Philanthropy and School Reform - more Lessons from the US
Philanthropy and schools - more lessons for the US
This article is about the way that a number of high profile billionaires are influencing the school reform agenda in the US in a way that vastly outruns the resources they donate. Perhaps we are fortunate in having a less mature and less influential philanthropic sector in Australia or is the US scenario a glimpse into a possible Australian education reform future.
An article by Wendy Kaufman, "As Gates Foundation Grows, Critics Question Methods" (3 June 2011)[i] reports on the growing concerns about the role and unprecedented influence of the giant philanthropic groups such as the Gates Foundation. It was published on the website of National Public Radio (NPR), an organisation that is also in receipt of money from the Gates Foundation.
The article notes that in order to keep its tax-exempt status, the foundation has to give away about $3 billion a year. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, says the foundation's influence goes far beyond that. They are influencing government in lots of ways and at many levels - it's an unchecked way of getting things done and that bothers a lot of people."
The article identifies Diane Ravitch as one of the most outspoken critique of the philanthropic agenda for schools for many reasons including: lack of accountability; the buying up of think tanks and research foundations in a way that drowns out alternative voices: its unquestioning acceptance of business models as the solution for schools; and its willingness to paint teachers as at the root of all the problems.
Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Gates Foundation dismisses Ravitch's contention that the foundation has commandeered the education debate, but he makes no apologies for the organization's doggedness in trying to achieve its objectives.
"We do think a very important part of our role is to really shine a spotlight on the key issues that lead to inequity in the world," he says.
It is interesting to note that this article does not refer other articles that raise these concerns.
An article in the New York times "Behind the grassroots school advocacy: Bill Gates",[ii] quotes Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said that it is Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,"
A more significant article by Joanne Barkan created quite a stir in the media because it was such a comprehensive critique of the role of billionaires and their tactics of influence. The article was called Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools[iii] (March 2011)
It appeared in the winter 2011 issue of the Dissent Magazine. It has now been tagged by large numbers of blog sites and education websites across the US. It differs from many reports about the influence of philanthropists on schools because it is based on an extensive investigation.
Barkan's basic premise is that while the money put into education by philanthropists is unprecedented and significant (around $4 billion), when it is compared to the costs of education borne by governments in the US (over $500 billion) it is but a drop in the bucket (0.8%).
In spite of this, they have managed to "define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels"
While there are hundreds of Foundations and individual philanthropists in the US that give to education causes, Barkan's focus is the big three -the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
Barkan argues that these three are not only very significant donors, they now work in sync and command the field, with a shared agenda to overhaul education using market based reforms around choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making.
In support of these goals they fund "charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, getting rid of teacher tenure, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don't rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher".
Their justification for this intervention is based on the international tests. And here Barkan makes an interesting point about how this data is interpreted. Gate and others, she says argue that the results show that "U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, and that U.S. public schools are failing." Yet Barkan concludes that the results are as they are because "twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. Her argument is that the problem is not public schools; it is poverty - "as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three."
Barkan explores a number of questions in this paper
How do they leverage their money into control over public policy?
One of the key differentiating strategies of these foundations is that they do not fund programs, they fund pipelines. This difference is so fundamental that it is worth quoting from Barkan's paper extensively
The smallest of the Big Three, the Broad Foundation, gets its largest return on education investments from its two training projects. The mission of both is to move professionals from their current careers in business, the military, law, government, and so on into jobs as superintendents and upper-level managers of urban public school districts. In their new jobs, they can implement the foundation's agenda. One project, the Broad Superintendents Academy, pays all tuition and travel costs for top executives in their fields to go through a course of six extended weekend sessions, assignments, and site visits. Broad then helps to place them in superintendent jobs. The academy is thriving. According to the Web site, "graduates of the program currently work as superintendents or school district executives in fifty-three cities across twenty-eight states. In 2009, 43 percent of all large urban superintendent openings were filled by Broad Academy graduates."
The second project, the Broad Residency, places professionals with master's degrees and several years of work experience into full-time managerial jobs in school districts, charter school management organizations, and federal and state education departments. While they're working, residents get two years of "professional development" from Broad, all costs covered, including travel. The foundation also subsidizes their salaries (50 percent the first year, 25 percent the second year). It's another success story for Broad, which has placed more than two hundred residents in more than fifty education institutions.
This paints an alarming picture. It is easy to see why pipeline interventions are so attractive. Programs, impact on a limited population of teachers and students, but pipelines "attract new talent to education, keep those individuals engaged, or create new opportunities for talented practitioners to advance and influence the profession....By seeking to alter the composition of the educational workforce, pipelines offer foundations a way to pursue a high-leverage strategy without seeking to directly alter public policy".
