School choice schism
Education secretary’s voucher support alienates key people
For two decades, a loose-knit group that includes some of the country’s wealthiest people has underwritten the political push for school choice, promoting ballot initiatives and candidates who favor competition for traditional public schools.
But when a member of this elite group was elevated to education secretary, the appointment opened a philosophical schism that now threatens to shatter the alliance, turn billionaires against one another and possibly lead some school-choice advocates to join with teachers’ unions, their archenemies.
Fueling the split is the anticipation of a plan from President Donald Trump’s administration that could offer parents federal dollars to send their children to private schools, including religious and for-profit institutions.
“As much as we are aligned on change, we aren’t always aligned on how much change or how. Sometimes, we fight,” said Derrell Bradford, executive vice president of the school-reform group 50CAN.
The movement has been cleaved into two camps: those who want to use choice to improve public schools and others, like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who want to go further by allowing tax money to flow to private schools through vouchers, governmentfunded scholarships or corporate tax credits.
The differences that once seemed minor are at the heart of a potential seismic shift in the school-choice movement.
School-choice programs were first proposed in the 1950s by Nobel Prize-winning free-market economist Milton Friedman. Since the beginning of this century, they have grown quickly, although the overwhelming majority of students still attend traditional public schools.
Thirty states plus Washington, D.C., have some combination of vouchers, government-subsidized education savings accounts or tax credits that help families afford private-school tuition or encourage private groups to fund scholarships, according to EdChoice, an advocacy group.
Still, less than 1 percent of children in kindergarten through high school used vouchers to attend private schools in 2015. Just 5 percent of students were in charter schools that year, when charters were operating in more than 40 states. That’s up from about 3 percent in 2008, according to the Department of Education.
Charter schools are public but in several states are not held to the same accountability standards as traditional schools, which in theory gives them more freedom to innovate.
When standardized test scores of children who switched to charter schools or used vouchers are compared with those of students who remained in traditional public schools, some results have been promising. Other studies have shown little or no effect.
The biggest donors
Wal-Mart’s Walton family, Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and the father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates have been some of the largest political contributors to the school-reform movement, according to an analysis by The Associated Press of campaignfinance records compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics and state campaignfinance regulators.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates avoids political contributions. His family’s massive foundation — which his father, Bill Gates Sr., co-chairs — is a major contributor to education-reform nonprofits. The elder Gates contributes personally as well.
In the past, contributions have flowed to reform-minded groups, regardless of whether they supported public charter schools, vouchers for private schools or a combination. Now those funders are beginning to split into competing camps.
Groups such as Stand for Children, which pushes for charter schools among other educational changes, are being more vocal now because “the level of ambition of the efforts to expand vouchers is so high,” said Jonah Edelman, co-founder and chief executive, who called the voucher proposals “a dramatic effort to undermine public education.”
Edelman, whose organization receives part of its funding from Walton, Broad and Gates-related charities and family members, said his group will fight any administration effort to promote vouchers nationwide.
Stand for Children has worked with teachers unions in the past on state-level measures to provide more money for schools and raise teacher pay. But its calls for more charters often put it at odds with the unions, which are powerful political entities in many states.
The American Federation of Teachers has had conversations with some charter school advocates it has opposed in the past about coordinating to fight a national voucher program, said Randi Weingarten, president of the union.
To identify those who have shaped the school-choice movement across the country, the AP analyzed the political contributions of 48 individuals and couples who have given at least $100,000 to related statewide ballot measure campaigns. That group accounted for the majority of reported contributions to campaigns favoring school-choice initiatives from 2000 through last year. The donors nearly matched all the measures’ opponents.
The group also wields political clout.
The AP analysis showed that the same wealthy funders contributed a total of more than $200 million from 2007 through last year to candidates and political action committees, some of which are supporters of school choice.
The funders are from a variety of industries and regions, with a concentration of investors and tech innovators from Seattle and Silicon Valley. Some give millions more to research centers, legal funds, foundations, charter schools and scholarships that promote pieces of the cause.
Political campaigns often are a clash of titans. The nation’s two largest teachers’ unions — the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, which have 4.5 million members combined — contributed $573 million to campaigns and political action committees over the same 10-year period, much of it designed to counter the spending of the wealthy families and their affiliated groups.
THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TENSIONS IN SOME QUARTERS OVER THE BEST WAYS TO OFFER EDUCATIONAL OPTIONS TO FAMILIES. SCHOOL CHOICE IS A MEANS TO AN END AND NOT THE END IN ITSELF. IT IS ABOUT MAKING SURE THOSE OPTIONS — INCLUDING SCHOOLS WITHIN TRADITIONAL SCHOOL SYSTEMS — OFFER THE KINDS OF HIGH-QUALITY, DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES SO THAT EVERY CHILD HAS A REAL CHANCE TO SUCCEED IN LIFE. MARC STERNBERG SENIOR EDUCATION ADVISER TO THE WALTON FAMILY