Your interest in the community paid off, because at the time of the announcement, my family had been seriously considering leaving town.

Dylan Hawthorne, Loy Norrix High School, class of 2012

After seven years on the job, Janice Brown stepped down as superintendent. A fit, outdoorsy woman who can still race her small grandson on a bike, she was then prevailed upon to be executive director of the Kalamazoo Promise in the third year of the program. “I told the donors I had no power after leaving the school system,” she says, “except for the network I built up while superintendent.” Instead of a big staff — one other employee pays the tuition bills, keeps track of Promise-eligible students and reviews borderline cases — Brown wields her connections and the clout that comes from being the sole liaison to the donors. “She’s like Kalamazoo’s Wizard of Oz,” Eberts says. “She kind of goes back behind the curtain, meets with the donors and communicates to the rest of us what she has to share.”

People in Kalamazoo have hunches about who the donors are. Some say they must be the Stryker family or former executives. Stryker now has 20,000 employees worldwide; $100 invested in its stock in 1982 would have been worth more than $25,000 in 2007. Three of the Strykers are billionaires, and two of them have worked in the Kalamazoo public schools. Others suggest the donors might be a group of people — among them, perhaps, Derek Jeter, the Yankees shortstop and Kalamazoo Central High alum. The mystery is built into the Promise, encouraging the people of Kalamazoo to make it their own and respond in ways to get the most out of it.

When asked how the conversations that led to the Promise unfolded, Brown demurs. “That, and the identity of the donors, are things I just will never talk about,” she says. But she lets some things slip. “The donors believed that education was the most important thing to invest in, period,” she says, for instance. But she also acknowledges that the donors do regard their gift as a communitywide experiment.

The Promise donors saw how a school district in decline and a weakening economy created a vicious circle. Poor schools hindered Kalamazoo’s ability to support businesses and bring in new ones, and as commercial activity suffered, the resources available to schools shrank. The Promise was created against a backdrop of recent economic thought that considers investment in education better than nearly every other kind of developmental effort when it comes to promoting economic growth. Eberts, for one, argues that if Kalamazoo prepares its students for college, the long-term return to the community will be an educated, innovative work force, a higher tax base and a more attractive business environment. Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that well-educated people not only make more money individually; their interactions with everyone around them also amplify a community’s wealth. The biggest difference in salaries between highly and lesser-educated regions is not found in the salaries of the elite but in those earned by lower-skilled workers. The spillover effects energize the economy at every level.

One of Brown’s roles is to enlist as much of the community as possible — businesses, government, neighborhood organizations, churches, health care providers, you name it — in providing whatever kids need to get through school and into college. This means more than better schools; it includes better nutrition for children, better housing, medical care and, most urgently, universal prekindergarten programs. But Brown’s is a delicate balancing act: businesses will not participate in anything that looks like an antipoverty program.

Brown’s work on this front takes its most concrete form in the Learning Network, an umbrella organization financed by $11 million in seed money from the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Kellogg, located 20 minutes from Kalamazoo, in Battle Creek, is the nation’s fifth-largest philanthropy and donates $360 million yearly to projects around the world, much of it on behalf of children’s welfare. According to Sterling K. Speirn, the foundation’s chief executive, it is granting money to early-childhood literacy programs in Kalamazoo partly because the Promise, by spending money on children when they’re older, gives a boost to the money Kellogg spends on younger children today.