Changing the outlook, identity and philosophy of key decision makers in education would have very significant knock-on effects in terms their recruitment activities and the programs and policies they invest in too.
How do they create a climate of consensus?
The answer to this question lies in their vast sums of money and ability to buy influence and silence critique, not in any direct way but by financing almost all the relevant actors of note.
Barkan quotes from an article by Rick Hess which notes that
...[A]cademics, activists, and the policy community live in a world where philanthropists are royalty-where philanthropic support is often the ticket to tackling big projects, making a difference, and maintaining one's livelihood.
...[E]ven if scholars themselves are insulated enough to risk being impolitic, they routinely collaborate with school districts, policy makers, and colleagues who desire philanthropic support.
Hess found that the press, too, handles philanthropies with kid gloves. One study reviewed how national media outlets (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and Associated Press) portrayed the educational activities of major foundations (Gates, Broad, Walton, Annenberg, and Milken) from 1995 to 2005. The study revealed "thirteen positive articles for every critical account." Hess had three explanations for the obliging attitude of the supposedly disinterested press: a natural inclination to write positively about "generous gifts," the routine tendency to affirm "professionally endorsed school reforms," and the difficulty of finding experts who will publicly criticize the foundations.
Note: Rick Hess works for the American Enterprise Institute itself funded generously by the Gates Foundation
Barkan provides an interesting account of the Gates approach to policy development. His first major foray into school reform was based on the belief that smaller schools would be the answer. Significant funds were provided to break up large public high schools based on data that showed that small schools are over represented in the country's is highest achieving schools. The fact that smaller schools in this category also serve high SES populations was not considered. Over 42 billion was spent on this.
Then "[i]n November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home .. to announce that the small schools project hadn't produced strong results. They didn't mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates.
They now had a new plan "performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school "turnaround" (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).
This is now the cornerstone of US federal education policy. Barkan notes that the Race to the Top program "came straight from the foundations' playbook"
The Broad Foundations 2009/10 Report apparently notes that:
The election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as the U.S. Secretary of Education, marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned.
With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments-charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time, and national standards-the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.
Meanwhile Duncan ...creat[ed] a position within the Office of the Secretary for the Director of Philanthropic Engagement. This dedicated role within the Secretary's Office signals to the philanthropic world that the Department is "open for business" and started to recruit its top staff from the ranks of the foundation and its graduate programs.
There is no doubt that the Government and the billionaires are working together on a shared agenda. Diane Ravitch notes that at a recent meeting of the powerful NewSchools Venture Fund - an organisation that includes investors who started companies such as Google and Amazon mingled with executives from the Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants, and scholars from Stanford and Harvard. Secretary Duncan spoke to the assembled throng by video from Washington and pledged "to combine 'your ideas with our dollars' from the federal government."
Diane Ravitch, writing to her friend Deborah Meier, notes that the ideological shift has been significant and that it has taken place with very little coherent debate:
You and I are old enough to remember heated debates about what democracy in education means. Some argued that it had to do with the governance of education, with the ability of the public to participate in decisions affecting their children. Some maintained that it had to do with the provision of a high-quality education in every school, so that the education available to those with the least resources was as good as the education available to those with the most resources. There were many other definitions, but this much is clear: The argument did not center on whether to have good public schools, but how to make them better for all (my emphasis)
Now we are at a new juncture. The Obama administration has resolved that "school reform" requires privatization of as many public schools as possible. Officials in the administration point to examples of truly excellent privately managed charter schools and imply that all privately managed schools will be equally excellent, just by being privately managed.
While the original thinking behind charter schools involved seeing them as incubators of innovative approaches to working with disadvantaged communities so that good practice could be spread, Charters have in fact set themselves up as competitors of government schools. They have managed to selectively weed out the most needs students - this increasing the concentrations of need as the residualised government school
Can anything stop the foundation enablers, asks Barkan?
After five or ten more years, the mess they're making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they'll say, "Oops, that didn't work" and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of "teaching to the test," demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?
Her conclusion
All children should have access to a good public school. And public schools should be run by officials who answer to the voters. Gates, Broad, and Walton answer to no one. Tax payers still fund more than 99 percent of the cost of K-12 education. Private foundations should not be setting public policy for them. Private money should not be producing what amounts to false advertising for a faulty product. The imperious overreaching of the Big Three undermines democracy just as surely as it damages public education.
[i] Read the article and the many blogger comments at http://www.npr.org/tablet/#story/?storyId=136920664&ps=cprs
[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/education/22gates.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
[iii] Read the full article at http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781