Lowell Milken
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Lowell Jay Milken (born November 29, 1948) is an American businessman, philanthropist, and the co-founder and chairman of the
Milken Family Foundation The Milken Family Foundation is a private foundation established by Lowell Milken and Michael Milken in 1982. Lowell Milken serves as chairman and co-founder of the foundation. Goals The foundation is focused primarily on supporting education ...
. He is also the founder of the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement as well as co-founder of Knowledge Universe, the world's largest provider of early childhood education from 2005 until 2016. He is known for his advocacy and nonprofit leadership focused on K-12 American education reform. In 2017, he was the recipient of the James Bryant Conant Award for exceptional contributions to American Education. Lowell Milken has founded several more nonprofit organizations, including the Lowell Milken Family Foundation and the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes. In 2000, he was named one of America's most generous philanthropists by '' Worth'' magazine and has been listed for the past 7 years in the Los Angeles Business Journal's LA500 list of the most influential and impactful executives in Los Angeles. Milken is a former senior vice-president in the
High-yield debt In finance, a high-yield bond (non-investment-grade bond, speculative-grade bond, or junk bond) is a bond that is rated below investment grade by credit rating agencies. These bonds have a higher risk of default or other adverse credit even ...
department for
Drexel Burnham Lambert Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. was an American multinational investment bank that was forced into bankruptcy in 1990 due to its involvement in illegal activities in the junk bond market, driven by senior executive Michael Milken. At its height, i ...
, which was forced into bankruptcy in 1990, and was headed by his brother
Michael Milken Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American financier. He is known for his role in the development of the market for High-yield debt, high-yield bonds ("junk bonds"), and his conviction and sentence following a guilty plea on felony ...
. In 1985, he created the Milken Educator Awards, widely considered the preeminent teacher recognition program in the nation.


Early life

Lowell Jay Milken was born on November 29, 1948, in
Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
and grew up in Encino,
California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
. He is the second son of Bernard and Ferne Milken; his older brother
Michael Michael may refer to: People * Michael (given name), a given name * he He ..., a given name * Michael (surname), including a list of people with the surname Michael Given name * Michael (bishop elect)">Michael (surname)">he He ..., a given nam ...
was born in 1946 and a sister Joni born in 1958. The family moved to the
San Fernando Valley The San Fernando Valley, known locally as the Valley, is an urbanized valley in Los Angeles County, Los Angeles County, California. Situated to the north of the Los Angeles Basin, it comprises a large portion of Los Angeles, the Municipal corpo ...
in 1953, where Lowell attended
LAUSD Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is a State school, public school district in Los Angeles County, California, United States of America. It is the largest public school system in California in terms of number of students and the List ...
public schools, including Hesby Elementary School in Encino, Portola Junior High School in Tarzana, and Birmingham High School in
Van Nuys Van Nuys ( ) is a neighborhood in the central San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, California. Home to Van Nuys Airport and the Valley Municipal Building, it is the most populous neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. History In 1 ...
. Milken graduated
Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States. It was founded in 1776 at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences, ...
and ''
summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sout ...
'' from the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
where he won the business department's top student award. He earned a J.D. degree from the
University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...
, where he was a member of the
Order of the Coif The Order of the Coif () is an American honor society for law school graduates. The Order was founded in 1902 at the University of Illinois College of Law. The name is a reference to the ancient English order of trial lawyers, the serjeants-at-la ...
honor society and an editor of the ''
UCLA Law Review The ''UCLA Law Review'' is a bimonthly law review established in 1953 and published by students of the UCLA School of Law, where it also sponsors an annual symposium. Originally, UCLA Law proposed in 1950 that either Berkeley and UCLA should p ...
''. Milken graduated in the top ten percent of his class at
UCLA School of Law The University of California, Los Angeles School of Law (commonly known as UCLA School of Law or UCLA Law) is the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles. History Founded in 1949, the UCLA School of Law is the third oldest of t ...
.


Business career

After graduating from UCLA Law, Milken joined the law firm of Irell & Manella, where he specialized in business and tax law. He spent four years working as an associate at the Los Angeles-based firm. Milken particularly enjoyed and excelled at the tax-study lunches at Irell & Manella, where a senior attorney at the firm presented a complicated case and the lawyers in attendance attempted to come up with unique solutions. In 1979, he joined Drexel Burnham Lambert's High Yield and Convertible Bond Department, also known as the "junk bond" department. His brother
Michael Milken Michael Robert Milken (born July 4, 1946) is an American financier. He is known for his role in the development of the market for High-yield debt, high-yield bonds ("junk bonds"), and his conviction and sentence following a guilty plea on felony ...
had moved the operation to Los Angeles the year before, and he hired Lowell to serve as a departmental senior vice-president until he resigned in 1989. His duties were reported to be "mostly administrative", but he also provided financial analysis of companies. Lowell was most interested in bankruptcies and distressed finances where he was able to utilize his tax policy experience from Irell & Manella. He was not a registered representative with any securities exchange. In March 1989, after a long investigation, the government indicted Michael with 98 counts of
racketeering Racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercion, coercive, fraud, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation (a "racket") to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit. ...
and fraud. The indictment also named Lowell in two charges of racketeering and 11 counts of fraud. Michael pleaded guilty and went to prison. As part of that deal, the government dropped all charges against Lowell Milken, but in March 1991, he was barred from working in the securities industry as part of a settlement with the
Securities and Exchange Commission The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Its primary purpose is to enforce laws against market m ...
. It has been suggested that the government indicted Lowell in order to put pressure on Michael to settle the case against him, a tactic condemned as unethical by some legal scholars. "I am troubled by – and other scholars are troubled by – the notion of putting relatives on the bargaining table," said Vivian Berger, a professor at Columbia University Law School, in a 1990 interview with ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
''. In articles in the ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...
'' and ''The New York Times'' published in 1990, Lowell was characterized as an "unassuming family man" being used as a "bargaining chip", indicted only to put pressure on his brother. In 1992, Lowell Milken funded $1.6 million to back a lawsuit against author James B. Stewart for a passage written in Stewart's book, '' Den of Thieves'', which was about the insider trading scandals during the 1980s. In the lawsuit, Michael F. Armstrong, the criminal defense lawyer who represented Lowell Milken, alleged that the book wrongly accused Armstrong of preparing a false affidavit for a witness to sign to exonerate Lowell Milken. An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in New York found that the passage concerning Armstrong and the affidavit were true or substantially true and that defendants were protected by the defenses of "opinion" and the "single instance" rule and dismissed the charges. Lowell has served as chairman of Heron International, a London-based property investment and development company, for over 20 years. Lowell also serves as Chairman of National Realty Trust Inc., the largest property owner of early childhood centers in the United States. In 2020, National Realty Trust raised $415 million of new equity and is now a private real estate investment trust. Milken also is leading more than $1.5 billion of property development and investment in Reno, Nevada. One project, Comstock Commerce Center, is a 688-acre, 7.9 million-plus square-foot development of advanced manufacturing, data center, and logistics. In 1996, Lowell co-founded Knowledge Universe with Michael Milken and
Larry Ellison Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and entrepreneur who co-founded software company Oracle Corporation. He was Oracle's chief executive officer from 1977 to 2014 and is now its chief technology officer a ...
. In 2003, they became the sole owners of the company. In the United States, Knowledge Universe Education Holdings Inc. became the largest early childhood education company and operated under the KinderCare Learning Centers, Knowledge Beginnings, CCLC, The Grove School, Champions and Cambridge Schools brands. Internationally, it oversees early childhood education, K-12 education and post-secondary education programs and is headquartered in Singapore. Lowell served as vice-chairman of Knowledge Universe Education and he is chairman of Knowledge Universe Education Holdings Inc. In July 2015, Knowledge Universe Education was sold to Switzerland-based
Partners Group Partners Group Holding AG is a Swiss-based global private equity firm with US$152 billion in assets under management in private equity, private infrastructure, private real estate and private debt. The firm manages a broad range of funds, struct ...
for undisclosed terms.


