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Home > How the Cutthroat Walmart Business Model Is Reshaping American Public
Education
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How the Cutthroat Walmart Business Model Is Reshaping American Public
Education
By Jeff Bryant [1] / AlterNet [2]
March 13, 2016
Walmart's recent decision to close 269 stores [3] was a blip on the national
media radar, but it was big news in small towns and suburban neighborhoods
across America.
"Now we have to figure out how to do our shopping," a Walmart customer in
Baldwin Hills [4], in Southern California lamented.
"Before Walmart's arrival, Winnsboro had two grocery stores," a local
reporter [5] in that South Carolina town noted. Now that Walmart is gone, so
is convenient access to groceries and other retail goods.
"It's the traditional story of a big corporation driving local competition
out of town," an article in Texas Monthly [6] stated, "and then leaving."
A Walmart spokesperson told a reporter covering a store closure in a small
Mississippi community [7] that closing stores is "strictly a business
decision. It made fiscal sense."
That rationale is nothing new. Stories about local communities being
devastated by business decisions made in distant headquarters have become a
staple of this era. Time and time again, the nation has witnessed whole
towns being hollowed out when big companies uproot local manufacturing
plants to move to cheaper labor markets in Mexico or China.
The cause of the trauma and grief is always the same: "strictly business."
"Fiscal sense."
But what if that story isn't just about businesses anymore? What if instead
of a closed factory or shuttered store, the story is about a closed public
school? What if the consequence of these types of "business decisions" isn't
a grown man having to look for another job or an elderly woman having to
figure out a new way to pick up her prescriptions, but a child having his or
her education significantly disrupted or a whole community left without
convenient access to schools?
That question is becoming increasingly urgent as more and more government
officials turn to publicly funded but privately run charter schools to
compete with and upend local public schools-an education option, it is worth
noting, that the family behind the Walmart empire has played a huge role in
promoting and funding nationwide.
The Walmart Way For Education
At the same time news of Walmart store closings spread through local media
outlets, the Walton Family Foundation (WFF), the private foundation created
with the retail giant's wealth, announced that it would be "doubling down on
its investments in school choice with a $1 billion plan [8] to help expand
the charter school sector and other choice initiatives over the next five
years," according to a report in Education Week [9].
This immense treasure trove for expanding the number of charter schools in
the country comes in addition to the millions the Waltons have already spent
on charter schools. In fact, the foundation's "strategic plan [10],"
published in 2015, claims, "1 in 4 charters nationally have received WFF
startup funds."
In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How
Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, education historian Diane
Ravitch explores whether there is any "commonality between the Walmart
business philosophy and the Walton funding of school choice." She likens the
competition that charters pose to public schools to the competition that
Walmart stores present to locally owned stores, and suggests parallel
consequences: just as Walmart forces stores that can't match their prices to
shut their doors, so charters - which bleed students, and their funding,
from traditional schools - cause local schools to close down.
Is the analogy Ravitch poses fair and accurate? Or is this new model for
school options being promoted by the Waltons and other self-ascribed
education "reformers" something more nuanced? Is there any evidence that
their plans for distributing "quality" education are more efficient than
democratic governance?
The Waltons Go To School
As the Walmart retail chain became the world's largest retailer [11], the
Walton family [12] became one of the world's richest families, with a
combined net worth of around $150 billion as of January 2016.
The Walton Family Foundation-the family's main philanthropic endeavor-was
established in 1987 by Walmart founder Sam Walton and his wife Helen. In Sam
Walton's autobiography Made in America, he voices a concern for America's
public school system and links education and national economic prosperity,
particularly in the context of being able to "compete" with other nations.
Since its founding, WFF has given more than $1.3 billion [13] to K-12
education, according to its own recent calculations, an amount that is
surpassed only by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation's
most recent annual report shows well over 50 percent of its 2014 grantee
investments went to education ($202.4 million out of $373 million).
Sam Walton's concerns about America's public education system were no doubt
fed by the animosity toward public schools that spread during the 1980s and,
in particular, the presidential administration of Ronal Reagan.
Reagan had campaigned in 1980 on abolishing the department of education,
according to Valerie Strauss [14] of the Washington Post, and declared in a
speech in 1984, "America's schools don't need new spending programs; they
need tougher standards, more homework, merit pay for teachers, discipline,
and parents back in charge."
The landmark report from Reagan's presidency, "A Nation at Risk: The
Imperative for Educational Reform [15]," published in 1983, set the tone for
those years [16] and the years following, warning of a "rising tide of
mediocrity" in public education "that threatens our very future as a nation
and a people."
That report proved to be "a golden treasury of selected, spun, and distorted
statistics," noted the late education policy scholar, and Reagan critic
Gerald Bracey [17], 25 years after the report's publication. Nevertheless,
it was hugely influential.
According to the Philanthropy Roundtable [18], Sam Walton's second-eldest
son, John [19], who would take control of the Walton Family Foundation after
his father's death in 1992, read "A Nation at Risk" the year it was
published and "circulated it among family members," prompting "a number of
discussions" in the family about ways to improve education and influencing
his father to announce, "I'd like to see an all-out revolution in
education."
At first, the Walton's education philanthropy "followed the usual course of
education giving," the Philanthropy Roundtable quotes John Walton
recollecting of those early years, doling out money to "programs you hope
will address the problems." But at some point during the 1990s, John
Walton's patience with this approach wore thin, as he found "the
improvements [to be] transitory, lasting only as long as the heroes making
them work are on the job."
