Do supporters of Democrats pretty much have the education reform movement in a vise grip?

Two education researchers say they do indeed, despite protests to the contrary. And they argue the potential consequences of this political monoculture could be quite harmful. But their new report has quickly attracted criticism in the education community.

In“Education Reform’s Deep Blue Hue: Are School Reformers Right-Wingers or Centrists—or Neither?”Jay P. Greene and Frederick M. Hess analyze political campaign donations—mostly over the past decade— from staffers at organizations receiving grants from two large philanthropies involved in education, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

The groups highlighted in their study include a Who’s Who of organizations that focus on issues including charter schools, changes to traditional educator labor rules, academic standards, robust school accountability, among them: Achieve, the New Schools Venture Fund, the Education Trust, Education Reform Now, KIPP, the New Schools Venture Fund, Teacher For America, and others. (To be clear, not all those groups work on all those issues.) Hess and Greene coded results for all the groups receiving at least $500,000 in the most recent annual reports from Gates and Walton, and also sampled groups receiving less cash.

The results, Greene and Hess say, speak for themselves. For example, as the above chart from Greene and Hess indicates, 99 percent of the 2,617 contributions from staffers at Gates Foundation grant recipients went to Democratic causes, while just eight contributions total went to Republican causes. Staffers at groups benefitting from Walton largesse showed slightly more partisan diversity in their donations, with 87 percent of all grantees’ donations going to Democrats. Finally, donations from researchers who presented at the Association for Education Finance and Policy in 2018 going to Democratic causes 96 percent of the time, Greene and Hess found.

Alpha-Phonics Blog Editor Note:  The the full article is long so we cut it here and provide a link to the full article if you wish to read it. The rest of the article includes some rebuttal arguments by Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform and others.

 FULL ARTICLE

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