The Death and Life of the Great American School System
Page 26
Before considering the specific goals and activities of these foundations, it is worth reflecting on the wisdom of allowing education policy to be directed or, one might say, captured by private foundations. There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions. These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state. If voters don’t like the foundations’ reform agenda, they can’t vote them out of office. The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.
Such questions are seldom discussed in the mass media. Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has written that the major foundations—especially Gates, Broad, and Walton—are the beneficiaries of remarkably “gentle treatment” by the press, which suspends its skeptical faculties in covering their grants to school reform. “One has to search hard to find even obliquely critical accounts” in the national media of the major foundations’ activities related to education, Hess reports. Furthermore, he writes, education policy experts steer clear of criticizing the mega-rich foundations; to date, not a single book has been published that has questioned their education strategies. Academics carefully avoid expressing any views that might alienate the big foundations, to avoid jeopardizing future contributions to their projects, their university, or the district they hope to work with. Hess observes that “academics, activists, and the policy community live in a world where philanthropists are royalty.” Everyone, it seems, is fearful of offending the big foundations, so there is an “amiable conspiracy of silence. The usual scolds choose to give philanthropic efforts only a pro forma glance while training their fire on other, less sympathetic targets.” Because of this deferential treatment, Hess concludes, “we don’t really know how much money foundations give, what it gets spent on, how they decide what to fund, how they think about strategy, or what lessons they have drawn from experience.”9
This “conspiracy of silence” makes it all the more imperative that journalists, scholars, and public officials carefully scrutinize the long-term vision and activities of the major foundations, as well as their changes over time. Before relinquishing control of public policy to private interests, public officials should be sure that they understand the full implications of the foundations’ strategies.
The big three of education philanthropy—Gates, Broad, and Walton—deserve close attention because they, more than any other foundations, tend to act in concert and therefore exert unusual power in the area of urban school reform.
The Walton Family Foundation has been the strongest, most consistent force in the nation advancing school choice through its gifts. It was established by Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, in 1987. As the company became the world’s largest retail operation, the foundation’s assets grew rapidly; they are sure to multiply in the future as older family members bequeath their assets. By 2007, the latest year in which data were available, the family’s foundation had assets of $1.6 billion and made grants that year of $241 million, distributed mainly to organizations involved in K-12 education, the environment, and the Arkansas-Mississippi region. It spent about $116 million to support vouchers, charter schools, and various local initiatives. Not only did Walton give large grants to individual charter schools and charter school chains, but it supported organizations that engage in political advocacy for charters, vouchers, and choice. Although most members of the Walton family went to public schools and did well in life, their family foundation has been a major source of funding for the school choice movement for many years.
In 2007, the Walton Family Foundation awarded $82 million to charter schools, $26 million to school choice programs, and an additional $8 million to school reform activities in Arkansas and Mississippi. Among its major grants was $8 million (most of which was a low-interest loan) to the Brighter Choice Foundation, which manages charter schools in Albany, New York; $21 million (half of which was a low-interest loan) to Charter Fund Inc., a Colorado-based charter promoter; $3.9 million to the KIPP Foundation for its schools; and direct grants to hundreds of charter schools across the nation. In addition, the Walton Family Foundation made sizable gifts to organizations that advocate for vouchers, including the Alliance for School Choice ($1.6 million), Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation ($4 million), the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options ($700,000), and the Black Alliance for Educational Options ($850,000). The foundation also aided organizations favored by the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation, including Teach for America ($283,000), New Leaders for New Schools ($1.2 million), and the New Teacher Project ($1 million). The foundation made grants to a few public school districts in Arkansas, but most such grants were relatively small, less than $20,000.10
As one reviews the contributions made by the Walton Family Foundation, it is obvious that the family members seek to create, sustain, and promote alternatives to public education. Their agenda is choice, competition, and privatization. Beyond making symbolic contributions to local school districts near their Arkansas headquarters, they favor market competition among schools. Their theory seems to be that the private sector will always provide better consumer choices than government, and that government can’t be relied upon to provide good education. They seem to have concluded that the best way to help low-income children is to ensure that they have access to a variety of privately managed schools.