To create more immediate and lasting change, John Walton came to believe,
his foundation's approach to public education would have to change. The
agent of change would be "school choice."
The Friedman Effect
The whole idea of school choice, most policy experts believe, is credited to
the extreme libertarian Friedman Foundation [20], founded in 1996 by the
economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose to advance his ideas for how to
improve K-12 education systems.
"Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically
restructured," Friedman [21] argued in 1995. "Such a reconstruction can be
achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system-i.e.,
by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop . a wide variety of
learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools."
It's not hard to see why John Walton's conception of how to improve American
schools would be heavily influenced by Friedman's preference for school
choice; both individuals viewed the world through the lens of rational
markets. And year [22] after year [23], the Friedman Foundation has been a
consistent recipient of grant money from WFF.
Central to Friedman's ideology was that schools should be thought of as
businesses, with students being, essentially, customers. "In order to have
satisfactory performance, you have to have a customer who needs to be
served," Friedman explained in an interview with the conservative Heartland
Magazine [24] in 1998.
Where public education had gone wrong in America, according to Friedman, was
that the students' role as the customer in the system had been displaced by
the "professionalization and unionization" of teachers. Teachers unions had
made education a "monopoly," Friedman believed, and he falsely correlated
the National Education Association's conversion to trade union status in
1965 to a drop in scores on the SAT. (The scores changed because more
students were taking the test.)
As Friedman saw it, "the only solution" to fixing the nation's education
monopoly was "through a system of vouchers." As long as public schools were
essentially free, and private schools charged tuition, most parents would
keep sending their kids to the local public school. But introducing a
voucher that could be "redeemed" by parents at a private school would break
that dynamic, and in turn, break up the public education monopoly.
Friedman's theory is, of course, grounded in what the Walton family
practiced in retail: provide customers with the products they want (in this
case, a "good" education for their children), at lower prices, and
eventually drive merchants that are unable to compete out of business.
Enterprises that are able to endure this churn in the marketplace, the
theory holds, will be strengthened by their abilities to hold their
customers.
Friedman's animosity toward teachers unions also meshed with the Walton's
anti-union business practices. As freelance writer T. A. Frank writes for
Washington Monthly [25], Sam Walton was obsessed with lowering business
costs, especially payroll, and he believed loyal employees were created by
giving them a stake in the business-through profit-sharing, stock options,
and other means-rather than by giving them higher wages.
After the founder's death in 1992, his progeny eliminated many of the
employee retention policies Sam Walton created, Frank recalls, but the
vigilant opposition to unions remained. While Sam Walton countered the first
pro-union outbreak in his stores in 1989 with a series of management
seminars exhorting his managers to "care" about frontline employees, his
children, in 2000, responded to union activity among the company's meat
cutters by shutting down operations, finding alternative contractors, and
summarily firing the instigators of the union organizing.
Fully inculcated with Friedman's philosophies, and motivated by the myth of
school failure spread by the Reagan administration, the Waltons were ready
for their education revolution to begin.
A Preference For School Vouchers
John Walton launched the foundation's battle for school choice by throwing
both money and influence into a succession of voucher referendums throughout
the 1990s and beyond - only to see the cause defeated at the ballot box time
after time, as numerous studies [26] have chronicled. The public, it would
seem, was nowhere near as keen on the idea of vouchers as the Waltons and
their ilk.
Then in 1998, came the Walton family's earliest ventures into direct funding
of school choice, according to Education Week [27], when John Walton joined
with New York City financier Theodore J. Forstmann to pledge $100 million
"to launch a national privately financed voucher program that would offer
scholarships to as many as 50,000 poor students."
A voucher of $1,000 would be given to each qualifying family to cover most
of the cost of attending a Catholic private school, which, at the time,
typically cost $1,500 in tuition annually. The idea was a scaling up of an
effort the previous year by both Walton and Forstmann to give $6 million to
the Washington Scholarship Fund, an organization that offered scholarships
to students who wanted to transfer from public schools to private Catholic
schools in the nation's capital. Neither Walton nor Forstmann appear to be
followers of the Catholic faith.
In a rare interview for Bloomberg Business Week [28] in 2000, John Walton
explained his preference for school vouchers over traditional giving to
public education institutions.
"I've also invested in public schools," he explained, and the interviewer
makes note of "investments in New American Schools, scholarships, teacher
and principal training, and other programs that work inside traditional
public schools."
But then Walton adds, "I will say that we have had a much more difficult
time evaluating the benefits of those investments than we have our [private
voucher] investments, where the benefits are so clear and convincing.
At some point amidst repeated defeats at the ballot box and his frustrations
with direct funding vouchers, John Walton decided "choice" needed another
option.
The Waltons Choose Charters
That other option was charter schools.
"The Walton foundation itself was one of the early organizations to
transition from vouchers to charters," explains Jeffrey R. Henig in an
interview for Education Week [29]. Henig is a political science and
education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and a co-editor
of the book The New Education Philanthropy [30].
In a phone interview with AlterNet, Henig explained that the succession of
ballot box losses, as well as numerous opinion polls conducted by
conservative groups, influenced John Walton and other voucher advocates to
conclude charter schools were the "more politically feasible" option, in
Henig's words.
Henig believes many conservatives view charter schools as a way to "soften
the ground" for potentially more private options, though he isn't entirely
sure "the Waltons view charters as a Trojan Horse for eventually providing
vouchers universally."
