The Death and Life of the Great American School System
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Should test score data be used to award bonuses or to fire teachers? Thus far, there is a paucity of evidence that paying teachers to raise test scores leads to anything other than teaching to the test. Teaching to the test predictably narrows the curriculum and inflates test scores, so it is not a good idea. Similarly, it may be a bad idea to base teacher terminations solely on test score data; the data must be supplemented by evaluations conducted by experienced educators. There are too many other confounding variables. Some states give their tests in midyear—which teacher should receive credit or blame for the students’ scores? The one who taught them for nearly five months last year, or the one who taught them for nearly five months before the test was administered?
Districts such as Denver are giving bonuses not only to teachers who bring up their students’ scores, but also to those who agree to work in “hard-to-serve” urban schools or accept “hard-to-staff” assignments (e.g., teachers of special education, middle-school mathematics, and English as a second language), or who improve their knowledge and skills (for instance, by getting an advanced degree in the subject they teach). That sort of performance-related pay seems likely to proliferate, especially since the Denver plan was adopted with the support of the local teachers’ union.33 Other districts, such as New York City, pay a schoolwide bonus if test scores go up, and a committee of teachers decides how to distribute it to staff members, which might include non-teaching personnel, such as the school secretary. This plan too was adopted with the support of the local teachers’ union. But, like the garden-variety merit pay plan, the schoolwide bonus plan puts a premium on raising test scores and encourages teaching to the test.
A study of international compensation for teachers and principals by Susan Sclafani and Marc Tucker reports that some districts and nations have come up with a variety of compensation schemes to attract or retain teachers. These include signing bonuses for new teachers, housing stipends, reimbursement for college loans in exchange for teaching a certain number of years, even subsidies for home mortgages. Bonuses may be designed to encourage teachers to teach in areas where there is a shortage, such as special education, science, or mathematics. They may be used to attract teachers to schools in poor urban neighborhoods or rural districts or simply to honor teachers. Sclafani and Tucker predict that there will be increasing use of incentives based on the school system’s needs and teachers’ performance. But they warn that such incentive systems must be properly structured. If a signing bonus is big enough, it will attract applicants, but they won’t remain in teaching if the work is not satisfying. They add, “Performance bonuses based on student performance on low level literacy tests in math and English won’t produce high level performance in any subject.” And, perhaps most important from two authors who support incentives, “money is not everything.” Teachers, like other professionals, “need to feel competent, effective, and admired.”34
Knowing that they are changing the lives of their students, one by one, is a source of satisfaction, to be sure. If teachers are treated with condescension by administrators, expected to work in badly maintained buildings, assigned to large classes of poorly prepared students, confronted by unruly students, and compelled to meet unrealistic goals, they are not likely to gain a sense of personal and professional satisfaction.
So, I wonder, what would Mrs. Ratliff do? Would any school today recognize her ability to inspire her students to love literature? Would she get a bonus for expecting her students to use good grammar, accurate spelling, and good syntax? Would she win extra dollars for insisting that her students write long essays and for grading them promptly? I don’t think so. She was a great teacher. But under any imaginable compensation scheme, her greatness as a teacher—her ability to inspire students and to change their lives—would go unrewarded because it is not in demand and cannot be measured. And let’s face it: She would be stifled not only by the data mania of her supervisors, but by the jargon, the indifference to classical literature, and the hostility to her manner of teaching that now prevail in our schools.
As we expand the rewards and compensation for teachers who boost scores in basic skills, will we honor those teachers who awaken in their students a passionate interest in history, science, the arts, literature, and foreign language? If we fail to attract and retain teachers like Ruby Ratliff, will we produce a better-educated citizenry? Will our schools encourage the innovative thinkers who advance society? It’s not likely.
CHAPTER TEN
The Billionaire Boys’ Club
IN 1967, OFFICIALS at the Ford Foundation asked the Carnegie Corporation to join them in supporting a controversial project in New York City, which was intended to demonstrate a new form of school governance called community control. The theory behind the project in three small demonstration districts was that schools in an impoverished urban neighborhood would improve if they were governed by parents and members of the local community. Ford was attempting not to redesign the New York City public school system, but to respond to racial grievances in certain school districts in the city. The districts—ranging from one to several schools—were located in black and Hispanic neighborhoods and led by activists who had concluded that racial desegregation was never going to happen; they wanted community control and—in two of the three districts—“Black Power.”1
As Carnegie was mulling Ford’s request, a college friend recommended me for a part-time position at Carnegie. The program officer decided to take a chance on me, even though I had no experience and no advanced degrees. I was paid $5 an hour to do research and writing. One of my first assignments was to visit the demonstration districts and report what I learned. When I introduced myself as a representative of the Carnegie Corporation, I had no trouble meeting and interviewing the leaders. My access to key local activists was further assured because I was a friend of Preston Wilcox, an African American social worker in Harlem who was one of the intellectual leaders of the community control movement.
