More Funding Is Flowing for Education Journalism. Is That Okay?
Our recent post on Campbell Brown's education news site and the funders supporting it started us thinking about the larger topic of funder support for journalistic coverage of education issues. The topic raises questions about the current journalistic landscape, relationships between funders and media organizations, and what implications those ties may have for editorial independence.
These are knotty issues. For example, it may have come as a surprise to some readers (it certainly did to us) that Education Week, the K-12 education newspaper of record, receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, a funder with a strong agenda and point of view on K-12 issues.
Brown, a former CNN anchor turned education reform advocate, launches her new site, the Seventy Four, this month. Named for the 74 million children in U.S. public schools, the Seventy Four is intended to stimulate greater discussion of the need for reform of the nation's education system, which Brown sees as captive to teachers' unions and other interest groups. Funders supporting the Seventy Four include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Walton Family Foundation, investor Jonathan Sackler, and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation.
Multiple education news sites and organizations exist, including educationworld.com and educationews.org, among others. Two of the largest organizations specializing in journalistic coverage of education include Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher ofEducation Week and the edweek.org website, and the Education Writers Association (EWA), a national association of education journalists, based in Washington, D.C. EWA reports a membership of more than 3,000 journalists. Both organizations receive support from a broad range of funders.
EWA receives support from more than a dozen prominent funders, including the Gates, Carnegie, Ford, Cooke, Joyce, Kern, Lumina, Dell, Raikes, Spencer, Wallace, Walton, and Hewlett foundations. Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) also receives funding from Gates, Joyce, Wallace, Walton, Hewlett, Raikes, Cooke, Carnegie, and Ford. Other supporters of EPE include the Atlantic Philanthropies, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the California Endowment.
An examination of the specific grants provided by these funders to education news organizations over the years reveals the tendency for funders to support journalistic coverage of issues and events that align to the funders' education funding interests. In the example of Walton and EPE, Walton funding supports Education Week's coveage of parent empowerment issues. Walton is a top funder of parent empowerment activities and organizations, such as Parent Revolution, which advocates "parent trigger' laws, which allow parents to force changes in failing public schools, including replacement of principals and staff, or transforming the campus into a charter school.
Ford Foundation funding for EPE reflects funder interest in more and better learning time, a key Ford initiative in education. Funding supportedEducation Week coverage of how more and better learning time is being used across the U.S. to support improved student achievement. Cooke supports scholarships and programs for high-achieving low-income students, and its grants to EPE and EWA have supported coverage of such students' experiences.
In other instances, funder dollars have helped build capacity among education journalists, enhancing their understanding and coverage of key issues. A pair of grants to EWA from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, for example, helped build the capacity of education journalists — not usually a quantitative-minded bunch — to more effectively leverage K-12 data to inform the public on education issues.
Earlier this year, we also reported on a $550,000 grant by Walton to theAtlantic Monthly. The money was for two events hosted in partnership with the Aspen Institute, but the Atlantic regularly covers education issues.
The specificity and alignment of these grants for journalistic activities make sense. After all, most funders do not write checks to support the general operations of recipient organizations. Why should news More Funding Is Flowing for Education Journalism. Is That Okay? - Inside Philanthropy: Fundraising Intelligence - Inside Philanthropy:
