Editor’s Note: In June 2015, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted its second Junior Scholars Forum. The following article covers a not-yet-published research paper presented there. To learn more about the research, readers can contact the paper’s author, Sarah Reckhow ([email protected]) and Megan Tompkins-Stange ([email protected]).
(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
The No Child Left Behind Act, which the US Congress passed in 2001, defined “teacher quality” in fairly minimal terms. An individual could meet that standard simply by having a bachelor’s degree and an official certification to teach. Since then, there has been a dramatic shift in how states evaluate teachers. Many states, for example, now judge teacher quality on the basis of student performance.
That shift happened in part because certain leading philanthropic organizations decided to make it happen, according to Sarah Reckhow, an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University, and Megan Tompkins-Stange, an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. In their research, Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange examine the role that two institutions—the Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—have played in efforts to change US education policy since 2001.
Those efforts have revolved around a pair of issues: national standards-based assessment and teacher quality. Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange opted to focus on teacher quality because they were able to access a large body of publicly available information about that issue. Using the testimony of foundation-funded expert witnesses who appeared before Congress, interviews with foundation officials, and each foundation’s tax documents, they analyzed changes in the grantmaking strategies of the two foundations between 2005 and 2010.
In 2008, the researchers show, Broad and Gates started taking steps to increase their influence on US education policy. They redirected funding from local education groups to national advocacy organizations; increasingly, their grantees included groups that conducted or promoted research that aligned with the policy goals of the two foundations. Many of those groups, moreover, employed experts who frequently provided testimony in congressional hearings. “Getting invited to testify before Congress is a rare thing, and [the foundations gave] a lot of money to groups that testified five or six times over a 12-year period [2000-2012],” Reckhow says. To map connections among grantee organizations and grantee-supported witnesses, the researchers tracked references to scholarly research that appeared in congressional testimony and identified cases in which two or more witnesses cited the same report. Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange also studied the way that Broad and Gates formed close relationships with officials in the US Department of Education.
The foundations’ shift in strategy appears to have borne fruit. Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange note that in 2009 the federal government began to use both the No Child Left Behind waiver process and a new program called Race to the Top to encourage states to link teacher evaluation to student test-score data. Since then, more than two-thirds of states have made significant changes in how they evaluate teachers. Not all participants in the education debate are happy about this shift. “We now see a lot of controversy about this approach to teacher evaluation bubbling up from school districts,” Reckhow says.
The costs and benefits of the foundations’ influence on policy are likely to remain a matter of contention. “The public and foundation sectors feel as though they need each other, so they are aligning in partnerships—which in some ways is encouraging and admirable,” says Jeffrey R. Henig, chair of the Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is co-editing a book in which Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange’s study will appear. But the trend toward collaboration between government and philanthropic institutions is also a “legitimate” cause for concern, Henig suggests: “In order to concentrate resources and focus efforts, we’re narrowing the range of ideas that have play in the national arena.”
Reckhow shares that concern. “We’re not saying there’s something wrong with foundations’ [engaging in] advocacy,” she says. “But it’s a little hard to take an honest view of their role in the democratic process if they don’t own up to [that] role.”
Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tompkins-Stange, “Singing From the Same Hymnbook: Education Policy Advocacy at Gates and Broad.”
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.