Walton’s Education Grants Seek to Spread Charter Schools

No other philanthropy has done as much as the Walton Family Foundation to make charter schools a part of America’s education landscape.

Since the 1990s, the Bentonville, Ark., fund has been backing efforts to give low-income parents options for where to send their children to school.

The foundation has done so not only by helping to create charter schools (it has given money to about 1,200) and by supporting vouchers but also by paying for research on such efforts and financing work to influence public policies on education.

In addition, it gives money to help traditional public schools by supporting groups like Teach for America and school districts that demonstrate a commitment to improving their schools.

“It’s just had an enormous impact,” says Frederick M. Hess, an education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “It has played a leading role in shaping and providing intellectual leadership when it comes to school choice and charter schooling.”

Options for Poor Families

While critics of charter schools and vouchers argue that much of Walton’s giving has been misguided, and may even hurt some students, supporters see a foundation whose long-term commitment to a set of guiding principles on education has helped build a movement that continues to gain steam and benefit more and more young people.

Carrie Walton Penner, a foundation trustee and granddaughter of Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder, says the foundation’s leaders settled on charter schools and vouchers as a key approach because they believed that poor parents deserved options just like wealthier families. They also felt strongly that creating competition among schools would lead to system-wide improvements.

Ms. Penner, who holds a master’s degree in education policy from Stanford University, has made education the focus of her work as a trustee.

She says that in recent years the foundation realized that spurring competition among schools “in and of itself isn’t enough.”

Parents often lack access to information about the best schools, and public policies sometimes hold school improvements back. “We realized what was missing was policy, in terms of advocacy,” she says.

To that end, Ms. Penner says, the fund is doing more to support advocacy and efforts to make education function more like a true market in which people have options and the knowledge to make good choices, and schools and educators that fall short in generating results will face consequences.

For example, it gives money to GreatSchools, which rates schools so parents can make informed decisions about where to send their youngsters.

‘A Tone Setter’

About half of the Walton foundation’s money for education goes to creating new schools,30 percent goes to working on public policy, and 20 percent to improving existing schools.

The foundation is focused primarily on seven cities it felt would be most receptive to change: Albany, Denver, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Newark, N.J., New Orleans, and Washington.

Mr. Hess says Walton’s growing emphasis on supporting research and shaping public policy is much needed, and he hopes the foundation can do a lot more. He faults people who have tried to overhaul schools for “overestimating the degree to which choice would be self-executing.”

“Walton is not just a funder but a tone setter,” he says. “I think it would be terrific for them to signal that it’s important to think about when and why choice doesn’t work as intended.”

Warren Simmons, executive director of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, says the foundation’s mistake has been not doing enough to engage directly with parents and otherlocal people affected by their efforts.

“Where I think they are underinvesting is in grass-roots policy making,” he said. “When you’re trying to create lasting change in low-income communities and communities of color, you have an obligation to engage those communities to help them define what kinds of schools they want.”

An example of the failure to involve community residents effectively, he says, is Washington.

The Walton foundation was one of several grant makers that contributed a total of $64.5-million over three years to help Michelle Rhee, the former District of Columbia, schools chancellor, negotiate a new contract with teachers and institute merit pay. Ms. Rhee drew national praise but failed to get the support of local voters, who rejected her boss, Adrian Fenty, in a mayoral re-election campaign last year.

Walton, however, says much of its grant making is focused on empowering low-income communities.

In Los Angeles, for example, the foundation made a grant last year to the Los Angeles Parents Union, which organizes parents to advocate for school improvements. The organization got the attention of Walton because it helped win passage of a “trigger law” that gives parents the right to petition for changes in their schools if they fail certain standards, says Gabe Rose, its deputy director.

“Our organization tries to address the naïveté, if you will, of much of the previous generations of education reform, which have assumed that if you have a good idea that helps kids, people will jump on it,” he says.

Recipients of Walton money say the foundation shows little naïveté itself—and in fact is savvier than many other donors.

Peter C. Groff, chief executive of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, which Walton helped to start five years ago, says that staff at his organization understands the need to push through both state and federal agendas and not get bogged down with a single challenge.

Ms. Penner, who says she got interested in education while tutoring high-school students as a freshman at Georgetown University, says it will be a challenge to keep people interested and motivated in improving schools. There was buzz after the documentary film “Waiting for Superman” came out, but that is fading.

Mixed Results

Data on charter schools have been mixed, adding fuel to the arguments that they aren’t a fix for America’s ailing school systems. A Stanford University study of charter schools in 16 states, for example, found that just 17 percent performed significantly better in termsof student achievement than traditional public schools, while 37 percent did significantly worse.

Other research, meanwhile, has not shown that competition among schools helps lift traditional public schools—another belief driving Walton’s grant making.

Given that track record, experts like Kevin Welner, director of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center, say they doubt that Walton’s giving will make a difference.

He and others argue that competition risks pulling resources from existing schools and creating greater inequality. “My big concerns about school-choice policies is if we create greater differences in quality in schools, there will be students on the low end who are really suffering,” he says.

Ms. Penner agrees that charter schools must continue to improve.

She says, however, that Walton-financed schools have performed better than some other charter schools. A separate study by Stanford University of 350 Walton-backed charters, paid for by Walton, found that 35 percent performed significantly better than traditional public schools, more thantwice the number in the larger study.

Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which conducted the survey, says that’s largely because of Walton’s rigor in selecting grantees.

Ms. Penner also says that charter schools like KIPP and Aspire have successfully challenged the assumption that poor children can’t succeed in school unless other issues they face, like poverty, are solved.

“One of the things that charter schools really turned on its head is this argument that kids from low-income and poverty-stricken areas can’t learn unless you address all the other things,” she says. “A number of schools disprove that.”