Nevertheless, he has little doubt the current intention of the foundation is
to "rapidly expand the number of charter schools to create a constituency of
parents and others who will have a direct stake in the continued funding and
expansion of these schools."
"The Walton Family Foundation has been the strongest and most consistent
force in the nation advancing charter schools," as Ravitch notes. And that
has remained true, even after John Walton's untimely death in a plane crash
[31], in June of 2005.
A Controversial Charter Legacy
Since John Walton's death, a number of other family members have taken up
his passion for promoting school choice, particularly in the form of charter
schools.
According to a pro-union website [32], another member of the Walton family,
Carrie Walton Penner, sits on the board of the foundation connected to the
prominent KIPP charter school chain-on which the Walton Family Foundation
has lavished many millions in donations-and is also a member of the
California Charter Schools Association. Carrie's husband, Greg Penner, "is a
director of the Charter Growth Fund, a 'non-profit venture capital fund'
investing in charter schools." And Annie Walton Proietti, the daughter of
Sam Walton's youngest son Jim, works for a KIPP school in Denver.
Certainly there are beneficiaries beyond charter schools of WFF education
money, most notably Teach for America [33], which has raked in tens of
millions of dollars over the years. But year in [34] and year out [35], top
recipients of the Walton Foundation's largesse are charter schools
themselves and the many national, state, and local organizations and
political groups that serve and promote school choice and the charter
industry. Even TFA is closely associated with charter schools, with a third
[36] of the program's recruits working in those schools.
Yet this unquestioning commitment to charter schools seems grossly detached
from the controversy that charters have become in the American education
landscape.
The charter school sector has been rife with financial scandal. Local news
reports of charter school malfeasance and corruption have become commonplace
in states where these schools have proliferated, such as in Florida [37],
Ohio [38], Pennsylvania [39], and Michigan [40].
A series [41] of reports from the Center for Popular Democracy [42] in 2014
[43] and 2015 [44] uncovered many hundreds of millions in "alleged and
confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement" committed by
charter schools around the country. Authors of the 2015 report called their
discovery the "tip of the iceberg."
The financial problems caused by charter schools stem from the particular
blend of public and private players involved. As a recent policy brief [45]
from the National Education Policy Center explains, the very structure of
the charter school business introduces new actors into public education who
can skim money from the system without returning any benefit to students and
taxpayers.
The brief's authors Bruce Baker and Gary Miron - university professors from
Rutgers and Eastern Michigan, respectively - note that charters generally
aren't subject to the same disclosure laws that apply to state operated
entities and public officials, especially when the governance bodies for
these schools outsource management services to for-profit management firms,
as is increasingly the case.
The very nature of charters, the authors state, results in a "substantial
share of public expenditure intended for the delivery of direct educational
services to children.being extracted inadvertently or intentionally for
personal or business financial gain."
Furthering the financial controversy related to charters is the model of how
these schools are financed.
As currently conceived, charter schools are funded based on the idea that
"money should follow the child." That is, when students transfer from a
public school to a new charter, the per-pupil funding to educate that child
transfers as well.
But research studies [46] have shown that this financial model harms the
education of public school students. As a public school loses a percentage
of its students to charters, the school can't simply cut fixed costs for
things like transportation and physical plant proportionally. It also can't
cut the costs of grade-level teaching staff proportionally. That would
increase class sizes and leave the remaining students underserved. So
instead, the school cuts a program or support service - a reading
specialist, a special education teacher, a librarian, an art or music
teacher - to offset the loss of funding.
For these reasons, and others [47], the introduction of charter schools into
communities now invariably sparks division and resentment from parents who
stay committed to public schools.
Yet, none of the controversy surrounding charters seems to have altered the
Walton Family Foundation's determination to expand the numbers of these
schools on the American landscape.
Answering the Critics
WFF's apparently unwavering course for charter expansion has drawn prominent
critics.
A recent report [48] by Philamplify [49], an initiative of the National
Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, looks closely at the Foundation's
education reform efforts, especially in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina,
and concludes that the "preformulated, specific approach" WFF employs,
"fixated on very particular market reform vehicles: publicly funded charter
schools and vouchers to attend private schools," is in fact a hinderance to
the "transformative potential of the foundation's education program."
As an apparent response, WFF recently issued a paper titled, "Investing in
Change: The Walton Family Foundation Charts a New Course [50]," wherein the
Foundation admits that its devotion to "expanding community-wide school
choice" may not be "sufficient to improve educational outcomes." But the
paper's author, Michelle Wisdom, reasons that that insufficiency stems from
something other than WFF's guiding philosophy.
Calling school choice a "theory of change," Wisdom asserts, "School choice
works." What's needed now, she argues, is "a favorable policy environment
for choice to be truly effective."
Responding to Wisdom's paper, Strauss writes on her Washington Post [51]
blog, "Choice isn't enough? So what is?" Most likely, Strauss deduces,
nothing short of a total "dismantling [of] traditional public school
systems."
The Formula
"We're at the early stage of the beginning of the end of public schools,"
former classroom teacher and prominent public school advocate Anthony Cody
tells Alternet in a phone conversation. "You can already see this in big
cities such as New Orleans, Detroit, and Chicago."
Cody is a harsh critic of education philanthropists. For years he engaged in
a public debate [52] with leaders of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
which provided material for his book The Educator and the Oligarch: A
Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation [53]. Cody is also cofounder, along
with Ravitch and other education reform critics, of the Network for Public
Education.
Cody sees Gates, another major funder of the charter school industry, and
Walton as "operating with the same playbook;" although he acknowledges there
are differences (notably around vouchers). What the two foundations share,
Cody believes, is a devotion to operating schools according to "their belief
in business systems."
He argues that having charter schools compete with local public schools
around student test scores will "corrupt education," as schools chase after
ever higher scores at the expense of educating all children equitably. In
Cody's mind, this will inevitably lead to expansions of charter schools,
which have more leeway to game the system, and the closure of more public
schools.
"There's no way to compromise with this formula," he contends, and "no end
point at which applying the formula would stop because it impinges on human
dignity."
Cody isn't the only critic who sees a fundamental problem with choice. When
the late Rick Cohen [54] of the Nonprofit Quarterly reflected on the
Philamplify study of the Walton Foundation, he argued that "choice" makes
education, ultimately, "a zero-sum [game], focused on the individual and the
family and increasingly saying to hell with community. What's lost is what
the nation was trying to achieve in the first place with public education."
Choice For Who?
Is the Walmart Foundation really intent on dismantling public education
through its expansions of charter schools?
Henig argues no, saying the debate of charters versus public schools is not
what really what matters "at the parent level."
In his view, the debate about choice needs to shift from being about charter
versus public schools to focusing on the role of democracy in school
governance and how to "calibrate" democratic input in decision-making about
schools.
That's an important subject for sure, but when Henig says the debate about
charters is not relevant at "the parent level," it's not clear what parents
he is referring to. He's clearly not talking about parents in Southside
Chicago, where in 2013, families reeled from a rash of school closings [55]
coupled with charter school expansions.
As Sarah Karp reported for Catalyst Chicago [56], Walton had made Chicago
its largest recipient of charter school grants, then gave the district
additional financial support for a series of community meetings to "educate
parents" about the school closures and obscure the role of charter schools.
The WFF money paid for "robo-calls to tell parents about the meetings,
mailings to parents and 'other engagement and communication platforms.'"
This churning of public school closings with charter school openings left
some stretches of the community without any schools at all, according to an
article by Trymaine Lee for MSNBC [57]. Calling these neighborhoods "school
deserts," much like the food deserts many low-income communities know about
all too well, Lee quotes community activist Jitu Brown: "This is not about
school choice. If it was really about providing us with choices, we'd have
the choice to improve our neighborhood schools."
That the spread of school choice can actually leave some communities with
fewer educational options is not a matter constrained to Chicago alone.
In cities such as New Orleans [58], which now has an all charter system,
whole neighborhoods are bereft of schools [59], and it is now quite common
for students to spend hours a day in transit as they trek from their homes
to available schools across town. Conditions are similar in some areas of
Houston [60], TX, where parents have coined the term "education desert" [60]
to describe "areas where a significant number or share of residents is far
from schools."
"This crisis has reached critical mass," the Houston parents contend.
Choice Hurts America's Heartland
Around the same time Walmart was closing stores in rural North Carolina,
parents in an Appalachian community in that state gathered at a hearing to
fight for their local public school to keep it from being closed down. "Many
in the audience sobbed as students talked about losing what to them has been
the center of their world as long as they can remember," a local newspaper
reported [61].
The local reporter noted a "trifecta" of factors leading to the imminent
closure. Two in the trifecta-declining student enrollment and state budget
cuts-are factors school officials and communities across America have faced
many times before. But the third factor was new: "charter school
competition."
We'll never know if this is an outcome John Walton considered when he
committed his family's billions to the expansion of charters and choice.
What we do know for sure, though, is that when he made his decision to pull
back from direct investments in public schools, he did so because he did not
see the kind of results he wanted to see.
But what if John Walton's disappointment in public schools stems from the
possibility that Americans, as a whole, want other kinds of "results" from
their public schools? What if what they want, as Jitu Brown says of his own
community, is the opportunity to "improve our neighborhood schools" instead
of having them replaced by the charters preferred by the Waltons?
Meanwhile, as WFF contemplates how to best "soften the ground" for increased
school choice, and policy makers ponder the growing impact of
philanthropists in education, more communities may have to contend with the
reality of schools, public or charter, coming and going based on forces not
in their control. Completely lost in the discussion, though, is whether it's
right for the American populace to have its access to education determined
by the values and philosophy of a few rich people.
Jeff Bryant is director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership
effort of the Institute for America's Future and the Opportunity to Learn
Campaign. He has written extensively about public education policy.
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Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jeff-bryant
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ort_rev2.pdf
[45] http://tinyurl.com/py94cuk
[46]
http://nashvillepublicmedia.org/blog/2014/09/22/report-confirms-negative-fis
cal-impact-charters-nashville-schools/
[47]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-s
tudent-paper.html
[48]
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Foundation-ExecSummary.pdf
[49] http://philamplify.org
[50]
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ng%20in%20change.pdf
[51]
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tions-new-education-investment-strategy-scary-or-what/
[52] http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/
[53]
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s-the-gates-foundation/
[54]
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2015/11/09/markets-equity-school-choice-taken
-on-by-hazen-foundation/
[55]
http://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/school-closures-continue-in-chicago-e
ven-while-more-charter-schools-open
[56]
http://catalyst-chicago.org/2013/01/record-walton-foundation-funds-community
-engagement/
[57] http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/dont-call-it-school-choice
[58]
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18352/10-years-after-katrina-new-orleans-all
-charter-district-has-proven-a-failur
[59] http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/no_transportation.pdf
[60] http://ppshouston.org/2013/what-are-education-deserts/
[61] http://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/17089
[62] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on How the Cutthroat
Walmart Business Model Is Reshaping American Public Education
[63] http://www.alternet.org/
[64] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > How the Cutthroat Walmart Business Model Is Reshaping American Public
Education
How the Cutthroat Walmart Business Model Is Reshaping American Public
Education
By Jeff Bryant [1] / AlterNet [2]
March 13, 2016
Walmart's recent decision to close 269 stores [3] was a blip on the national
media radar, but it was big news in small towns and suburban neighborhoods
across America.
