American Foundations: Roles and Contributions

3. Catalysts for Change? Foundations and School Reform, 1950–2005

51 3 Catalysts for Change? Foundations and School Reform, 1950–2005 elisabeth clemens and linda c. lee From the early nineteenth century through World War II, American foundations developed a varied repertoire of strategies, beginning with a model of the foundation as charity and later expanded to include conditional giving, otherwise known as partial succor, to leverage additional support and the “outsider within” strategy of subsidizing new kinds of public officials or experts, training personnel, demonstration projects, and scientific research.1 Pursuing strategies of complementarity, philanthropy provided more and better schools for those children not well served by public education, exemplified by foundation efforts to expand supply or to make schooling more equitable for black students in the South and Hispanic students in the Southwest.2 Yet as public provision of schooling expanded, foundations withdrew from the partial succor model and began to develop new theories of giving and models of transformation to promote innovation and policy change. By the 1950s foundations faced a very different situation from that which confronted the Peabody Education Fund after the Civil War or the General Education Board in the Jim Crow South. To a considerable extent, the public provision of education from kindergarten through twelfth grade was set in place.3 Since 1. Havighurst (1980); chapter 2, this volume. 2. Getz (1992); Rose and Stapleton (1992). 3. By 1940, 74.6 percent of all five- to nineteen-year-olds were enrolled in school (75.6 percent of whites, 68.4 percent of nonwhites). Enrollment rose to 78.7 percent in 1950 and 88.6 percent in 1960. By 1990, 92.6 percent of this age group was enrolled in school. Snyder (1993, p. 14). 52 elisabeth clemens and linda c. lee midcentury the aims of foundation giving have focused on better or different education rather than simply more or even more equitable schooling. This change of emphasis coincided with greater involvement in education by the federal government, driven by judicial decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and new laws such as the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. To promote better or different education, foundations now confront an elaborate set of legal constraints, a developed set of operating schools, and greatly expanded public spending which decreases the financial leverage afforded by even the most generous of foundation grants. The increase in federal intervention has also generated denser interconnections across levels of government, linking federal programs to state departments of education and to individual districts and schools. These ties are complicated by the professional associations, unions, commercial companies, and institutions of higher education that are also involved in providing different components of primary and secondary education .4 Consequently, foundation efforts to promote change or improvement now require attention to the systemic properties of education systems. From Partial Succor to School Reform In response to the changed character of elementary and secondary education, postwar philanthropic projects adopted new approaches. By midcentury, grants began to shift from support for established programs (libraries, arts education) to investment in instructional innovation. While foundations remained committed to equal educational opportunity, donors such as the Ford Foundation supported efforts to develop innovative curriculums, teacher training programs, and even novel uses of space within schools.5 Ford’s Great Cities Schools program of the 1950s and the Comprehensive School Improvement programs of the 1960s represented major efforts to improve urban education, projects that complemented both the commitment to racial equality in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the focus on alleviating poverty at the core of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Foundations no longer relied so heavily on cultivating local and state political elites, a concern that had been central to strategies of partial succor. Instead, they built alliances with national policy elites and cultivated community support by advocating for the decentralization of school district control in the spirit of the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor.6 Many of these programs focused on improving the quality of teachers and of the infrastructure to support 4. Rowan, Barnes, and Camburn (2004). 5. Mead (1972). 6. Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Section 202(a)(3). foundations and school reform 53 them.7 But foundations increasingly combined a technical focus on pedagogical innovation with support for transforming the governance of local districts. Multifaceted approaches, reformers argued, could “form a critical mass...