A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools
WASHINGTON
— DC Prep operates four charter schools here with 1,200 students in
preschool through eighth grade. The schools, whose students are mostly
poor and black, are among the highest performing in Washington. Last
year, DC Prep’s flagship middle school earned the best test scores among
local charter schools, far outperforming the average of the city’s
traditional neighborhood schools as well.
Another,
less trumpeted, distinction for DC Prep is the extent to which it — as
well as many other charter schools in the city — relies on the Walton
Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that
founded Walmart.
Since
2002, the charter network has received close to $1.2 million from
Walton in direct grants. A Walton-funded nonprofit helped DC Prep find
building space when it moved its first two schools from a chapel
basement into former warehouses that now have large classrooms and wide,
art-filled hallways.
One-third
of DC Prep’s teachers are alumni of Teach for America, whose largest
private donor is Walton. A Walton-funded advocacy group fights for more
public funding and autonomy for charter schools in the city. Even the
local board that regulates charter schools receives funding from the
Walton Family Foundation.
In
effect, Walton has subsidized an entire charter school system in the
nation’s capital, helping to fuel enrollment growth so that close to
half of all public school students in the city now attend charters,
which receive taxpayer dollars but are privately operated.
Walton’s
investments here are a microcosm of its spending across the country.
The foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants nationally to
educational efforts since 2000, making it one of the largest private
contributors to education in the country. It is one of a handful of
foundations with strong interests in education, including those
belonging to Bill and Melinda Gates of Microsoft; Eli Broad, a Los
Angeles insurance billionaire; and Susan and Michael Dell, who made
their money in computers. The groups have many overlapping interests,
but analysts often describe Walton as following a distinct ideological
path.
In
addition to giving grants to right-leaning think tanks like the Thomas
B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute for Public
Policy Research, the Walton foundation hired an education program
officer who had worked at the American Legislative Exchange Council, a
conservative business-backed group. Walton has also given to centrist
organizations such as New Leaders for New Schools, a group co-founded by
Jon Schnur, a former senior adviser to President Obama’s transition
team and to Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.
In 2013, the Walton foundation spent more than $164 million across the country. According to Marc Sternberg,
who was appointed director of K-12 education reform at the Walton
Family Foundation last September, Walton has given grants to one in
every four charter start-ups in the country, for a total of $335
million.
“The
Walton Family Foundation has been deeply committed to a theory of
change, which is that we have a moral obligation to provide families
with high quality choices,” said Mr. Sternberg. “We believe that in
providing choices we are also compelling the other schools in an
ecosystem to raise their game.”
The
supporters and critics of charter schools, many of them fierce, cannot
be easily divided into political camps. Supporters include both
Republicans and Democrats, although critics tend to come more from the
left. In Washington, where the charter system has strong backing in City
Hall, supporters have been more successful than in New York, where
opposition from teachers unions and others has kept charter school
enrollment to about 6 percent, despite growth in the past decade.
The
size of the Walton foundation’s wallet allows it to exert an outsize
influence on education policy as well as on which schools flourish and
which are forced to fold. With its many tentacles, it has helped fuel
some of the fastest growing, and most divisive, trends in public
education — including teacher evaluations based on student test scores
and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.
“The
influence of philanthropy in terms of the bang for the buck they get is
just really kind of shocking,” said Jack Schneider, an assistant
professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,
Mass.
A
separate Walton foundation that supports higher education bankrolls an
academic department at the University of Arkansas in which faculty,
several of whom were recruited from conservative think tanks, conduct
research on charter schools, voucher programs and other policies the
foundation supports.
Last
year, the Walton Family Foundation gave $478,380 to a fund affiliated
with the Chicago public schools to help officials conduct community
meetings to discuss their plan to close more than 50 schools at a time
when charters were expanding in the city.
And
Walton played a role in a recent battle in New York, giving a grant to a
charter advocacy group that helped pay for advertisements attacking
Mayor Bill de Blasio after he denied public space to three schools run
by Success Academy Charter Schools, a network in which students have
gotten high scores on standardized tests.
While
charter schools and vouchers may benefit those families that attend
these schools, there may be unintended effects on the broader public
school system.
Grant
recipients say Walton injects entrepreneurial energy into public
education and helps groups eager to try new ideas move more quickly than
they could if they relied solely on publicly managed bureaucracies.
Thousands of children, they say, attend better schools because of
options Walton supports.
“The
supply of new models and new ideas is really important, and so I think
it’s a very positive thing,” said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry
School of Education at the University of Virginia, of the Walton
investments. Neither Dr. Pianta nor the Curry School have received
funding from Walton.
Critics
say that Walton backs schools and measures that take public dollars —
and, some say, the most motivated families — away from the existing
public schools, effectively creating a two-tier educational system that
could hurt the students most in need.
Although Walmart opened its first two stores in the nation’s capital just last December after a protracted battle over the retailer’s wages,
the Walton Family Foundation has played a role in steering the
direction of public education in the city for more than a decade. Since
2000, the foundation has invested more than $80 million here, not only
in charter schools but also in support of taxpayer-funded vouchers for
students to attend private schools. It poured millions into a
controversial overhaul of tenure, the implementation of stricter teacher
evaluation systems and the introduction of performance pay in the
district’s public schools.
Walton
also supports measures that labor leaders say undermine union
protections for teachers. Like-minded Walton recipients are working
together in many cases, so there are few dissenting voices.
“When
lots of charter schools open up, it’s like a new Walmart store moving
in,” said Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy
Center at University of Colorado in Boulder. “You could look at it and
say, ‘Well, the schools in a community are losing families because of
healthy competition the same way that the hardware store is losing
customers because of healthy competition.’ But that doesn’t take into
account the long-term harms to the community, which are probably greater
than any short-term benefit.”
In
addition to the foundation’s activities, many individual members of the
Walton family have made millions of dollars in campaign donations to
candidates for local school boards and state legislatures who support
causes funded by the foundation.
Walton’s
largest recipients include the Charter School Growth Fund, which helps
charter school networks expand ($101.6 million since 2000); Teach for
America, which recruits high-achieving college graduates for two-year
teaching stints in poor districts and now places about a third of its
corps members in charter schools ($67.2 million); KIPP, one of the
country’s best-known and largest charter school networks ($58.7
million); the Alliance for School Choice, a national advocate for
private school vouchers ($18.4 million), whose board includes Carrie
Penner, a member of the Walton family; and GreatSchools Inc., an online
schools information database ($15.5 million.)
Last
year, the foundation announced a two-year, $8 million grant to
StudentsFirst, an advocacy group led by Michelle A. Rhee, the former
schools chancellor in Washington who oversaw many of the policy changes
funded by Walton in the district’s public schools. StudentsFirst now
pushes for the extension of many of those same policies in states across
the country, contributing to the campaigns of lawmakers who support the
group’s agenda.
“What
they’re doing in terms of education is they’re trying to create an
alternative system and destabilize what has been the anchor of American
democracy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation
of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.
Although
the foundation’s leaders say they are focused on helping children in
poverty or stuck in low-performing schools, some of their actions
support concepts regardless of whether poor children benefit. In 2012,
for example, Walton gave $300,000 to the Douglas County School District
in Colorado to help it fight a lawsuit brought by opponents of a voucher
program. The median income of families in the district, where the
public schools are high performing, is more than $99,000, according to
census data.
Walton
supporters say the foundation is not blindly supporting the expansion
of charters. Two years ago, Walton announced a $5.2 million grant to the
National Association of Charter School Authorizers to support an
initiative under which the group would push state and local regulators
to close about 900 low-performing charter schools around the country,
while opening another 2,000.
“Any
foundation that invests the money has to ask themselves, is their money
impacting the system as a whole?” said Dennis Van Roeckel, president of
the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers
union.
Walton’s
Mr. Sternberg, who started his career in Teach for America and founded
the Bronx Lab School, a public school in New York City, does not
apologize for Walton’s commitment to charter schools and vouchers.
“What’s the argument there?” he said during an interview. “Don’t help
anybody until you can help everybody?”
He said the foundation was focused not on ideology but on results, a word he repeated many times.
In
Washington, for example, the group has given more than $5.8 million to
the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, whose members are
nominated by the mayor to regulate the opening and closing of charter
schools. The board has used Walton’s grants to help develop
accountability measures for all charter schools in the city. When
critics complained that charters were pushing out difficult students,
the board began reviewing and publishing data on expulsions and midyear
departures. Scott Pearson, executive director of the board, said charter
schools in the city had halved expulsions since the board began
releasing statistics.
“D.C.
is a better place today than it was 10 years ago because of the reforms
that have played out here,” said Mr. Sternberg, who was an official in
the New York City Department of Education under Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg. He pointed to recent increases in scores on national tests by
both public and charter school students, saying that neighborhood
schools had responded to competition from charters. “And maybe in very
small part, because of Walton’s role,” he added.
Walton
has become a go-to source for many charter schools seeking start-up
grants. In addition to funding large networks like KIPP, which is
expanding in Washington, the foundation has given grants to several
stand-alone schools.
The
Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts,
housed in a building across the street from the Washington Navy Yard in
the southeast part of the city, received $250,000 from Walton in 2011.
The school used the money to buy computers for students, as well as
chemistry lab equipment and recording gear for the school’s media
studio.
All
of the school’s students qualify for federally subsidized free or
reduced price lunches. According to Marco Clark, the founder and head of
the school, one in five students have special needs and one in 10 have
been involved with the criminal justice system.
On
a recent morning, the range of academic abilities in the school was
apparent. In an advanced placement world history class, 11th-graders
gave rapid-fire answers to questions about Native American tribes, with
the teacher asking “Why?” to gauge whether students were merely
regurgitating memorized facts. Upstairs, in an eighth-grade reading
class, several students asked the teacher for help in understanding a
passage about the world’s largest harp. One boy struggled to eke out
what he thought was the main point. “It about how can orchastra works,”
he wrote.
Several
students noted that they had come from schools in which they either did
not feel safe or were not learning much. Dr. Clark acknowledged that
the school was still working to raise test scores, and had added extra
math and reading classes.
“Those
who want to criticize any philanthropy group for giving money to kids
to change their futures,” said Dr. Clark, “there’s something wrong with
them.”
Some
parents said they felt torn between the interests of their children and
those of the city. Marcus Robinson, the owner of a pet supply and
grooming business, said he had attended public schools in Washington and
wanted his children to do the same. But his daughters Lourdes, 8, and
Maja, 6, attend Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School, a start-up
that received $250,000 from Walton.
Mr.
Robinson was concerned that the schools in his northeastern
neighborhood had trouble coping with students who had behavioral
problems. He also liked the dual language approach at Mundo Verde, where
students work in small classes on projects related to the environment
and sustainability. A relaxed atmosphere permeates the classrooms, and a
yoga teacher and nutritionist are on the faculty.
“Charter
schools are a bit of a disservice to the public schools,” Mr. Robinson
said. “It puts the onus on public schools to take on the people and
children that other schools don’t want. But in the meantime, between
everyone fighting about it, I did not want my kids to be caught in the
limbo.”
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