movement gave a voice to parents and others who wanted to take some measure of control back from government bureaucrats and union-dominated school systems.” ¹³ IJ received $333,333 from the Kovner Foundation in 2019. ¹²

Jay Nordlinger in Philanthropy noted in 2016 that the Kovners were “major backers” of the Success Academy charter schools, with Suzie Kovner sitting on the Success Academy board. Academy founder Eva Moskowitz said that Kovner’s donations have encouraged other donors to give “because they know he (Kovner) is a serious person. So his influence goes beyond his gifts. He is a leader.” ¹⁴

Success Academy received $4 million from the Kovner Foundation in 2019.  A $1,000,000 grant went to the Charter Fund, a national charter-school funder based in Broomfield, Colorado. ¹²

Grants to Center-Right Policy Organizations

The American Enterprise Institute received a $1.2 million grant from the Kovner Foundation in 2019. Grants of $100,000 or more went to the Fordham Institute ($200,000), Education Next Institute ($113,000), and Foundation for Constitutional Government ($100,000). ¹²