"Now we have to figure out how to do our shopping," a Walmart customer in
Baldwin Hills [4], in Southern California lamented.
"Before Walmart's arrival, Winnsboro had two grocery stores," a local
reporter [5] in that South Carolina town noted. Now that Walmart is gone, so
is convenient access to groceries and other retail goods.
"It's the traditional story of a big corporation driving local competition
out of town," an article in Texas Monthly [6] stated, "and then leaving."
A Walmart spokesperson told a reporter covering a store closure in a small
Mississippi community [7] that closing stores is "strictly a business
decision. It made fiscal sense."
That rationale is nothing new. Stories about local communities being
devastated by business decisions made in distant headquarters have become a
staple of this era. Time and time again, the nation has witnessed whole
towns being hollowed out when big companies uproot local manufacturing
plants to move to cheaper labor markets in Mexico or China.
The cause of the trauma and grief is always the same: "strictly business."
"Fiscal sense."
But what if that story isn't just about businesses anymore? What if instead
of a closed factory or shuttered store, the story is about a closed public
school? What if the consequence of these types of "business decisions" isn't
a grown man having to look for another job or an elderly woman having to
figure out a new way to pick up her prescriptions, but a child having his or
her education significantly disrupted or a whole community left without
convenient access to schools?
That question is becoming increasingly urgent as more and more government
officials turn to publicly funded but privately run charter schools to
compete with and upend local public schools-an education option, it is worth
noting, that the family behind the Walmart empire has played a huge role in
promoting and funding nationwide.
The Walmart Way For Education
At the same time news of Walmart store closings spread through local media
outlets, the Walton Family Foundation (WFF), the private foundation created
with the retail giant's wealth, announced that it would be "doubling down on
its investments in school choice with a $1 billion plan [8] to help expand
the charter school sector and other choice initiatives over the next five
years," according to a report in Education Week [9].
This immense treasure trove for expanding the number of charter schools in
the country comes in addition to the millions the Waltons have already spent
on charter schools. In fact, the foundation's "strategic plan [10],"
published in 2015, claims, "1 in 4 charters nationally have received WFF
startup funds."
In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How
Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, education historian Diane
Ravitch explores whether there is any "commonality between the Walmart
business philosophy and the Walton funding of school choice." She likens the
competition that charters pose to public schools to the competition that
Walmart stores present to locally owned stores, and suggests parallel
consequences: just as Walmart forces stores that can't match their prices to
shut their doors, so charters - which bleed students, and their funding,
from traditional schools - cause local schools to close down.
Is the analogy Ravitch poses fair and accurate? Or is this new model for
school options being promoted by the Waltons and other self-ascribed
education "reformers" something more nuanced? Is there any evidence that
their plans for distributing "quality" education are more efficient than
democratic governance?
The Waltons Go To School
As the Walmart retail chain became the world's largest retailer [11], the
Walton family [12] became one of the world's richest families, with a
combined net worth of around $150 billion as of January 2016.
The Walton Family Foundation-the family's main philanthropic endeavor-was
established in 1987 by Walmart founder Sam Walton and his wife Helen. In Sam
Walton's autobiography Made in America, he voices a concern for America's
public school system and links education and national economic prosperity,
particularly in the context of being able to "compete" with other nations.
Since its founding, WFF has given more than $1.3 billion [13] to K-12
education, according to its own recent calculations, an amount that is
surpassed only by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation's
most recent annual report shows well over 50 percent of its 2014 grantee
investments went to education ($202.4 million out of $373 million).
Sam Walton's concerns about America's public education system were no doubt
fed by the animosity toward public schools that spread during the 1980s and,
in particular, the presidential administration of Ronal Reagan.
Reagan had campaigned in 1980 on abolishing the department of education,
according to Valerie Strauss [14] of the Washington Post, and declared in a
speech in 1984, "America's schools don't need new spending programs; they
need tougher standards, more homework, merit pay for teachers, discipline,
and parents back in charge."
The landmark report from Reagan's presidency, "A Nation at Risk: The
Imperative for Educational Reform [15]," published in 1983, set the tone for
those years [16] and the years following, warning of a "rising tide of
mediocrity" in public education "that threatens our very future as a nation
and a people."
That report proved to be "a golden treasury of selected, spun, and distorted
statistics," noted the late education policy scholar, and Reagan critic
Gerald Bracey [17], 25 years after the report's publication. Nevertheless,
it was hugely influential.
According to the Philanthropy Roundtable [18], Sam Walton's second-eldest
son, John [19], who would take control of the Walton Family Foundation after
his father's death in 1992, read "A Nation at Risk" the year it was
published and "circulated it among family members," prompting "a number of
discussions" in the family about ways to improve education and influencing
his father to announce, "I'd like to see an all-out revolution in
education."
