In the Columbia Journalism Review today, LynNell Hancock writes about the way the media covers the education beat — often flitting from one silver bullet to the next, driven largely by the agendas of a familiar core of reformers with similar worldviews:
By far the most influential of all are the Big-Three venture philanthropies, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Walton Family Foundation, and Eli Broad’s Broad Foundation, which often work in concert on issues like school choice and teacher effectiveness.
….An important story in the Winter 2011 edition of Dissent magazine by Joanne Barkan detailed their influence—amplified by the media—over urban school policy. In it, she quotes conservative education expert Frederick Hess, the nation’s most vocal critic of the media’s “gentle treatment” of the foundations. In the 2005 book, With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K-12 Education, he describes a credulous press that treats philanthropies like royalty.
What draws these venture philanthropists and Wall Street financiers to urban school reform, and to top-flight charter schools like Uncommon Schools and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) network? One is the businesslike way the schools in those systems are run. They value standardized curricula and measures, incentives, as well as a young, flexible, nonunion teaching force. As a group, these reformers tend to believe that America’s growing child-poverty rate and shrinking social services are used as excuses by educators. Results in schools like those in the KIPP network, they say, prove that poverty does not have to be an obstacle. They see themselves as warriors against the status quo, with leverage. “It’s the most important cause in the nation, obviously,” the manager of hedge fund T2 Partners, Whitney Tilson, told The New York Times in December 2009. “And with the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged.”
The whole thing is worth a read.