Is there any commonality between the Walmart business philosophy and the Walton funding of school choice? When Walmart comes into a small town, the locally owned stores on Main Street often close down, because they can’t match Walmart’s low prices. In education, the Waltons underwrite charter schools and voucher programs that compete with the government-run public school system. Some left-wing critics think the Waltons are pushing privatization so they can make money in the education industry, but that does not seem credible. It simply doesn’t make sense that a family worth billions is looking for new ways to make money. But why should it be surprising that a foundation owned by one of the richest families in the United States opposes government regulation and favors private sector solutions to social problems? Why should it be surprising that a global corporation that has thrived without a unionized workforce would oppose public sector unions? Nor should it be surprising that the Walton Family Foundation has an ideological commitment to the principle of consumer choice and to an unfettered market, which by its nature has no loyalties and disregards Main Street, traditional values, long-established communities, and neighborhood schools.
THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION was established in 2000 by the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft, the world’s leading software company. (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the successor to the William H. Gates Foundation, created in 1994, and some smaller Gates-family foundations.) Its assets of some $30 billion make it the largest foundation in the nation, if not the universe, and the pledge of another $30 billion or so to the Gates Foundation by one of its trustees, the famed investor Warren Buffett, in 2006 ensured its future dominance of the world of philanthropy (these values were depressed by market turbulence in 2008-2009, but the Gates Foundation remains the largest in the nation).
The Gates Foundation has laudably addressed some of the biggest global problems, such as public health and poverty. It has committed its vast resources to eradicating malaria in poor countries, noting that 2,000 children in Africa die every d
ay from the disease. With the foundation’s willingness to support the world’s best researchers, combined with its ability to move swiftly, it stands a better chance of reaching this admirable goal than any national or international organization.
Yet even this worthy goal has alarmed critics who worry about the foundation’s overwhelming influence and power. The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world’s leading scientists in the field were “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” making it difficult to get independent reviews of research. The foundation’s decision-making process, he charged, was “a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself.” In a statement that had implications for the foundation’s education initiatives, the scientist said that the powerful influence of the foundation “could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.”11 In other words, the Gates Foundation was setting the international agenda, because of its unrivaled wealth, and unintentionally shutting out competing views.
In 2000, the Gates Foundation selected a problem in American education that it wanted to solve: boosting high school graduation rates and college entry rates, especially in urban districts. The foundation leaders decided that the primary obstacle to reaching these goals was the traditional comprehensive high school. Although foundation officials regularly claimed that their decision to support small schools was based on research, most of the research available at that time was written by advocates of small schools, so the foundation had no warning signs of the difficulties it would encounter in pursuing its agenda.
The Gates initiative began when the small schools movement had become the leading edge of school reform in urban districts, largely because of the Annenberg Challenge. The movement’s ardent adherents believed that small schools were the cure to the problems of urban education. They said that students got lost in large high schools, that they would respond positively to the personalized attention they received in a small high school, and that they would thus be motivated to study, stay in school, graduate, and go to college.
The foundation agreed with this diagnosis. It promised that its schools—most with fewer than four hundred students—would promote rigor, relevance, and relationships. “Rigor” meant that all students would take challenging courses; “relevance” meant that their studies would be connected to their own lives; and “relationships” referred to the close connections between teachers and students that a small school makes possible. Gates pumped about $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 into its campaign to restructure the American high school. Its funding reached 2,600 schools in forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Some of the Gates schools were new, while others were created by dividing up existing large schools. 12
It was never obvious why the Gates Foundation decided that school size was the one critical reform most needed to improve American education. Both state and national tests showed that large numbers of students were starting high school without having mastered basic skills. Perhaps in a small school these students would get noticed quickly and get more help than they would in a large high school. But the root causes of poor achievement lie not in the high schools, but in the earlier grades, where students fail to learn the skills they need to keep up with their peers and to achieve academic competence.
Certainly there were too many high schools that enrolled too many students, some with 3,000, 4,000, or even 5,000 adolescents in the same building. In urban schools, this was a recipe for disaster because many students needed extra assistance and personal attention. For students who need close relationships with concerned adults, a small high school is surely superior to the anonymity of the comprehensive high school.