At first, the Walton's education philanthropy "followed the usual course of
education giving," the Philanthropy Roundtable quotes John Walton
recollecting of those early years, doling out money to "programs you hope
will address the problems." But at some point during the 1990s, John
Walton's patience with this approach wore thin, as he found "the
improvements [to be] transitory, lasting only as long as the heroes making
them work are on the job."
To create more immediate and lasting change, John Walton came to believe,
his foundation's approach to public education would have to change. The
agent of change would be "school choice."
The Friedman Effect
The whole idea of school choice, most policy experts believe, is credited to
the extreme libertarian Friedman Foundation [20], founded in 1996 by the
economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose to advance his ideas for how to
improve K-12 education systems.
"Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically
restructured," Friedman [21] argued in 1995. "Such a reconstruction can be
achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system-i.e.,
by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop . a wide variety of
learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools."
It's not hard to see why John Walton's conception of how to improve American
schools would be heavily influenced by Friedman's preference for school
choice; both individuals viewed the world through the lens of rational
markets. And year [22] after year [23], the Friedman Foundation has been a
consistent recipient of grant money from WFF.
Central to Friedman's ideology was that schools should be thought of as
businesses, with students being, essentially, customers. "In order to have
satisfactory performance, you have to have a customer who needs to be
served," Friedman explained in an interview with the conservative Heartland
Magazine [24] in 1998.
Where public education had gone wrong in America, according to Friedman, was
that the students' role as the customer in the system had been displaced by
the "professionalization and unionization" of teachers. Teachers unions had
made education a "monopoly," Friedman believed, and he falsely correlated
the National Education Association's conversion to trade union status in
1965 to a drop in scores on the SAT. (The scores changed because more
students were taking the test.)
As Friedman saw it, "the only solution" to fixing the nation's education
monopoly was "through a system of vouchers." As long as public schools were
essentially free, and private schools charged tuition, most parents would
keep sending their kids to the local public school. But introducing a
voucher that could be "redeemed" by parents at a private school would break
that dynamic, and in turn, break up the public education monopoly.
Friedman's theory is, of course, grounded in what the Walton family
practiced in retail: provide customers with the products they want (in this
case, a "good" education for their children), at lower prices, and
eventually drive merchants that are unable to compete out of business.
Enterprises that are able to endure this churn in the marketplace, the
theory holds, will be strengthened by their abilities to hold their
customers.
Friedman's animosity toward teachers unions also meshed with the Walton's
anti-union business practices. As freelance writer T. A. Frank writes for
Washington Monthly [25], Sam Walton was obsessed with lowering business
costs, especially payroll, and he believed loyal employees were created by
giving them a stake in the business-through profit-sharing, stock options,
and other means-rather than by giving them higher wages.
After the founder's death in 1992, his progeny eliminated many of the
employee retention policies Sam Walton created, Frank recalls, but the
vigilant opposition to unions remained. While Sam Walton countered the first
pro-union outbreak in his stores in 1989 with a series of management
seminars exhorting his managers to "care" about frontline employees, his
children, in 2000, responded to union activity among the company's meat
cutters by shutting down operations, finding alternative contractors, and
summarily firing the instigators of the union organizing.
Fully inculcated with Friedman's philosophies, and motivated by the myth of
school failure spread by the Reagan administration, the Waltons were ready
for their education revolution to begin.
A Preference For School Vouchers
John Walton launched the foundation's battle for school choice by throwing
both money and influence into a succession of voucher referendums throughout
the 1990s and beyond - only to see the cause defeated at the ballot box time
after time, as numerous studies [26] have chronicled. The public, it would
seem, was nowhere near as keen on the idea of vouchers as the Waltons and
their ilk.
Then in 1998, came the Walton family's earliest ventures into direct funding
of school choice, according to Education Week [27], when John Walton joined
with New York City financier Theodore J. Forstmann to pledge $100 million
"to launch a national privately financed voucher program that would offer
scholarships to as many as 50,000 poor students."
A voucher of $1,000 would be given to each qualifying family to cover most
of the cost of attending a Catholic private school, which, at the time,
typically cost $1,500 in tuition annually. The idea was a scaling up of an
effort the previous year by both Walton and Forstmann to give $6 million to
the Washington Scholarship Fund, an organization that offered scholarships
to students who wanted to transfer from public schools to private Catholic
schools in the nation's capital. Neither Walton nor Forstmann appear to be
followers of the Catholic faith.
In a rare interview for Bloomberg Business Week [28] in 2000, John Walton
explained his preference for school vouchers over traditional giving to
public education institutions.
"I've also invested in public schools," he explained, and the interviewer
makes note of "investments in New American Schools, scholarships, teacher
and principal training, and other programs that work inside traditional
public schools."
But then Walton adds, "I will say that we have had a much more difficult
time evaluating the benefits of those investments than we have our [private
voucher] investments, where the benefits are so clear and convincing.
At some point amidst repeated defeats at the ballot box and his frustrations
with direct funding vouchers, John Walton decided "choice" needed another
option.
The Waltons Choose Charters
That other option was charter schools.
"The Walton foundation itself was one of the early organizations to
transition from vouchers to charters," explains Jeffrey R. Henig in an
interview for Education Week [29]. Henig is a political science and
education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and a co-editor
of the book The New Education Philanthropy [30].
In a phone interview with AlterNet, Henig explained that the succession of
ballot box losses, as well as numerous opinion polls conducted by
conservative groups, influenced John Walton and other voucher advocates to
conclude charter schools were the "more politically feasible" option, in
Henig's words.
