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"For a dozen years, big philanthropy has been funding a massive crusade to remake public education for low-income and minority children in the image of the private sector. If schools were run like businesses competing in the market-so the argument goes-the achievement gap that separates poor and minority students from middle-class and affluent students would disappear. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have taken the lead, but other mega-foundations have joined in to underwrite the self-proclaimed "education reform movement." Some of them are the Laura and John Arnold, Anschutz, Annie E. Casey, Michael and Susan Dell, William and Flora Hewlett, and Joyce foundations."

On April 9 we learn that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will also cancel their ALEC funding, after their current funding runs out (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout): Following Kraft, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Intuit, another influential sponsor of ALEC has withdrawn its support from the right-wing corporate front group. ... Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Color of Change, among others, had targeted the Gates Foundation for giving more than $375,000 to ALEC over the past two years. Well that's nice (sorta - their grant still has 17 months to go). But wait ... the Gates Foundation was funding ALEC? Why? Aren't they half-way between that wonderful Steve Jobs (blessings be upon him) and that even more wonderful Warren Buffett (likewise)? In a word, No. There's a right-wing war to destroy public education, and the Gates Foundation is in the thick of it. Again, ALEC writes the laws that bought-off state legislators get passed.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest philanthropic organization involved in public education. Their flexible capital allows the foundation to change course, experiment and take on tasks that would be problematic for other organizations. Although the foundation's education programs have been the subject of both praise and controversy, one area in which they deserve a great deal of credit is transparency. Unlike most other foundations, which provide a bare minimum, time-lagged account of their activities, Gates not only provides a description of each grant on its annually-filed IRS 990-PF forms, but it also maintains a continually updated list of grants posted on the foundation's website. This nearly real-time outlet provides the public with information about grants months before the foundation is required to do so. The purpose of this post is to provide descriptive information about programmatic support and changes between 2008 and 2010. These are the three years for which information is currently available.

The data summit is part of the Data Quality Campaign, which is a national effort by dozens of organizations and funded by grants and contributions from a variety of foundations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, AT&T, and the Birth to Five Policy Alliance. The campaign, the website says, works to "encourage and support state policymakers to improve the availability and use of high-quality education data to improve student achievement." There's nothing wrong and there can be a lot right with using high-quality education data to improve achievement, of course, but data can never be the whole story. Ensuring that data is high quality, knowing how to use it - and understanding its limitations - is still not the science. A lot of the data we have is junk, but we use it to inform important decisions anyway.

Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the GAP clothing company, began contributing to education-related causes through various philanthropic organizations in the late 1990s. The Doris and Donald Fisher Fund is the current foundation, although it was formerly known as the Doris and Donald Fisher Education Fund, is still sometimes abbreviated as D2F2, and earlier was known as the Pisces Foundation. The Fishers were early supporters of Edison Schools, and have been major supporters of KIPP and Teach for America. Although I cannot find some of the Fisher's earliest IRS 990s, the family also supported a young organization, The New Teacher Project, founded by Michelle Rhee. As noted on the Fisher's 2011 Form 990, the foundation contributed $250,000 to Rhee's newest organization, StudentsFirst. I gathered Form 990s for the fiscal years ending in 2003 through 2011, and pulled information about contributions made during each of those years. You can find all of these Form 990s through Guidestar.org or Foundation Center's 990 Finder. You can see the information I pulled in an Excel file on my Data page or check out the results below.

The Rhode Island Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation today announced grants totaling $1.8 million to expand The Learning Community's nationally-recognized professional development work in reading for free to five area public elementary schools. The Learning Community, one of Rhode Island's highest performing high poverty schools, has received national recognition for its partnership with the Central Falls school district, where reading scores increased through innovative, proven strategies for boosting reading achievement.

The Rhode Island Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation today announced grants totaling $1.8 million to expand The Learning Community's nationally-recognized professional development work in reading for free to five area public elementary schools. The Learning Community, one of Rhode Island's highest performing high poverty schools, has received national recognition for its partnership with the Central Falls school district, where reading scores increased through innovative, proven strategies for boosting reading achievement.  

The foundation invested more than $159 million in education reform initiatives in 2011, marking the largest single-year investment in education reform initiatives. Grants were made to organizations and programs that empower parents, particularly in low-income communities, to choose among quality, publicly funded schools for their children. The foundation invests to expand the right of all parents to have access to quality schools, regardless of type, with the goal of ultimately increasing student achievement. List of grants can be found at http://waltonfamilyfoundation.org/2011-education-reform-grant-list

A number of prominent foundations have supported the charitable wings of national education advocacy groups. The engagement of philanthropies in policy advocacy is a relatively recent phenomenon that roughly parallels such education groups' expansion over the past decade. This list details three foundations' investments; it is not a comprehensive list of all private foundation contributions, nor does it include local, public, or community charities' contributions.

This was written by Will Miller, president of The Wallace Foundation, an independent, national foundation that works to expand learning and enrichment opportunities for children. The foundation maintains an online library of lessons at www.wallacefoundation.org.

