Broad Foundation Memo Reveals Major Push on Education Policy

A recently released memo from billionaire education and arts patron Eli Broad’s charity outlines plans for a major strategic shift aimed at speeding up “disruptive” and “transformational” change in urban school districts, according to The Washington Post.

The March 2012 document was made public through an open-records request by school activists in New Jersey, where the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation recently donated $430,000 to the public school system for training and professional development, and was reported by The Answer Sheet, a Post education blog.

The memo details proposals to merge the Broad Foundation’s two academies for training school leaders into a single, reform-focused institution and create a policy organization that would advocate to “make it easier for superintendents to define policy agendas, influence public opinion, coalesce political forces, and advance bold reforms on the ground.”

The new leadership academy would shift the foundation’s training focus from school operations and classroom instruction to “reform priorities,” such as school choice and measuring educators’ effectiveness, and ways to speed their implementation.