American Provincialism and K-12 Grantmaking - keeping a close ...

In the disputatious world of K-12 pedagogy, there is at least one thing liberals and conservatives agree on: the clear empirical evidence (most recently here and here pages 17, 23, 29) that American students perform mediocre compared to those in other advanced countries.

Considering the importance of K-12 education to any society, and considering its defects in the United States, it is not surprising that in most years U.S. grantmakers devote more dollars to education than to any other issue.

The five biggest K-12 funders in the U.S. are, in order, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and Robertson Foundation. (Full disclosure: NCRP is or has recently been funded by Gates and Kellogg). Technically, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation is #5 on this list, but like most community foundations the vast majority of its giving comes from donor-advised funds over which staffers have no control, and thus I exclude SVCF from analysis.

I am no expert in K-12 education, so this essay neither praises nor criticizes the specific programmatic goals pursued by any these five grantmakers. Instead, I am curious whether their respective strategies evince the same blindness to evidence from outside the United States ? itself but part of a larger American culture of provincialism ? as I have uncovered in my other blog explorations of the past couple of years. In those earlier blogs, I found U.S. grantmakers are in general blithely ignorant of (or unconcerned about) our nation?s deteriorating rate of upward social mobility compared to other advanced countries; I found health grantmakers guilty of a decades-long refusal to pursue goals based on more successful health care systems abroad; and I found historians of U.S. philanthropy failing to examine the topic in transnational perspective.

Do any of the five biggest U.S. K-12 grantmakers base their reform prescriptions on (or at least a considered rejection of) more successful K-12 systems abroad?

The most authoritative international rating is the OECD?s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), according to which the foreign school systems, ranked in descending order, that most clearly outperform the United States across all K-12 subjects tested (i.e., reading, math and science) are Shanghai-China, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Singapore and Canada. To determine which, if any, of the five biggest K-12 U.S. grantmakers model their prescriptions on ? or at least an evidence-based rejection of ? any of these superior-performing countries, I did word-searches for each of those countries and of ?PISA? on each foundation?s website; and I also google-searched linkages of the name of each foundation to those same terms.

My web search found that the Gates Foundation describes its K-12 goals by referencing PISA and specifically to aspects of the K-12 systems of PISA high-performers Hong Kong, Korea, Shanghai and Singapore; that Kellogg makes passing reference to PISA but does not appear to base its programmatic goals on any of the PISA high performers; and that none of the other three foundations make any reference at all to PISA.

What can we conclude from this?

First, two caveats. A web search of course is not exhaustive: it is possible that Walton, Dell, Kellogg or Robertson do indeed base their respective K-12 goals on the successful PISA countries but have chosen not to publicize this fact. But, if true, that would raise a different troubling question, namely, that of lack of transparency.

Second, while re-iterating my amateur status when it comes to K-12 pedagogy, a little voice in my head wishes that Gates would base its goals on PISA high performers Finland or Canada rather than on Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Korea. Three out of these four East Asian K-12 systems are embedded in countries with authoritarian regimes and therefore surely help support those regimes in their formal curricula and probably also informally by inculcating into students exaggerated deference to authority. Schools are places to learn not only the 3 Rs but also democratic citizenship and how to think critically, creatively and independently. Does Gates factor these concerns into its K-12 strategy?

But, again, considering my lack of K-12 pedagogical credentials, I won?t quibble too much with Gates? goals. I truly commend the world?s biggest foundation for bucking the deep American cultural tendency toward provincialism. Unfortunately, it looks like the other biggest American K-12 grantmakers can make no such boast.

Sean Dobson is field director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

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