The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have put out a report purporting to show that public school teachers are overpaid. It's 23 pages of elaborate statistical justification of right-wing beliefs, all built on a foundation of right-wing assumptions. The basic claims are that while teachers are underpaid relative to other people with similar levels of education, in fact they are overpaid because education programs are easier than other majors and also, teachers are stupid; that public school teachers earn more than private school teachers and this shows they earn more than the market should support; and that people who leave teaching earn less while people who enter teaching earn more, therefore teachers are overpaid.

The foundations-idea complex has also set its sights on remaking another of the key institutions of our democracy-the public school-in its own managerial image. There's no other way to account for the distorted, counter-empirical shape of the American debate over education. The overarching trends are plain enough: As wealth inequality swells, so do the coffers of private foundations, even as the recession has caused government budgets to shrink. As long as the motives of government and foundations are aligned, that's not necessarily a problem. But the funders of education reform seek nothing less than the wholesale retooling of public schools, at a time when the nation's school budgets are stretched to the breaking point. And the writing on the chalkboard grows clearer by the minute: Their market-based educational reforms don't work.

Once-a-year evaluations aren't enough to help teachers improve, says a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And school districts using infrequent classroom observations to decide who are their best - and their worst - teachers could be making some big mistakes, according to the second part of a multi-year study from the foundation.

"In response to a request under the NJ Open Public Records Act (OPRA), Education Law Center has obtained a confidential proposal prepared for the Broad Foundation by the NJ Department of Education (NJDOE) to "turnaround," take control, and potentially close over 200 public schools over the next three years.  NJ Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf submitted a draft "School Turnaround Proposal" to the Eli Broad Foundation in November 2011, seeking to secure millions in grant funds from the private, Los Angeles-based foundation. The draft formed the basis of a final proposal, submitted February 2012, requesting $7.6 million in grant funds."

"According to The New York Times, the New York State Attorney General has exposed the supposedly non-profit Pearson Foundation for what it really is, a partner with the for-profit wing of the global Pearson publishing mega-giant. The Pearson Foundation agreed to pay a penalty of over seven million dollars to New York State that will be used to prepare teachers to work in high needs communities. According to New York State law, foundations are prohibited by law from using charitable funds to promote and develop for-profit activities."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today became the latest backer to withdraw financial support for the American Legislative Exchange Council. A foundation spokesman told Roll Call that it does not plan to make future grants to the conservative nonprofit, which has come under fire from progressive activists for its support of voter identification laws and other contentious measures.

In advancing some interests, foundations have inevitably not advanced others. Hence, their actions must have political consequences, even when political purposes are not avowed or even intended. To avoid politics in dealing with foundation history is to miss a crucial part of the story. -Ellen Lagemann, Private Power for the Public Good When Microsoft magnate Bill Gates decided a decade ago that the "solution" to what he saw as America's failing school systems was an expansion of smaller schools, he started writing checks, a whole lot of checks, totaling more than $2 billion.   Gates is not the only billionaire who has decided to make education reform one of his pet projects. Los Angeles-based developer Eli Broad, the mega-rich Walton family (founders of Walmart) and other philanthropists currently give some $4 billion a year in contributions to education. But these handouts are hardly purely philanthropic. They come tied with policy strings and a well-defined agenda. While not the only donors, Gates, Broad and the Waltons have emerged as the highest-profile deep-pocket benefactors of what has become a nationwide education reform movement.

"This is the last exchange in this formal dialogue with the Gates Foundation. The tension uncovered by this dialogue reveals a disconnect between the work of the Gates Foundation and many of us who have spent our lives working in schools. Nonetheless, this represents an opportunity to move beyond the impasse. Similar to the polarization that has occurred in the national political scene, the battle lines over education reform have become so hardened that it seems as if we cannot even agree on a common understanding of reality. Therefore bridging our differences requires us to share and discuss those realities, even though our perspectives are very different. I hope that in the months to come this dialogue will deepen, and that the tensions we have revealed will not lead us throw up our hands and abandon the effort, but rather will strengthen our commitment to continue to wrestle with these issues in the interest of our students. Today we are taking on a big question: What is the role of the marketplace in pushing forward education improvement and innovation?"

New Jersey education officials had a dilemma last summer: Following the approval of a record number of charter schools, questions were flying about how closely the applications had been screened. With more prospective charters lining up, acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf, a former charter executive, bought in help - a move that proved controversial. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a Chicago nonprofit, had offered to fly in 14 consultants to lead Department of Education staff in the next approval round, looking toward overhauling the entire process. What was particularly enticing was that the association could arrange funding through the Newark Charter School Fund, a nonprofit backed by the same philanthropies that support the association, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A new well-financed player has jumped into the debate over education reform in New York State, and already the sparks have begun to fly. The New York Campaign for Achievement Now, or NYCAN, has launched its Web site, and its executive director, Christine Grant, said it has raised $1.2 million from such entities as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.