Shadow Chancellor
Katherine Bradley's influence calls into question who really makes the decisions about D.C. education reform
She’s the wife of a media mogul, a friend of the Washington Post’s Graham family. She’s a philanthropist, adviser to public officials, and conduit to private foundations and investors in what has become her life’s work. In D.C., likely no private citizen is more involved in public education than Katherine Bradley.
Bradley and her husband, David Bradley, chairman of Atlantic Media Company, are completely committed to education, and they have the means to affect policy at the highest level. They live in a mansion and have offices in the Watergate complex. They host galas and hobnob with business and political elite. In 2012, the Washington Business Journal named the couple “Philanthropists of the Year.”
Operating in a nebulous zone between D.C. Public Schools and a network of charter school operators, innovators, and fellow donors, Katherine Bradley is a force multiplier: As secretary of the Federal City Council, a nonprofit collective of District power brokers, and chair of its Education Reform Committee, she and former Post owner Donald Graham and former Mayor Anthony Williams, both executive officers, form a virtual trilateral education commission. They talk broadly about public education reform, and they pour money, energy, and influence into privately managed solutions.
Bradley’s primary advocacy vehicle is CityBridge Foundation, a nonprofit that distributed nearly $25 million in grants, scholarships, and donations from 2004 to 2013—mostly to charter schools and groups like Teach for America, which received $2.5 million according to tax filings. The Bradleys personally gave more than $20 million to CityBridge during that time. Like Bradley herself, the foundation is at the center of a constellation of private interests that are promoting charter schools in D.C. and around the country. The organization partners with TFA, Friends of Choice in Urban Education, and Charter Board Partners, and counts among its “Thought Partners” the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
Proponents of “choice” welcome CityBridge as a policy force. Others find Bradley’s influence unsettling, especially at a time when cities are pushing back against privatization of public education as a pathway to successful outcomes and equality of access. Bradley describes herself as a “cross-spectrum advocate,” and denies she has an outsized role: “Like most others in education philanthropy, I have a strategic view about how to build a system of schools that will serve all children well, and I have shared that perspective broadly, if primarily, with a business and philanthropic audience,” she wrote last year in response to inquiries for this story.
DCPS is entering its second decade of a reform effort into its fifth mayoral administration. That “business Katherine Bradley's influence calls into question who really makes the decisions on D.C. education reform - Washington City Paper: