Lowell Milken

Early life

Lowell Jay Milken was born on November 29, 1948, in Los Angeles and grew up in Encino, California. He is the second son of Bernard and Ferne Milken; his older brother Michael was born in 1946 and a sister Joni born in 1958. The family moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1953, where Lowell attended LAUSD public schools, including Hesby Elementary School in Encino, Portola Junior High School in Tarzana, and Birmingham High School in Van Nuys.

Milken graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley where he won the business department's top student award. He earned a J.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif honor society and an editor of the UCLA Law Review. Milken graduated in the top ten percent of his class at UCLA School of Law.

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.

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 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 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. 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. In articles in the Los Angeles Times 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.

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.

During the 2004 event "Only in America: Jewish Music in a Land of Freedom", Milken was honored by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for his contribution to Jewish culture in the creation of Milken Archive. In 2009, the Hebrew Union College 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's George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. 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, 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.