But the foundation seemed unaware of the disadvantages of small high schools, that is, schools with fewer than four hundred students. Because of their size, they seldom have enough students or teachers to offer advanced courses in mathematics and science, electives, advanced placement courses, career and technical education, choir, band, sports teams, and other programs that many teenagers want. Nor can most offer adequate support for English-language learners or students with special needs. For many students, the small high school was not the wave of the future, but a revival of the rural schools of yesteryear, with strong relationships but limited curriculum.
When Bill Gates spoke to the nation’s governors in 2005, half a decade into the foundation’s commitment to small high schools, he told them bluntly that “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded—though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools—even when they’re working exactly as designed—cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.” They were designed fifty years ago, he said, “to meet the needs of another age,” and they are “ruining” the lives of millions of students every year. He said, “In district after district, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II while low-income minority kids are taught to balance a check book!” He recited woeful statistics about high dropout rates and low performance on international assessments. He insisted that the high school of the future must prepare all students to go to college. He believed this was likeliest to happen in small high schools. What should governors do? Set high standards for all; publish data showing which students were progressing to college and which were not; and intervene aggressively to turn around failing schools and open new ones. 13
I was at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, in 2006, where I heard Gates enthusiastically describe the high schools his foundation had created. In a public discussion with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Gates told the world’s political and financial leaders about the dramatic improvements these schools had achieved. He assured them that the key to their success was “relevance,” making all learning real and immediate to each student.
But Gates did not mention that things were not going so well at home. The foundation had contracted with two major research organizations, the American Institutes for Research and SRI International, to evaluate its small high schools. The first AIR-SRI report in the summer of 2005 indicated problems on the horizon. It compared students in the new and redesigned high schools with students in comprehensive high schools that were planning a redesign. The students in the new small schools were doing well in language arts, as compared to those in the comprehensive high schools under study, but not in mathematics. And according to the executive summary, “the quality of student work in all of the schools [both large and small] we studied was alarmingly low.” In mathematics, the researchers found that half the teacher assignments in both kinds of schools lacked rigor, and that students in the comprehensive schools outperformed those in the new schools by a significant margin. 14 But it was still too early to draw any firm conclusions.
More troubling still was the tumult at Manual High School in Denver. Manual, initially considered a flagship of the foundation’s plan to reconstruct the American high school, was closing.
Manual, one of Denver’s oldest high schools, had an enrollment of 1,100 students in 2000. After a quarter century of mandatory busing ended in the late 1990s, the enrollment became predominantly nonwhite and low-income; the school’s performance dropped sharply, and its graduation rate fell to about 60 percent. The principal eliminated many Advanced Placement classes, and academic expectations dropped. In 2001, the Gates Foundation awarded more than $1 million to restructure Manual High School into three small, autonomous high schools, each on its own floor of the building. Manual was supposed to demonstrate the foundation’s belief that personal relationships and high expectations would enable every student to prepare for college.
It didn’t work out that way. Soon after the three new schools
opened, the new principals began to squabble over the use of the cafeteria, the library, and the gym, even over the division of textbooks. The small schools did not offer the programs, classes, and activities that had been available in the larger school, and enrollment plummeted by nearly half as students interested in college, athletics, and music transferred to other schools. As enrollment contracted, so did the number of faculty, and the school went into a steep decline. In 2002, three-quarters of the students at Manual were low-income; by 2005, the proportion was 91 percent. After four years of the new schools, evaluators reported better attendance and improved relationships between students and teachers, but the academic results of the transformation were awful. Only 20 percent of those who started ninth grade in the fall of 2001 graduated four years later, and no student at the school reached the advanced level on state tests of reading and mathematics in 2003, 2004, or 2005. In February 2006, just weeks after Gates praised his foundation’s small schools initiative to world leaders, the Denver Board of Education voted to shut down Manual for a year, renovate it, and redesign it.15
The fallout from Manual’s demise was not pretty. The foundation’s spokesman blamed the school district, the principals, and the school. A local Colorado foundation that was involved in the venture, however, commented that the foundation was shifting blame and was “as much implicated in the Manual failure as any other stakeholder.” It said that the reforms were implemented hastily, with inadequate planning and involvement of those who were expected to carry it out. The Gates Foundation’s insistence that the three new schools be autonomous caused conflict and competition for resources among the schools, when collaboration was needed.16