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DISSENT: WINTER 2011 »
Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools
By Joanne Barkan
For resources and further reading suggested by Barkan, click here.
THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion
per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just
a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion
dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has
sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly illconceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the
domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they
want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in
education yields great bang for the buck.
Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or
transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children
(only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the
Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances
differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling
public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based
decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools,
high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students
improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don‘t rise
adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and
teacher. Other foundations—Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few—often
join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement‘s success so far
has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate.
Every day, dozens of reporters and bloggers cover the Big Three‘s reform campaign, but
critical in-depth investigations have been scarce (for reasons I‘ll explain further on).
Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that the reforms are not working. Stanford University‘s
2009 study of charter schools—the most comprehensive ever done—concluded that 83
percent of them perform either worse or no better than traditional public schools; a 2010
Vanderbilt University study showed definitively that merit pay for teachers does not
produce higher test scores for students; a National Research Council report confirmed
multiple studies that show standardized test scores do not measure student learning
adequately. Gates and Broad helped to shape and fund two of the nation‘s most extensive
and aggressive school reform programs—in Chicago and New York City—but neither has
produced credible improvement in student performance after years of experimentation.
To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing
far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are
specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading
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Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down
student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five
years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where
the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in
math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in
reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and
lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average
ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
And 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.
Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their
education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their
prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot
be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by
Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about
education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.
Given all this, I want to explore three questions: How do these foundations operate on the
ground? How do they leverage their money into control over public policy? And how do they
construct consensus? We know the array of tools used by the foundations for education
reform: they fund programs to close down schools, set up charters, and experiment with
data-collection software, testing regimes, and teacher evaluation plans; they give grants to
research groups and think tanks to study all the programs, to evaluate all the studies, and to
conduct surveys; they give grants to TV networks for programming and to news
organizations for reporting; they spend hundreds of millions on advocacy outreach to the
media, to government at every level, and to voters. Yet we don‘t know much at all until we
get down to specifics.
Pipelines or Programs
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
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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.
In reform-speak, both the Broad Academy and Residency are not mere programs: they are
―pipelines.‖ Frederick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative
American Enterprise Institute, described the difference in With the Best of Intentions: How
Philanthropy Is Reshaping K–12 Education (2005):
Donors have a continual choice between supporting ―programs‖ or supporting ―pipelines.‖
Programs, which are far more common, are ventures that directly involve a limited
population of children and educators. Pipelines, on the other hand, primarily seek to 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.
Once Broad alumni are working inside the education system, they naturally favor hiring
other Broadies, which ups the leverage. A clear picture of this comes from Los Angeles. The
foundation is based there and exerts formidable influence over the LA Unified School
District (LA Unified), the second largest in the nation. At the start of 2010, Broad Residency
alums working at LA Unified included Matt Hill, who oversees the district‘s Public School
Choice project that turns schools over to independent managers (Broad pays Hill‘s
$160,000 salary); Parker Hudnut, executive director of the district‘s innovation and charter
division (Kathi Littmann, his predecessor, was also a Broad resident); Yumi Takahashi, the
budget director; Marshall Tuck, chief executive of the nonprofit that manages schools for
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Mark Kieger-Heine, chief operating officer of the same
nonprofit; and Angela Bass, its superintendent of instruction. In June 2010, the Board of
Education hired Broad Academy alumnus John Deasy as deputy superintendent of LA
Unified (he‘s a likely candidate for the superintendent‘s job). At the time of hiring, Deasy
was deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation.
Broad casts a long shadow over LA Unified, but other foundations also invest. A $4.4
million grant from the LA-based Wasserman Foundation, $1.2 million from Walton, and
smaller grants from Ford and Hewlett are paying the salaries of more than a dozen key
senior staffers in the district. They work on projects favored by the foundations.
Philanthropists Are Royalty
On September 8, 2010, the Broad Foundation announced a twist on the usual funding
scenario: the Broad Residency had received a $3.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation. According to Broad‘s press release, the money would go ―to recruit and
train as many as eighteen Broad Residents over the next four years to provide management
support to school districts and charter management organizations addressing the issue of
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teacher effectiveness.‖ Apparently Broad needs Gates in order to expand one of its core
projects. The truth is that the Gates Foundation could fully subsidize all of Broad‘s grantgiving in education, as well as that of the Walton Family Foundation. Easily—it‘s that
outsized. Since Warren Buffett gave his assets to Gates, the latter is more than six times
bigger than the next largest foundation in the United States, Ford, with $10.2 billion in
assets.
Now is the moment for me to address the inevitable objection. Many people, including
leftists, consider it unseemly, even churlish, to criticize the Gates Foundation. Time and
again, I‘ve heard, ―They do good work on health care in Africa. Leave them alone.‖ But the
Gates Foundation has created much the same problem in health funding as in education
reform. Take, for example, the Gates project to eradicate malaria.
On February 16, 2008, the New York Times reported on a memo that it had obtained,
written by Dr. Arata Kochi, head of the World Health Organization‘s malaria programs, to
WHO‘s director general. Because the Gates Foundation was funding almost everyone
studying malaria, Dr. Arata complained, the cornerstone of scientific research—independent
review—was falling apart.
