The Edsel of Education Reform
The Ford Foundation finds a needy cause: teachers unions.
Nov 17, 2009
The Wall Street Journal, page A24 - link to original article
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527641778464958.html?mod=article-outset-box
We hate to say it, but don’t be misled by headlines. The biggest headline in education circles last week was that the Ford Foundation is making a whopping $100 million grant “to transform secondary education in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools.”
Our eyes raced to see which piece of the vibrant school-reform movement Ford was going to support. Would it be America’s 4,600 charters schools, many outperforming their traditional school peers and some even closing the race gap? Maybe it would be Teach for America, busting at the seams and turning down Ivy League applicants by the hundreds. Or, who knows, maybe Ford’s really on the leading edge, and would want to support voucher programs in cities like Washington.
Would you believe the recipients of Ford’s largesse are the teachers unions? Yup. The folks at Ford are giving new meaning to the word “retro.”
Ballyhooing the $100 million, the foundation’s president Luis Ubinas said, “Improving our schools, and giving the most vulnerable young people real educational opportunities, benefits all of us. With this initiative we want to shake up the conversations surrounding school reform and help spur some truly imaginative thinking and partnerships.”
And yet the Ford press release contains not one mention of charter schools, vouchers, merit pay or even Teach for America. Literally speaking, this really does shake up, not to say shock, “the conversations surrounding school reform.”
Ford’s formula for reform involves more money, less accountability and a bigger role for the unions. “Many state finance systems fail to allocate enough resources to provide quality schooling for all students,” Ford’s daring analysts write. And, “standardized tests are a blunt and inadequate tool by which to gauge student learning and school effectiveness.”
But one of the screaming ironies of public education, known to all, is that some of the worst school districts in the country spend the most money on students. Standardized tests may be a “blunt” instrument, but they are also the only way that parents have had of holding bad teachers and terrible students accountable. This is why the unions dislike student testing, as well as teacher pay based on student performance.
One of Ford’s first grants will go to the new American Federation of Teachers Innovation Fund, a “union-led initiative to make grants to AFT affiliates nationwide for innovative efforts established jointly by teachers, administrators, and parents.” Here’s guessing the main such innovation will be more money for everyone regardless of results.
The fact that Ford is supporting the unions—the biggest barrier to school reform in America—is no surprise. The foundation has funded just about every major failed liberal establishment program since the Great Society. Head Start, Job Corps and the Community Development Corporation were launched from Ford templates. In the 1970s, the foundation supported forced sterilization programs to curb overpopulation in the third world. A few years ago it gave money to an Arab NGO that wanted to wipe Israel off the map. It also largely paid for the University of Michigan’s defense of affirmative action at the Supreme Court.
Last Wednesday, by contrast, the Gates Foundation offered $10 million to help the wildly successful KIPP charter schools expand in Houston. One might have hoped that Ford’s administrators would have looked at some of the real innovation being done by philanthropies such as Gates or the Walton Foundation and seen how truly far behind the times Ford’s ideas are.
Oh, well, another $100 million for education down the drain.
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Letters to Editor – Dec 3, 2009
Ford Foundation Has Right Idea in Helping Education
It is unfortunate that too many people involved with education reform reinforce outdated ideas and create other barriers to real change (“The Edsel of Education Reform,” Review & Outlook, Nov. 17). However, the notion that we can move forward and improve education in this country without addressing and grappling with the complex issues of teacher unions in a way that ultimately supports the primacy of educators is both shortsighted and counterproductive.
It is essential that we untangle the terrible knot that both management and labor have created when it comes to defining teacher roles. Today’s schools need to improve, and real improvement evolves from redefining the roles and responsibilities of educators in a way that supports both teachers and learners. We must give teachers the resources necessary to provide all students with high-quality educational experiences and we must hold educators accountable in fair, rigorous and meaningful ways.
The Ford Foundation seems to recognize this, and to simply cast its strategy as another stage in some supposedly backward-thinking program ignores both its regard for diligence and the priority it has consistently placed on innovation across all of their grant-making. If anything, the foundation deserves credit for taking another stab at undoing a difficult knot that the status quo has long kept tangled.
Nicholas C. Donohue
President and CEO
Nellie Mae Education Foundation
Quincy, Mass.
The Ford Foundation is pumping $100 million into the teachers unions—hoping for a miracle. Pouring more money into an inferior system will continue to result in the same disastrous outcome; that’s what happened to the U.S. auto industry and that is precisely what will happen in the U.S. education system.
Andre George
Paradise Valley, Ariz.
It may be true that the Ford Foundation is testing unknown reforms, but that is the perfect role for a foundation: private funds seeding innovation that can then be taken up in the public sector. Head Start is a prime example of such success. Despite the implication in the editorial, the research on the interventions lauded by the Journal is inconclusive, for any study citing benefits of charter schools you can find another documenting their shortcomings. These and other similar initiatives may appeal to an audience with a propensity towards competition and market-based solutions, but it is disingenuous to regard them as the only real reform.
Lori Bezahler
President
Edward W. Hazen Foundation
New York
The Ford Foundation’s $100 million gift to the teachers unions to “transform secondary education in the nation’s most disadvantaged schools” is more of a political donation than an educational one.
As chairman of the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama oversaw the dispersal of $110 million, all supposedly to help the kids in Chicago public schools. William Ayers co-founded the Challenge. Together they burned through the $110 million over a five-year period. Not surprisingly there was little improvement in student achievement.
Steve Tanberg
Denver