My report described the context, the issues, and the personalities but made no recommendations. I was far too junior to presume to make recommendations. Carnegie, being deeply averse to controversy, decided not to become Ford’s partner in the rapidly escalating conflict between militant community leaders and the city’s Board of Education.
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, one of the demonstration districts, soon asserted its authority by ousting nineteen white teachers and supervisors without due process. Demonstrations, protests, and inflammatory rhetoric followed, as did racial and religious tensions. In response to the actions by the demonstration districts, the teachers’ union went on strike three times, ultimately closing down the city’s public schools for two months in the fall of 1968. For years afterward, the city was deeply polarized by enmity lingering from the struggle for control of the schools. The Ford Foundation’s president, McGeorge Bundy, and Mayor John Lindsay sided with the rebel districts. At the time, other cities were convulsed by riots and uprisings as minority communities protested against poverty, inferior schools, police brutality, and dilapidated housing. Bundy and Lindsay wanted to mollify the leaders of the demonstration districts and avoid violent upheavals.
Eventually, to settle the prolonged conflict, the state legislature passed legislation in 1969 decentralizing the schools and creating elected local school boards while eliminating the three upstart districts that had started the confrontation. In a symbolic slap at the mayor, the legislature allowed him to appoint only two members to the new seven-person board. Thus began an era of decentralization for the city’s schools, a period that lasted from 1969 until 2002, when the legislature restored control to the city’s mayor, going from one extreme—in which political authority was dispersed among many officials—to the other—in which the mayor was granted complete dominion over the schools.2
The decentralization controversy marked the beginning of my career as a historian. I decided to write an article about the tumultuous events I had witnessed. When I was unable to find a magaz
ine willing to publish the article, I instead wrote a history of the New York City schools, The Great School Wars, which was published in 1974. Thus began a lifetime commitment to studying and writing about education. So I have the Carnegie Corporation to thank for its modest but important investment in my life and the Ford Foundation to thank for turning the politics of education into a raging controversy in the late 1960s.
Foundations exist to enable extremely wealthy people to shelter a portion of their capital from taxation, and then to use the money for socially beneficial purposes. Foundations support hospitals, the arts, scientific research, public health, universities, and a host of other worthy philanthropic activities. Foundations themselves may not engage in political advocacy, but they may legally fund organizations that do. They may also support research projects likely to advance the foundation’s goals. Education has often been high on their agendas. The steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie established more than 2,500 free public libraries in the United States and other countries. Julius Rosenwald, who made his fortune as an executive of Sears Roebuck, devoted a large portion of it to building thousands of schools for African American children in the South.3
The Ford Foundation was badly burned by its assertive role in the school wars of the 1960s. It was castigated by all sides for having ignited a conflagration between the city’s Jews and blacks (Albert Shanker, the president of the teachers’ union, was Jewish, as were a substantial number of the teachers he represented, while most of the leaders of the community control movement were black). Almost everyone blamed Ford for its role in the ugly conflict that swirled around the public schools. The leadership of the demonstration districts felt betrayed by Ford, because their efforts at community control were thwarted, and critics of decentralization blamed Ford for encouraging the militants who demanded community control.
