NYTimes article on The Walton Foundation’s support for charter schools and educational reform goes into depth about the size and breadth of their involvement which is enormous all across the various elements involved in educational policy and reform implementation.
This being the NYTimes, the Walton Foundation, which has some ties to conservative organizations and interests, probably doesn’t get as many “benefits of the doubt” as say the teacher’s unions might get in a similar in depth reporting of their activities. Just saying, but the article does mention numerous Walton Foundation activities and follows those with a universally condemning quote from AFT president.
Walton’s largest recipients include the Charter School Growth Fund, which helps charter school networks expand ($101.6 million since 2000); Teach for America, which recruits high-achieving college graduates for two-year teaching stints in poor districts and now places about a third of its corps members in charter schools ($67.2 million); KIPP, one of the country’s best-known and largest charter school networks ($58.7 million); the Alliance for School Choice, a national advocate for private school vouchers ($18.4 million), whose board includes Carrie Penner, a member of the Walton family; and GreatSchools Inc., an online schools information database ($15.5 million.)
Last year, the foundation announced a two-year, $8 million grant to StudentsFirst, an advocacy group led by Michelle A. Rhee, the former schools chancellor in Washington who oversaw many of the policy changes funded by Walton in the district’s public schools. StudentsFirst now pushes for the extension of many of those same policies in states across the country, contributing to the campaigns of lawmakers who support the group’s agenda.
“What they’re doing in terms of education is they’re trying to create an alternative system and destabilize what has been the anchor of American democracy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.
So, if one were to combine this article’s viewpoint with the previous American Revolution 2.0 viewpoint, one might come out somewhere close to a balanced view of educational reform and innovation in US.
True enough, there’s a lot of interests at play in educational reform, and few are unaligned with various political inclinations or power groups. The Times covered the recent dustup between new mayor of NY who is against charter schools, and the governor of NY who is for, which pits two parts of the Democratic party against each other.
Also mentions that in Washington DC, a school system with a high proportion of minorities, close to half of the students in the city now attend charter schools. It points out that some of these charter schools have reported notably superior results. The general opinion in DC seems to be supportive of charters. NYC is battling between those in favor and those against.
But good, and even superior results can be attacked for various reasons, such as “what about the rest of the students”, and are they just “creaming”…taking the best students and families out of the public schools. One could also say, “hey if charters are superior, maybe we should take ALL of the students out of the public schools”…so there’s arguments to be made on all sides.
Rather than get caught in a “catch22” world where there’s nothing that can be done regarding real educational reform and innovation, one needs to somehow route around the roadblocks that have existed for so long in the US, and find ways to marry all the useful components in the equation into a general movement ahead toward our learning “promised land”.