Philanthropy

Lowell Milken co-founded Milken Family Foundation in 1982 and serves as its chairman. He also established the Lowell Milken Family Foundation in 1986 to support and provide funding for organizations and initiatives that strengthen communities through education and lifelong learning. In 1990, Milken founded the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a project to discover, record, preserve and disseminate the music of the American Jewish experience. The archive holds more than 600 recordings, 200 oral histories and 50 albums, all documenting the Jewish contribution to American music, from the liturgical music of Sephardi immigrants during the colonial era through the hits of the Yiddish stage and the jazz, blues and rock eras. Well before data-driven education reform was emphasized by the 2000 No Child Left Behind legislation, Lowell Milken conceived, implemented and oversaw programs and initiatives to advocate for, support, and reward teachers who were improving student achievement in a measurable manner in America's K-12 schools. Among his early contributions to improving K-12 education, Lowell Milken created the Milken Educator Awards in 1985 to recognize the importance of outstanding educators and to encourage talented young people to choose teaching as a career. Today, the Milken Educator Awards is the nation's preeminent teacher recognition program, coined "the Oscars of teaching" by Teacher Magazine. Milken continues to present awards to teachers annually. In 1999, the ''Los Angeles Times'' published an Op-Ed by Lowell Milken entitled "Why Not Create the $100,000 Teacher?" in which Milken argues that flexible salaries, professional development, and greater rewards for quality teaching are solutions, stating: "A recent report by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning underscores the teacher-quality crisis in California. Yet its recommendations, while worthy, do not go far enough. The solution is to create multi-tiered staffing opportunities that increase salary flexibility, open up new career-growth paths and provide ongoing professional development opportunities. By providing greater rewards and motivations for quality teaching, this strategy makes the profession competitive with other industries scrambling to recruit scarce human capital in our increasingly knowledge-based economy." That same year, Lowell Milken founded the Teacher Advancement Program (now called the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement). The TAP System was designed by Lowell Milken to significantly improve teacher recruitment, retention, practices, motivation and performance. The comprehensive whole school reform model is intended to improve teacher quality in the United States and, in turn, enhance student learning through opportunities given to teachers and administrators to pursue multiple career paths, receive ongoing professional growth, participate in instructionally focused accountability and earn additional compensation and bonuses based on multiple measures of performance. Over the past two decades, multiple independent studies have reported that TAP's multi-tiered approach has resulted in higher levels of achievement with students and schools where TAP is implemented in comparison to respective non-TAP counterparts due to TAP's emphasis on multiple career paths, intensive professional development, ongoing evaluation, and differential compensation. The TAP System for Teacher and Student Achievement currently impacts more than 275,000 educators and 2.7 million students across the country. In 2005, Milken founded an independent public charity to support and manage the TAP System, The National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), and has since served as its chairman. National support for the TAP System has been strong. As Richard Colvin wrote in 2000, TAP "is the only model that incorporates all those reforms at once....Lowell Milken, the foundation's co-chairman and architect of the model, said it seeks to motivate the best teachers by rewarding them for their efforts." In 2010, Patricia Hinchey wrote, "Getting Teacher Assessment Right" which stated that the National Education Association (NEA) identified only two promising teacher assessment models in the nation, one being the TAP System. In 2014, President Barack Obama cited the Teacher Advancement Program in South Carolina in a televised speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as a model for the administration's education initiatives, such as Race to the Top and the Teacher Incentive Fund. Former US Deputy Secretary of Education Ray Simon said of Lowell Milken, "When the history of education for the latter 20th and early 21st centuries is written, it will undoubtedly look upon the efforts of Lowell Milken - especially his groundbreaking successes with the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement - as seminal in addressing the core issues of high-quality teaching and learning." The Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes was established by Lowell Milken in 2007 in partnership with Kansas Milken Educator Norman Conard. The public nonprofit organization discovers, develops and communicates the stories of unsung heroes who have made a profound and positive difference on the course of history and includes a 6,000-square-foot museum space with permanent and rotating exhibitions. In May 2016, the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes opened a museum in
Fort Scott, Kansas Fort Scott is a city in and the county seat of Bourbon County, Kansas, Bourbon County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population of the city was 7,552. It is named for Gen. Winfield Scott. The cit ...
. Milken has partnered with the Prostate Cancer Foundation to present the Lowell Milken Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award to scientists for work in the field of prostate cancer. The Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy was founded at UCLA School of Law in 2011 with a gift from Milken of $10 million. In 2014, with an initial endowment of two million dollars from Lowell Milken Family Foundation, the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography was established at
ArtCenter College of Design The ArtCenter College of Design is a private art college in Pasadena, California. It was incorporated in 1930 as a degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for students of both the visual arts and design. ...
in
Pasadena Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial d ...
,
California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...
. In 2017, Milken gave an additional $2 million gift to the Hoffmitz Milken Center. In 2020, Milken gave a $6.75 million endowment from the Lowell Milken Family Foundation to UCLA to establish the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience. The center opened in January 2021 as part of the
Herb Alpert School of Music The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, located on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, is “the first school of music to be established in the University of California system.” Established in 2007 under the purview of the UC ...
. Eileen Strempel, dean of the school of music said of the gift: “We are incredibly grateful to Lowell Milken for his generous gift to endow this center, which builds on our latest learnings, establishes a standard of excellence and an enduring infrastructure at UCLA for music of the American Jewish experience, and gives us the ability to plan more ambitious initiatives for years to come.” In 2021, Milken donated $3.7 million to establish the Program on Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA School of Law, which focuses on research, training and policy. “We are immensely grateful to Lowell Milken for his visionary gift," said Jennifer Mnookin, Dean of the UCLA School of Law. "Our outstanding UCLA Law faculty, especially in tax law, nonprofit law and the governance of entities, positions us to be a national resource for scholarship and policy analysis of the nonprofit sector — and we can take a leadership role in the education of legal counsel, nonprofit directors and executives to meet the challenges that will shape nonprofits."


