Foundations' Bottom-Up Initiatives on School Reform
posted on: Wednesday, March 19, 2008
by Aaron Dorfman
Paul Tough’s New York Times Magazine article ("How Many Billionnaires Does It Take to Fix a School System," March 9) guided discussion with experts about how philanthropy can best improve public education was great to see, and there were some good ideas put forth. But the experts forgot to mention what many view as the most promising approach to improving our schools. There’s a movement afoot to fund community-driven school reform from the bottom up. Foundations are increasingly funding community organizing groups who engage parents and other community residents in building power to hold local school officials accountable. They see building community power and accountability as the way to effect lasting change in complex systems. Large foundations like Gates, Ford and Mott, and dozens of smaller ones have banded together in various multi-million dollar reform efforts—and they’re getting results. We need more philanthropic support for these bottom-up initiatives, not for top-down schemes of grand design.
Julie Kohler, director of evaluation and program manager for Public Interest Projects' Communities for Public Education Reform, talked about a collaborative of funders supporting community-driven school reform in the fall 2007 issue of NCRP's Responsive Philanthropy.
Aaron Dorfman is the executive director of NCRP.Labels: Foundations supporting advocacy and organizing, School Privatization
Paul Tough’s New York Times Magazine article ("How Many Billionnaires Does It Take to Fix a School System," March 9) guided discussion with experts about how philanthropy can best improve public education was great to see, and there were some good ideas put forth. But the experts forgot to mention what many view as the most promising approach to improving our schools. There’s a movement afoot to fund community-driven school reform from the bottom up. Foundations are increasingly funding community organizing groups who engage parents and other community residents in building power to hold local school officials accountable. They see building community power and accountability as the way to effect lasting change in complex systems. Large foundations like Gates, Ford and Mott, and dozens of smaller ones have banded together in various multi-million dollar reform efforts—and they’re getting results. We need more philanthropic support for these bottom-up initiatives, not for top-down schemes of grand design.
Julie Kohler, director of evaluation and program manager for Public Interest Projects' Communities for Public Education Reform, talked about a collaborative of funders supporting community-driven school reform in the fall 2007 issue of NCRP's Responsive Philanthropy.
Aaron Dorfman is the executive director of NCRP.
Labels: Foundations supporting advocacy and organizing, School Privatization
posted by NCRP at
11:01 AM
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Individualism: The Answer to Our Ailing Public Schools?
posted on: Tuesday, December 11, 2007
William Schambra, of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center
It is believed by a large number of conservative foundations that the current public education system is broken. In NCRP’s Strategic Grantmaking: Foundations and the School Privatization Movement, several of these foundations state that the greatest victims of today’s struggling system are children of lower income families.
Former board member of the Bradley Foundation, Pete DuPont, says of low-income people, “If you give them the opportunity to go to a school of their choice and opened the market up to creating those schools, there’s a practical thing you could do that would help the lower-income and disadvantaged people in this country, and it would be individualism as opposed to the collectivism of the education system.”
Labels: School Privatization
William Schambra, of the Hudson Institute’s
It is believed by a large number of conservative foundations that the current public education system is broken. In NCRP’s Strategic Grantmaking: Foundations and the School Privatization Movement, several of these foundations state that the greatest victims of today’s struggling system are children of lower income families.
Former board member of the Bradley Foundation, Pete DuPont, says of low-income people, “If you give them the opportunity to go to a school of their choice and opened the market up to creating those schools, there’s a practical thing you could do that would help the lower-income and disadvantaged people in this country, and it would be individualism as opposed to the collectivism of the education system.”
Labels: School Privatization
posted by NCRP at
11:07 AM
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Are Foundations Helping Create “Healthy Competition” in America’s Public School System?
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?Labels: School Privatization
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?
Labels: School Privatization
posted by NCRP at
4:47 PM
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