Ford’s experience during the decentralization controversy was a stark lesson to other foundations and to Ford itself about the dangers of trying to engineer social change. In an article titled “The Very Expensive Education of McGeorge Bundy,” David Halberstam attributed the disasters in both the war in Vietnam and the New York City schools to the arrogance and elitism of the patrician Bundy. Taking note of this unpleasant episode, other foundations (and Ford) continued to support school reform, but at arm’s length.4
Not until a quarter century later, in 1993, did another philanthropist make a bold commitment to school reform. At a White House ceremony, publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg stood with President Bill Clinton and announced a five-year plan to give $500 million to improve public education. The Annenberg Challenge grants, matched by equal (or greater) amounts from private and public donors at each site, awarded funds to local nonprofit groups in eighteen cities, including Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia, as well as rural areas, and set aside millions of dollars specifically for arts education. The Annenberg Challenge, the largest grant ever made to American schools at that time, generated enormous excitement among school reformers. Each site had its own locally designed plan, with its own strengths and weaknesses, and each had to navigate the politics of negotiating with City Hall and the school system. In New York City, the Annenberg gift was the catalyst for expanding a network of progressive small schools; other cities promoted schools within schools, small learning communities, leadership development, professional development for teachers, parent engagement, social services for students, and a variety of other strategies.5
When the Annenberg funding ended in 2001, it was clear that it had not transformed public education. Some of the urban districts improved, but there were so many other reforms taking place at the same time that it was difficult to attribute the improvements to the Annenberg Challenge. In Philadelphia, district officials pointed with pride to the Kearny Elementary School as a success story that could be credited to Annenberg funding and the district’s own visionary decentralization plan. Others thought that Kearny’s achievements might be due to its tireless principal, Eileen Spagnola. In any case, despite Kearny’s success, Philadelphia continued to register poor academic results and was in such financial distress that the state of Pennsylvania took control of the district in 2001. Ironically, President George W. Bush visited Kearny on January 8, 2009, to mark the anniversary of the signing of the No Child Left Behind act and to hail the school as proof of the law’s effectiveness. But a teacher at the school told a reporter that the law had not changed the school, which was already recognized as a model school before NCLB was enacted.6
Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, remarked that the Annenberg program was “a terrific bad example. The grants were poorly conceived, poorly managed, and . . . disconnected from any ability to drive any broader policy changes. The lesson is: Don’t do that again.”7 With the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, the Annenberg Challenge soon faded into memory.
The Annenberg Challenge, unlike the Ford Foundation’s involvement in the New York City public schools, did not ignite explosive social and political conflicts. Nor did it frighten other foundations away from school reform. In fact, the winding down of the Annenberg Challenge was promptly followed by the largest expansion in history of philanthropic effort focused on public education. New foundations, created by astonishingly successful entrepreneurs, took on the mission of reforming American education. But unlike the Ford Foundation, which responded to a specific crisis, or the Annenberg Foundation, which kept hands off its grantees, the new foundations had a plan. They wanted nothing less than to transform American education. They would not leave local communities to design their own reforms and would not risk having their money wasted. Their boldness was unprecedented. Never in American history had private foundations assigned themselves the task of reconstructing the nation’s education system.
The turn of the millennium marked a changing of the guard in the foundation world. In 1998, the top four foundations contributing to elementary and secondary schooling were the Annenberg Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. These four foundations provided 30 percent of all the funds given by the top fifty donors. A scant four years later, in 2002, the top two philanthropies were the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation; these two foundations alone were responsible for 25 percent of all funds contributed by the top fifty donors in that year.8
The new titans of the foundation world were billionaire entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. They were soon joined in education philanthropy by another billionaire, Eli Broad, who made his fortune in home building and the insurance industry; he launched the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in 1999. Unlike the older established foundations, such as Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie, which reviewed proposals submitted to them, the new foundations decided what they wanted to accomplish, how they wanted to accomplish it, and which organizations were appropriate recipients of their largesse.
Gates, Walton, and Broad came to be called venture philanthropies, organizations that made targeted investments in education reform. Venture philanthropy is also referred to as “philanthrocapitalism,” because it borrows concepts from venture capital finance and business management. Unlike Annenberg, who had distributed his huge gift to many intermediate organizations to do as they thought best, the venture philanthropists treated their gifts as an investment that was expected to produce measurable results, or in the argot of business, a “return on investment.” They funded new, entrepreneurial organizations that shared their goals, and they created new organizations to receive their funding when none existed that met their purposes.
Each of the venture philanthropies began with different emphases, but over time they converged in support of reform strategies that mirrored their own experience in acquiring huge fortunes, such as competition, choice, deregulation, incentives, and other market-based approaches. These were not familiar concepts in the world of education, where hi
gh value is placed on collaboration. The venture philanthropies used their funds assertively to promote their goals. Not many school districts could resist their offers. School districts seldom have much discretionary money; they are usually either cutting the budget or mediating disputes over how to spend any new money. The money expended by a foundation—even one that spends $100 million annually—may seem small in comparison to the hundreds of millions or billions spent by public school districts. But the offer of a multimillion-dollar grant by a foundation is enough to cause most superintendents and school boards to drop everything and reorder their priorities.
And so it happened that the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations came to exercise vast influence over American education because of their strategic investments in school reform. As their policy goals converged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these foundations set the policy agenda not only for school districts, but also for states and even the U.S. Department of Education.