Henig believes many conservatives view charter schools as a way to "soften
the ground" for potentially more private options, though he isn't entirely
sure "the Waltons view charters as a Trojan Horse for eventually providing
vouchers universally."
Nevertheless, he has little doubt the current intention of the foundation is
to "rapidly expand the number of charter schools to create a constituency of
parents and others who will have a direct stake in the continued funding and
expansion of these schools."
"The Walton Family Foundation has been the strongest and most consistent
force in the nation advancing charter schools," as Ravitch notes. And that
has remained true, even after John Walton's untimely death in a plane crash
[31], in June of 2005.
A Controversial Charter Legacy
Since John Walton's death, a number of other family members have taken up
his passion for promoting school choice, particularly in the form of charter
schools.
According to a pro-union website [32], another member of the Walton family,
Carrie Walton Penner, sits on the board of the foundation connected to the
prominent KIPP charter school chain-on which the Walton Family Foundation
has lavished many millions in donations-and is also a member of the
California Charter Schools Association. Carrie's husband, Greg Penner, "is a
director of the Charter Growth Fund, a 'non-profit venture capital fund'
investing in charter schools." And Annie Walton Proietti, the daughter of
Sam Walton's youngest son Jim, works for a KIPP school in Denver.
Certainly there are beneficiaries beyond charter schools of WFF education
money, most notably Teach for America [33], which has raked in tens of
millions of dollars over the years. But year in [34] and year out [35], top
recipients of the Walton Foundation's largesse are charter schools
themselves and the many national, state, and local organizations and
political groups that serve and promote school choice and the charter
industry. Even TFA is closely associated with charter schools, with a third
[36] of the program's recruits working in those schools.
Yet this unquestioning commitment to charter schools seems grossly detached
from the controversy that charters have become in the American education
landscape.
The charter school sector has been rife with financial scandal. Local news
reports of charter school malfeasance and corruption have become commonplace
in states where these schools have proliferated, such as in Florida [37],
Ohio [38], Pennsylvania [39], and Michigan [40].
A series [41] of reports from the Center for Popular Democracy [42] in 2014
[43] and 2015 [44] uncovered many hundreds of millions in "alleged and
confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement" committed by
charter schools around the country. Authors of the 2015 report called their
discovery the "tip of the iceberg."
The financial problems caused by charter schools stem from the particular
blend of public and private players involved. As a recent policy brief [45]
from the National Education Policy Center explains, the very structure of
the charter school business introduces new actors into public education who
can skim money from the system without returning any benefit to students and
taxpayers.
The brief's authors Bruce Baker and Gary Miron - university professors from
Rutgers and Eastern Michigan, respectively - note that charters generally
aren't subject to the same disclosure laws that apply to state operated
entities and public officials, especially when the governance bodies for
these schools outsource management services to for-profit management firms,
as is increasingly the case.
The very nature of charters, the authors state, results in a "substantial
share of public expenditure intended for the delivery of direct educational
services to children.being extracted inadvertently or intentionally for
personal or business financial gain."
Furthering the financial controversy related to charters is the model of how
these schools are financed.
As currently conceived, charter schools are funded based on the idea that
"money should follow the child." That is, when students transfer from a
public school to a new charter, the per-pupil funding to educate that child
transfers as well.
But research studies [46] have shown that this financial model harms the
education of public school students. As a public school loses a percentage
of its students to charters, the school can't simply cut fixed costs for
things like transportation and physical plant proportionally. It also can't
cut the costs of grade-level teaching staff proportionally. That would
increase class sizes and leave the remaining students underserved. So
instead, the school cuts a program or support service - a reading
specialist, a special education teacher, a librarian, an art or music
teacher - to offset the loss of funding.
For these reasons, and others [47], the introduction of charter schools into
communities now invariably sparks division and resentment from parents who
stay committed to public schools.
Yet, none of the controversy surrounding charters seems to have altered the
Walton Family Foundation's determination to expand the numbers of these
schools on the American landscape.
Answering the Critics
WFF's apparently unwavering course for charter expansion has drawn prominent
critics.
A recent report [48] by Philamplify [49], an initiative of the National
Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, looks closely at the Foundation's
education reform efforts, especially in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina,
and concludes that the "preformulated, specific approach" WFF employs,
"fixated on very particular market reform vehicles: publicly funded charter
schools and vouchers to attend private schools," is in fact a hinderance to
the "transformative potential of the foundation's education program."
As an apparent response, WFF recently issued a paper titled, "Investing in
Change: The Walton Family Foundation Charts a New Course [50]," wherein the
Foundation admits that its devotion to "expanding community-wide school
choice" may not be "sufficient to improve educational outcomes." But the
paper's author, Michelle Wisdom, reasons that that insufficiency stems from
something other than WFF's guiding philosophy.
Calling school choice a "theory of change," Wisdom asserts, "School choice
works." What's needed now, she argues, is "a favorable policy environment
for choice to be truly effective."
Responding to Wisdom's paper, Strauss writes on her Washington Post [51]
blog, "Choice isn't enough? So what is?" Most likely, Strauss deduces,
nothing short of a total "dismantling [of] traditional public school
systems."
The Formula
"We're at the early stage of the beginning of the end of public schools,"
former classroom teacher and prominent public school advocate Anthony Cody
tells Alternet in a phone conversation. "You can already see this in big
cities such as New Orleans, Detroit, and Chicago."
