Funding for Change
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Funding for Change: Factors Affecting Foundation Funding of Pre-Collegiate Education Policy in the United States Following the Charlottesville Summit and No Child Left Behind Shayna Melinda Klopott Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2015 © 2015 Shayna Melinda Klopott All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Funding for Change: Factors Affecting Foundation Funding of Pre-Collegiate Education Policy in the United States Following the Charlottesville Summit and No Child Left Behind. Shayna Melinda Klopott This dissertation examines philanthropic foundation grant making for early childhood and K-12 education policy in the period 1988 to 2005, focusing on how grant making changed as a result of the Charlottesville Summit in 1989 and the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001. Using a rational choice frame, I specifically ask if foundations responded to changes in the education policy environment that resulted from those 2 events by changing the levels of government that they target in their education policy grant making. Then, using an institutional frame, I ask if foundation capacity, as measured by their asset size and board size, increases the likelihood of being a foundation that focuses on policy grant making for education and increases the speed of response to changes in the field of foundations and the broader policy environment. Lastly, I employ the organizational ecology frame to ask if foundations have responded to changes in the organizational field of foundations, as the result of the entrance of new foundations that are influenced by broad changes in the business world, to focus their grant making increasingly on advocacy and other policy work. I find that there are a number of foundation characteristics that are associated with the odds of being a policy foundation and with the proportion of grants that policy foundations make for policy activities. I find that overall, following the Charlottesville Summit state targeted grantmaking decreased while nationally (affecting many if not all states) and federally targeted grantmaking rose. And, following the implementation of No Child Left Behind, locally targeted, state targeted and federally targeted grantmaking all increased as a percentage of total policy grantmaking, while nationally targeted grantmaking declined. However, these overall trends obscure important differences between the largest and non-largest foundations. Lastly, I find that grant recipient types also varied by foundation asset size. I conclude that while there is evidence to suggest that foundations behave as rational actors, to some degree, they are less responsive to isomorphic pressures from within the field of foundations than I would have expected. Additionally, rather than seeing tremendous change among the older foundations, the entrance of new foundations into the field of education philanthropy seems to be responsible for the perception that the field has changed dramatically. Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................................ IV LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................ VIII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. IX DEDICATION ....................................................................................................................................... XI CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 1 1.1: INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2: EXISTING RESEARCH ................................................................................................................................. 4 1.3: CHANGES IN EDUCATION POLICY ............................................................................................................ 7 1.4: CHANGES IN THE PHILANTHROPY LANDSCAPE .................................................................................... 8 1.5: GOALS OF THIS RESEARCH AND HYPOTHESES ..................................................................................... 9 1.6: DEFINITIONS ............................................................................................................................................ 11 1.7: CHAPTER OVERVIEWS ........................................................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................... 18 2.1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 18 2.2: HOW HAS PHILANTHROPY’S INFLUENCE ON EDUCATION BEEN STUDIED PREVIOUSLY? ............. 19 2.3: HOW FOUNDATIONS INFLUENCE POLICY ........................................................................................... 34 2.4: CHANGES IN THE EDUCATION POLICY LANDSCAPE. ........................................................................... 74 2.5: RATIONAL CHOICE OR INSTITUTIONAL THEORIES: EXPLAINING CHANGES IN FOUNDATION GRANTMAKING BEHAVIOR. ............................................................................................................................ 82 2.6: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK .................................................................................................................. 88 2.7: CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................ 94 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ...................................................................................................... 96 3.1: INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 96 3.2: POPULATION OF GRANTS ...................................................................................................................... 96 3.3: DATA COLLECTION—GRANTS .......................................................................................................... 100 i 3.4: VARIABLES ............................................................................................................................................ 112 3.5 ANALYSIS MODELS ............................................................................................................................... 132 CHAPTER 4: POLICY FOUNDATIONS AND POLICY GRANTMAKING ............................. 135 4.1: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 135 4.2: POLICY GRANTMAKING ....................................................................................................................... 136 4.3: POLICY FOUNDATIONS ........................................................................................................................ 144 4.4: DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................................... 170 CHAPTER 5: CHANGES IN LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT TARGETED BY POLICY FOUNDATIONS ................................................................................................................................ 175 5.1: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 175 5.2 LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT TARGETED BY POLICY FOUNDATIONS ................................................ 175 5.3: PREDICTING LOCALLY TARGETED GRANTMAKING ......................................................................... 204 5.4: DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................................... 209 CHAPTER 6: RECIPIENT TYPES ................................................................................................. 215 6.1: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 215 6.2: RECIPIENT TYPES ................................................................................................................................ 216 6.3: RECIPIENT TYPES WITHOUT THE LARGEST FOUNDATIONS ......................................................... 222 6.4 NATIONAL POLICY ORGANIZATIONS .................................................................................................. 226 6.5: GRANTS TO CHARTER SCHOOLS AND CHARTER MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATIONS ................... 229 6.6: DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................................... 244 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 254 7.1: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 254