It’s Time to Give Scrutiny to Foundations’ Efforts to Remake Education

As the 21st century opened, America witnessed the largest expansion in the history of philanthropic efforts focused on public education. New foundations, created by astonishingly successful entrepreneurs, proceeded with a boldness that was unprecedented. Never in American history had private foundations assigned themselves the task of reconstructing the nation’s education system.

The new titans of the foundation world were billionaire entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and corporate leaders like Eli Broad and the Walton family.

Each of the new philanthropic forces in education began with different emphases, but over time they converged in their support of reform strategies that mirrored their own experience in acquiring huge fortunes, such as competition, choice, deregulation, incentives, and other market-based approaches. As their goals merged, these foundations set the policy agenda not only for school districts but also for states and even the U.S. Department of Education.

The money expended by a foundation—even one that spends $100 million annually—may seem small compared with the hundreds of millions or billions spent by public-school districts. But not many school districts are in a position to resist foundation offers. School districts seldom have much discretionary money; they are usually either cutting the budget or mediating disputes over how to spend new money. A foundation’s offer of a multimillion-dollar grant is enough to cause most superintendents and school boards to drop everything and reorder their priorities.

Given their vast influence, it is worth reflecting on the wisdom of allowing education policy to be directed or, one might say, captured by private foundations. There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public-education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations have a common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions.

Those foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are, after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state.

If voters don’t like the foundations’ reform agenda, they can’t vote them out of office. The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.

Such questions are seldom discussed in the mass media. Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research wrote in 2005 that the major foundations—especially Gates, Broad, and Walton—are the beneficiaries of remarkably “gentle treatment” by the press, which suspends its skeptical faculties in covering their grants to school reform. “One has to search hard to find even obliquely critical accounts” in the national media of the major foundations’ activities related to education, Mr. Hess reported.

Furthermore, he wrote, education policy experts steer clear of criticizing the megarich foundations; at the time of his writing, not a single book had been published that questioned their education strategies.

Academics carefully avoid expressing any views that might alienate the big foundations, to avoid jeopardizing future contributions to their projects, their university, or the district they hope to work with. Mr. Hess observed that “academics, activists, and the policy community live in a world where philanthropists are royalty.”

Everyone, it seems, is fearful of offending the big foundations, so there is an “amiable conspiracy of silence. The usual scolds choose to give philanthropic efforts only a pro forma glance while training their fire on other, less sympathetic targets.”

Because of this deferential treatment, Mr. Hess concluded, “we don’t really know how much money foundations give, what it gets spent on, how they decide what to fund, how they think about strategy, or what lessons they have drawn from experience.”

This “conspiracy of silence” makes it all the more imperative that journalists, scholars, and public officials carefully scrutinize the long-term vision and activities of the major foundations, as well as their changes over time. Before relinquishing control of public policy to private interests, public officials should be sure that they understand the full implications of the foundations’ strategies, influence, and power.

The Gates-Broad agenda was warmly endorsed by the Obama administration. Both foundations had invested heavily in the programs of Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education, when he was superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools. Soon after his election, President Obama called for the elimination of state caps on charter schools and endorsed merit pay.

In a 2009 interview with Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Washington Post, Bill Gates had a label for what his foundation sought to accomplish: “You might call it the Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee philosophy of education reform.” (Michelle Rhee is chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools.)

It was also the Bloomberg-Broad-Klein policy reform, as it was advanced in the New York City public schools by the city’s mayor and schools chancellor, with ample financing from Broad.

Proponents of such reforms favor the idea of turning the schools into a marketplace in which the consumer is king. But the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers. Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.

The market serves us well when we want to buy a pair of shoes or a new car or a can of paint; we can shop around for the best value or the style we like. The market is not the best way to deliver public services. Just as every neighborhood should have a reliable fire station, every neighborhood should have good public schools.

Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or the police department. It is possible, but it is not wise. Our society needs a sensible balance between public and private.

The market undermines traditional values and traditional ties; it undermines morals, which rest on community consensus. If there is no consensus, then one person’s sense of morals is as good as the next, and neither takes precedence. This may be great for the entertainment industry, but it is not healthy for children, who need to grow up surrounded by the mores and values of their community. As consumers, we should be free to choose. As citizens, we should have connections to the place where we live and be prepared to work together with our neighbors on common problems. When neighbors have no common meeting ground, it is difficult for them to organize on behalf of their self-interest and their community.

With so much money and power aligned against the neighborhood public school and against education as a profession, public education itself is placed at risk. The strategies now favored by the most powerful forces in the private and public sectors are unlikely to improve American education. Deregulation contributed to the near-collapse of our national economy in 2008, and there is no reason to anticipate that it will make education better for most children.

Removing public oversight will leave the education of our children to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers. Nor is it wise to entrust our schools to inexperienced teachers, principals, and superintendents. Education is too important to relinquish to the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs.

American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?