Foundation Influence in Education Policy Deserves Greater Scrutiny
Philanthropy today plays an outsized role in schooling and the efforts to improve America’s education system. Indeed, one can say that, in ways good and bad, the story of 21st-century school reform is in many ways a tale of education giving.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pushed hotly debated reforms like Common Core and test-linked teacher evaluation. The Walton Family Foundation has been a crucial force in supporting the growth of charter schools. A leaked memo from the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation suggesting that Los Angeles needs many more charter schools was enough to convulse that city’s politics. The experiences of Facebook’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, in giving $100 million to Newark, N.J., attracted national attention — and the critiques of his work clearly influenced the plan he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced in December to devote 99 percent of his Facebook shares to good causes.
For all the commotion though, it’s striking how rarely the strategies, scope, and importance of education philanthropy are subjected to extended scrutiny and analysis. For all the ink devoted to high-profile foundation efforts, we know remarkably little about the patterns of giving and the accomplishments of these grant makers, and even less about how the patterns are changing.
To try to shed light on those patterns, we assembled a group of experts to contribute to our book, The New Education Philanthropy.
Just 15 years ago, there were concerns that the nation’s grant makers were retreating from elementary and secondary education. The $500 million Annenberg Challenge petered out on a disappointing note and major foundations were expressing second thoughts about whether their investments in elementary and secondary education were a good use of funds. Since then, philanthropy has roared back with a vengeance.
Grant makers have become more intentional in their strategies, more attentive to Opinion: Foundation Influence in Education Policy Deserves Greater Scrutiny - The Chronicle of Philanthropy:
