Popular education writer Larry Cuban considers the deep love of billionaires for certain brands of school reform.
In 1969, when I directed the Office of Staff Development for the Washington, D.C. schools, I applied for a grant of $10,000 from the Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation to give District of Columbia teachers awards for classroom innovations. I met with the Foundation officer, explained the rationale for the application (many teachers had designed classroom innovations that cost a few hundred dollars and short of digging into their own pockets, could not find money to underwrite their idea). The Foundation was then dedicated to awarding small grants in the D.C. area.
Within a few weeks, I received a letter granting the Office of Staff Development the funds. I was exhilarated that a local foundation had seen the merit of awarding teachers’ who redesigned parts of their daily practice. For several years the Meyer Foundation funded the Teacher Innovation Fund and then stopped. End of program.
Yes, that grant was peanuts today but I still remember vividly the joy I felt and recall clearly the excitement and satisfaction hundreds of D.C. teachers experienced when selected for awards in the years the program existed. Since then, as a superintendent and professor I have been fortunate to have received many grants and have, over the years, learned a great deal about how large and small foundations work, the mindset they project onto the world of education, and the dilemmas facing foundations eager to improve U.S. schooling.
Let me first deal with the prevailing beliefs that U.S. schools are in crisis—a mindset essential for foundation grant-giving. Primary among those beliefs is the myth that all U.S. schools are broken and have to be fixed.
Beginning in the late 1970s, followed by the Nation at Risk report and culminating in the No Child Left Behind law (2002), the message that all U.S. schools are failing has become accepted truth among smart, well-intentioned policy elites including foundation officials. Even though it is clear that there are many schools in the U.S. that parents clamor to have their children attend, the dominant belief remains that the entire system of schooling is broken. That belief is as commonplace as “smart” phones, television, and public utilities. It is a “truth” that goes largely unquestioned. (See one economist’s challenge of this belief in Reassessing schools are broken.
In much of this “failure” literature, what is ignored is the fact that there is a three-tiered system of schooling in the U.S anchored in performance and social status. The top two tiers (which over half of U.S. students attend) are considered by most parents to be either good or good enough for their children. In the third tier, however, big city and rural schools enrolling mostly poor and minority students have largely failed to educate children and youth. Surely, the three tiered system is obvious for anyone with 20/20 vision living in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other metropolitan areas, particularly to parents who shop around for schools to send their children or move from one district to another.
