posted on: Wednesday, November 28, 2007

There has long been the idea of “healthy competition” in America. Today, the idea continues to evolve and has surfaced in the matter of education reform.

NCRP’s new report Strategic Grantmaking explores education reform through a number of small and large foundations’ effective support of school privatization. Many of these foundations, particularly those considered “conservative,” see competition between schools as a worthy approach to improving the quality of education.

The Walton Family Foundation, of Wal-Mart Corporation fame, is the largest contributor to school privatization movement with nearly 16 percent of the Walton Family Foundation’s total grantmaking supporting school choice organizations in the year 2005.

Walton’s theory is, “that the ‘yardstick competition’ of private schools, drawing pupils armed with scholarships and vouchers, will compel public school systems to change, to become more malleable to parents’ needs, to break the constraints he and other believe inhibit effective K-12 education.”

Chester Finn, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, also supports the idea of competition for improving our public school system. He says, “What public education needs is to be forced to change… That force can come from the marketplace, from the customer, via competition from private schools and charter schools and virtual schools and privately managed schools and home schools and much more.”

Does today’s public school system need to be “forced to change”? Is creating competition with private schools enough to improve standards in public schools?