Awards

In 2000, Milken was named one of America's most generous philanthropists by '' Worth'' magazine. His work in business and philanthropy has been recognized by the National Association of State Boards of Education, the Horace Mann League and the
National Association of Secondary School Principals The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) is a national organization of and voice for middle level and high school principals, assistant principals, and aspiring school leaders from across the United States and more than 4 ...
. During the 2004 event "Only in America: Jewish Music in a Land of Freedom", Milken was honored by the
Jewish Theological Seminary of America The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) is a Conservative Jewish education organization in New York City, New York. It is one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism as well as a hub for academic scholarship in Jewish studies ...
for his contribution to
Jewish culture Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not simply a faith-based religion, but an orthopraxy and Ethnoreligious group, ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, ...
in the creation of Milken Archive. In 2009, the
Hebrew Union College Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until ...
in Los Angeles presented Milken with a Doctor of Humane Letters, ''honoris causa''. Milken was honored as one of UCLA School of Law's 2009 Alumnus of the Year for his accomplishments in public and community service, particularly in the area of education and school reform. In May 2015, Milken accepted an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from
Chapman University Chapman University is a private research university in Orange, California, United States. Encompassing eleven colleges, the university is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". The school maintains its foundi ...
's George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics at
Chapman University Chapman University is a private research university in Orange, California, United States. Encompassing eleven colleges, the university is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". The school maintains its foundi ...
. The Education Commission of the States honored Milken as the 2017 recipient of the James Bryant Conant Award. The award is named for the co-founder of Education Commission of the States and former president of
Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
, and recognizes outstanding individual contributions to American education. Lowell Milken has been listed for the past eight years in the Los Angeles Business Journal's list of the top 500 most influential people in Los Angeles.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Milken, Lowell 1948 births American billionaires Living people Businesspeople from Los Angeles Philanthropists from Los Angeles UCLA School of Law alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni 21st-century American Jews