Many of the world‘s leading malaria scientists are now ―locked up in a ‗cartel‘ with their own
research funding being linked to those of others within the group,‖ Dr. Kochi wrote. Because
―each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,‖ he wrote, getting
independent reviews of research proposals ―is becoming increasingly difficult.‖
The director of global health at Gates responded predictably: ―We encourage a lot of
external review.‖ But a lot of external review does not solve the problem, which is structural.
It warps the work of most philanthropies to some degree but is exponentially dangerous in
the case of the Gates Foundation. Again, Frederick Hess in With the Best of Intentions:
…[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.
…The groups convened by foundations [to advise them] tend to include, naturally enough,
their friends, allies, and grantees. Such groups are less likely than outsiders to offer a
radically different take on strategy or thinking.
…Researchers themselves compete fiercely for the right to evaluate high-profile reform
initiatives. Almost without exception, the evaluators are hired by funders or grantees….Most
evaluators are selected, at least in part, because they are perceived as being sympathetic to
the reform in question.
Hess found that the press, too, handles philanthropies with kid gloves. One study reviewed
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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.
The cozy environment undermines all players—grantees, media, the public, and the
foundations themselves. Without honest assessments, funders are less likely to reach their
goals. According to Phil Buchanan, executive director of the Center for Effective
Philanthropy, ―If you want to achieve the greatest possible positive impact, you’ve got to
figure out how to hear things from people on the ground who might know more than you
about some pretty important things‖ (Seattle Times, August 3, 2008).
No Silver Bullet
The sorry tale of the Gates Foundation‘s first major project in education reform has been
told often, but it‘s key to understanding how Gates functions. I‘ll run through it briefly. In
2000 the foundation began pouring money into breaking up large public high schools where
test scores and graduation rates were low. The foundation insisted that more individual
attention in closer ―learning communities‖ would—presto!—boost achievement. The
foundation didn‘t base its decision on scientific studies showing school size mattered; such
studies didn‘t exist. As reported in Bloomberg Businessweek (July 15, 2010), Wharton
School statistician Howard Wainer believes Gates probably ―misread the numbers‖ and
simply ―seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country’s
highest achievers….‖ Gates spent $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 to set up 2,602 schools
in 45 states and the District of Columbia, ―directly reaching at least 781,000 students,‖
according to a foundation brochure. Michael Klonsky, professor at DePaul University and
national director of the Small Schools Workshop, describes the Gates effect this way:
Gates funding was so large and so widespread, it seemed for a time as if every initiative in
the small-schools and charter world was being underwritten by the foundation. If you
wanted to start a school, hold a meeting, organize a conference, or write an article in an
education journal, you first had to consider Gates (―Power Philanthropy‖ in The Gates
Foundation and the Future of Public Schools, 2010).
In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in
education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn‘t
produced strong results. They didn‘t mention that, instead, it had produced many gutwrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en
masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power
couple 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
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school and sending the kids elsewhere).
To support the new initiatives, the Gates Foundation had already invested almost $2.2
million to create The Turnaround Challenge, the authoritative how-to guide on turnaround.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called it ―the bible‖ for school restructuring. He‘s
incorporated it into federal policy, and reformers around the country use it. Mass Insight
Education, the consulting company that produced it, claims the document has been
downloaded 200,000 times since 2007. Meanwhile, Gates also invested $90 million in one
of the largest implementations of the turnaround strategy—Chicago‘s Renaissance 2010.
Ren10 gave Chicago public schools CEO Arne Duncan a national name and ticket to
Washington; he took along the reform strategy. Shortly after he arrived, studies showing
weak results for Ren10 began circulating, but the Chicago Tribune still caused a stir on
January 17, 2010, with an article entitled ―Daley School Plan Fails to Make Grade.‖
Six years after Mayor Richard Daley launched a bold initiative to close down and remake
failing schools, Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of
the city’s school system, according to a Tribune analysis of 2009 state test data.
…The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance
2010—that displaced students ended up mostly in other low performing schools and that
mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms.
Together, they suggest the initiative hasn’t lived up to its promise by this, its target year.
Last fall, Daley announced that he wouldn‘t run again for mayor; Ron Huberman, who
replaced Duncan as schools CEO, announced that he would leave before Daley; and Rahm
Emanuel, preparing to run for Daley‘s job, announced that he would promote another
privately funded reform campaign for Chicago‘s schools. ―Let‘s raise a ton of money,‖ he told
the Chicago Tribune (October 18, 2010). Eminently doable.
Investing for Political Leverage
The day before the first Democratic presidential candidates‘ debate in 2007, Gates and
Broad announced they were jointly funding a $60 million campaign to get both political
parties to address the foundations‘ version of education reform. It was one of the most
expensive single issue efforts ever; it dwarfed the $22.4 million offensive that Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth mounted against John Kerry in 2004 or the $7.8 million that AARP
spent on advocacy for older citizens that same year (New York Times, April 25, 2007). The
Gates-Broad money paid off: the major candidates took stands on specific reforms,
including merit pay for teachers. But nothing the foundations did in that election cycle (or
could have done) advanced their agenda as much as Barack Obama‘s choice of Arne Duncan
to head the Department of Education (DOE). Eli and Edythe Broad described the import in
The Broad Foundations 2009/10 Report:
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 star …
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