Reckhow and Tomkins-Stange Document How Gates and Broad Money Got Everyone "Singing from the Same Hymnbook"
By Anthony Cody.
Researchers Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tomkins-Stange have released a paper titled “Singing from the Same Hymnbook”: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad.
The paper was shared last Thursday at a fascinating event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. The event was a forum, called “Is the ‘new’ education philanthropy good for schools? Examining foundation-funded school reform.” While the panels were a bit weighted with inside players, and did not include a single actual educator, there is some useful information here, starting with the research by Reckhow and Tomkins-Stange.
I have been writing about the widening influence of the Gates Foundation since it became apparent around 2010. But Gates officials have been reluctant to acknowledge their influence, pointing out that their grants are a small fraction of the total amount spent on K12 education in the US. This paper should clear up this confusion for once and for all.
The authors use several different methods to investigate Gates and Broad influence, as they explain:
First, we collected data on grant distributions at each foundation. Second, we analyzed the testimony of foundation-funded witnesses in Congressional hearings. Third, we drew upon an original set of interviews with foundation officials, conducted between 2010 and 2012, to contextualize and extend our analysis.
Here is what they discovered:
We find that after 2008, Gates and Broad deliberately pursued funding strategies that prioritized federal policy and advocacy initiatives, sometimes in partnership with one another through purposeful convergence.i Specifically, we find that since 2008, Gates and Broad shifted funds from local education groups to national advocacy organizations and from discrete project-based initiatives to systemic reform efforts. We also show that Congressional testimony on teacher quality by Gates-funded and Broad-funded grantees has increased over time, indicating that these foundations have identified this strategy as a source of significant policy influence.Finally, we demonstrate that the foundations utilized two distinct strategies within their advocacy funding efforts. First, the foundations closely aligned themselves with high-level officials at the federal Department of Education. Second, they funded a broad range of education interest groups that provided testimony to policymakers, disseminated research, and promoted a common set of policy goals. We argue that these targeted strategies led to a dominant narrative emerging within policy debates regarding teacher quality, specifically the concept of “value-added” teacher evaluation.
I first wrote about this strategy back in 2011, in an essay entitled “Bill Gates’ Big Play: How Much Can Reckhow and Tomkins-Stange Document How Gates and Broad Money Got Everyone "Singing from the Same Hymnbook" - Living in Dialogue:
