September 2017 will mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of America’s first charter school, City Academy High School in St. Paul, Minn. In the quarter-century since its founding, charters have become the fastest-growing school-choice option in the United States, with almost 7,000 of them enrolling more than 6 percent of public-school-age pupils. (In 17 districts, the figure is more than 30 percent.) Charters account for the entire growth of K-12 public-school enrollment since 2006.
That trend is likely to continue, or even speed up, under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a longtime friend of the charter movement. The charter program she oversees is one of the few federal K-12 programs to see a funding increase in President Trump’s first budget proposal.
As we observe the silver anniversary of the first charter school, it’s worth celebrating the role philanthropy has played in the growth of this field. But let’s not be confined by yesterday’s role as we go forward and grapple with the hard questions this success raises for philanthropy, government, and society.
First, has philanthropy’s emphasis on “no excuses” charter schools that aim to boost poor kids into college actually narrowed charters’ potential to revitalize American education?
Second, to what extent should philanthropy and government join forces to pursue combined goals rather than keeping their distance and pursuing separate agendas?
Third, is philanthropy strengthening or weakening public education when it supports unconventional challengers to the traditional system, such as charters and the organizations that advocate for them?
Changes in Giving
Underpinning all these questions is the large-scale shift in philanthropic support for public education over the past two decades.
In a 2014 paper on philanthropy and education politics, political scientists Sarah Reckhow and Jeffrey Snyder tracked changes in the makeup and giving patterns of the 15 biggest education grant makers from 2000 to 2010. Those years saw a number of benefactors enter or expand their engagement in the K-12 arena and displace older, established philanthropies.
Grant makers such as the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Daniels Fund, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund, the Robertson Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation (which employs one of us) brought fresh priorities to their education giving.
They tended to look outside the traditional public-education system and favor new models and organizations that challenged it. These included individual charter schools and charter networks (such as KIPP, Achievement First, High Tech High, and Aspire Public Schools) as well as collateral “challengers” like Teach for America and the Charter School Growth Fund.
In 2000, about 16 percent of K-12 grant dollars from the top 15 education donors went to traditional district schools. In 2010 the share was 8 percent. The share for charters grew in that decade from 3 percent to 16 percent.
Those foundations often teamed up to support similar activities and programs, at times in the same communities. By 2010, five grantees (the Charter School Growth Fund, Teach for America, KIPP, the DC Public Education Fund, and the NewSchools Venture Fund) collectively received more than $150 million from the top 15 K-12 foundations — 8 percent of those grant makers’ total giving. This coordinated spending advanced common goals, especially policy changes, pursued via funding of advocacy organizations.
The distribution of these dollars was notably lopsided, however. Some schools succeeded handsomely at private fundraising while others reaped little or nothing from philanthropy. In the District of Columbia, a city with more than 100 charters, more than half of that charitable money went to just three schools.
Capital campaigns that attract large gifts to a few fortunate or enterprising schools account for some of this asymmetry. It’s also due in part to the tendency of many donors to “go with winners” rather than invest in risky start-ups. The upshot is that while philanthropic dollars are welcome, they’re a shaky source of support for school operations and facilities, and that instability is apt to continue.
Narrowing Charters’ Potential
These newer donors were proactive in their education giving, deploying money to pursue predetermined ends rather than responding to requests from diverse directions, as did their more traditional predecessors. This was much to the benefit of the young charter movement, particularly given that the average charter gets only three-quarters of the per-pupil dollars that district schools receive from government sources and little or no money for facilities.
This inequity creates an enormous operational challenge. The surge of private philanthropy (plus huge entrepreneurial energy) has helped fill the gap. Such a concentration of philanthropic energy and dollars would be unthinkable, we submit, were charter schools not such a tantalizingly flexible and nonbureaucratic instrument — attributes with particular appeal to the newer benefactors, many of them entrepreneurs impatient for swift returns on their philanthropic investment.
Within the charter field, the big philanthropic winners have been urban schools serving poor and minority children. These mostly have a traditional academic program, a single-minded focus on college preparation, and a “no excuses” approach to teaching and learning that promises to boost student achievement. Economist Susan Dynarski summarized the positive impact of these investments in a New York Times article: “In urban areas, where students are overwhelmingly low-achieving, poor, and nonwhite, charter schools tend to do better than other public schools in improving student achievement.”
We laud the private generosity that has helped create and stabilize many successful charters and boost the prospects of tens of thousands of needy children. But we sense that philanthropy’s role in shaping this sector has excessively narrowed its scope and constrained its possibilities. When the bulk of available donor dollars goes to missions determined by the donors, there’s not much left to respond to others’ efforts, explore other roles for charters, or serve families and children with other needs.
What about, for example, more charter schools for immigrants and refugees? Gifted and talented youngsters? Students with a keen interest in the arts? What about charters offering state-of-the-art career and technical education? Schools aimed at rural populations? And so much more.
If philanthropy were eager to support such innovations and efforts, the charter movement would produce them.
“Partnering” with government has also narrowed the scope of what charters can accomplish. Using private dollars to advance public agendas was a feature of some Obama-era education programs that required recipients to match federal grants with donors’ funds. But that money wound up being spent on government-selected projects.
The Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund required recipients to match 20 percent of their federal grants with private dollars. In total, Washington invested $650 million, with donors pledging $500 million. Then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan called this a “historic coordinated effort between the Department of Education and philanthropy.”
Sounds great, sure. But we believe this practice extracts an opportunity cost for philanthropy, eroding its independence and consuming dollars that might otherwise be used to do worthwhile things that government cannot or will not do. The Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock aptly calls this “the smothering embrace of government.”
Charters and Democracy
The engagement of deep-pocketed donors with upstart grantees, many of them challengers to the traditional system of public education, has predictably brought pushback from those left out — and from those panicky that what education historian Diane Ravitch terms a “billionaire boys’ club” has been distorting American public education for its own nefarious reasons.
Such critics contend that when philanthropy supports charters, it pushes public education closer to “privatization.” They also note, with some accuracy, that more money for charter schools has meant less for district schools and district-supported programs and organizations.
The numbers do not, however, validate the claim that philanthropy ignores traditional public schools. University of Arkansas analysts found that when all sources of private giving are considered, district public schools received slightly more funds per pupil from nonpublic and charitable sources in 2010-11 than did public charter schools.
The difference was nominal on a per-student basis — $571 for district schools, $552 for charters — but considerable in terms of overall support, given that district schools enroll more than 90 percent of kids. In any case, both figures represent drops in the two sectors’ respective revenue buckets — in which light critics’ allegations about the “privatizing” effects of philanthropy in K-12 education seem far-fetched, if not fantastical.
Some critics of today’s education philanthropy (including but not limited to support for charters) charge that democracy is corrupted when private donors boost jurisdictional challengers, especially advocacy organizations focused on policy change. We respond that philanthropy has buttressed the “K-12 establishment” for decades with grants to districts, state education agencies, teachers’ unions, and advocacy organizations such as the Committee for Education Funding.
It seems only fair, especially when that same establishment has failed to educate millions of children, that philanthropy should give a boost to alternative providers and challengers. In our view, such support injects true democratic pluralism and consumer interests into a K-12 system long dominated by producers rather than users.
Chester Finn is a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Hoover Institution. Bruno Manno is a senior adviser for K-12 education at the Walton Family Foundation. Brandon Wright is the editorial director of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The opinions expressed in this column are the authors’ and are based on their book “Charter Schools at the Crossroads: Predicaments, Paradoxes, Possibilities,” published by Harvard Education Press.