Cody is a harsh critic of education philanthropists. For years he engaged in
a public debate [52] with leaders of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
which provided material for his book The Educator and the Oligarch: A
Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation [53]. Cody is also cofounder, along
with Ravitch and other education reform critics, of the Network for Public
Education.
Cody sees Gates, another major funder of the charter school industry, and
Walton as "operating with the same playbook;" although he acknowledges there
are differences (notably around vouchers). What the two foundations share,
Cody believes, is a devotion to operating schools according to "their belief
in business systems."
He argues that having charter schools compete with local public schools
around student test scores will "corrupt education," as schools chase after
ever higher scores at the expense of educating all children equitably. In
Cody's mind, this will inevitably lead to expansions of charter schools,
which have more leeway to game the system, and the closure of more public
schools.
"There's no way to compromise with this formula," he contends, and "no end
point at which applying the formula would stop because it impinges on human
dignity."
Cody isn't the only critic who sees a fundamental problem with choice. When
the late Rick Cohen [54] of the Nonprofit Quarterly reflected on the
Philamplify study of the Walton Foundation, he argued that "choice" makes
education, ultimately, "a zero-sum [game], focused on the individual and the
family and increasingly saying to hell with community. What's lost is what
the nation was trying to achieve in the first place with public education."
Choice For Who?
Is the Walmart Foundation really intent on dismantling public education
through its expansions of charter schools?
Henig argues no, saying the debate of charters versus public schools is not
what really what matters "at the parent level."
In his view, the debate about choice needs to shift from being about charter
versus public schools to focusing on the role of democracy in school
governance and how to "calibrate" democratic input in decision-making about
schools.
That's an important subject for sure, but when Henig says the debate about
charters is not relevant at "the parent level," it's not clear what parents
he is referring to. He's clearly not talking about parents in Southside
Chicago, where in 2013, families reeled from a rash of school closings [55]
coupled with charter school expansions.
As Sarah Karp reported for Catalyst Chicago [56], Walton had made Chicago
its largest recipient of charter school grants, then gave the district
additional financial support for a series of community meetings to "educate
parents" about the school closures and obscure the role of charter schools.
The WFF money paid for "robo-calls to tell parents about the meetings,
mailings to parents and 'other engagement and communication platforms.'"
This churning of public school closings with charter school openings left
some stretches of the community without any schools at all, according to an
article by Trymaine Lee for MSNBC [57]. Calling these neighborhoods "school
deserts," much like the food deserts many low-income communities know about
all too well, Lee quotes community activist Jitu Brown: "This is not about
school choice. If it was really about providing us with choices, we'd have
the choice to improve our neighborhood schools."
That the spread of school choice can actually leave some communities with
fewer educational options is not a matter constrained to Chicago alone.
In cities such as New Orleans [58], which now has an all charter system,
whole neighborhoods are bereft of schools [59], and it is now quite common
for students to spend hours a day in transit as they trek from their homes
to available schools across town. Conditions are similar in some areas of
Houston [60], TX, where parents have coined the term "education desert" [60]
to describe "areas where a significant number or share of residents is far
from schools."
"This crisis has reached critical mass," the Houston parents contend.
Choice Hurts America's Heartland
Around the same time Walmart was closing stores in rural North Carolina,
parents in an Appalachian community in that state gathered at a hearing to
fight for their local public school to keep it from being closed down. "Many
in the audience sobbed as students talked about losing what to them has been
the center of their world as long as they can remember," a local newspaper
reported [61].
The local reporter noted a "trifecta" of factors leading to the imminent
closure. Two in the trifecta-declining student enrollment and state budget
cuts-are factors school officials and communities across America have faced
many times before. But the third factor was new: "charter school
competition."
We'll never know if this is an outcome John Walton considered when he
committed his family's billions to the expansion of charters and choice.
What we do know for sure, though, is that when he made his decision to pull
back from direct investments in public schools, he did so because he did not
see the kind of results he wanted to see.
But what if John Walton's disappointment in public schools stems from the
possibility that Americans, as a whole, want other kinds of "results" from
their public schools? What if what they want, as Jitu Brown says of his own
community, is the opportunity to "improve our neighborhood schools" instead
of having them replaced by the charters preferred by the Waltons?
Meanwhile, as WFF contemplates how to best "soften the ground" for increased
school choice, and policy makers ponder the growing impact of
philanthropists in education, more communities may have to contend with the
reality of schools, public or charter, coming and going based on forces not
in their control. Completely lost in the discussion, though, is whether it's
right for the American populace to have its access to education determined
by the values and philosophy of a few rich people.
Jeff Bryant is director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership
effort of the Institute for America's Future and the Opportunity to Learn
Campaign. He has written extensively about public education policy.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
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ping-american-public-education
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jeff-bryant
[2] http://alternet.org
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[4]
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ons-As-Part-of-Global-Store-Closure--365591291.html
[5] http://www.thestate.com/news/business/article56269905.html#storylink=cpy
[6]
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[10]
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[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family
[12]
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[13] http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/our-impact/k12-education
[14]
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[15] http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html
[16] http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
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[19]
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[20] http://www.edchoice.org/who-we-are/
[21]
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[22]
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[24]
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[26] https://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2011/2011-032.pdf
[27] http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1998/06/10/39vouch.h17.html?qs=Walton
[28] http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_06/b3667008.htm
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[62] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on How the Cutthroat
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