Give Locally, Achieve Nationally

10 Give Locally, Achieve Nationally New York City’s influential data-based bail reform, described in the last chapter, is an excellent illustra- tion of how philanthropists who solve local problems in creative ways can then find their contributions echoing on the national stage. Another crystalline example of this is the Bradley Foundation’s spon- sorship of school-choice successes in Milwaukee. Bradley pried open the door for much more school choice across the nation. Agenda Setting 131 GIVE LOCALLY, ACHIEVE NATIONALLY In a 1990s presentation to the Council on Foundations, Bradley president Michael Joyce and his staff encapsulated the ideal that underlay all of the foundation’s philanthropy: “Individuals coming together in communities as proud, self-governing, personally responsible citizens, capable once again of running their own lives and affairs, freed from the pater- nalistic oversight and interference of bureaucratic elites.” School choice fit this vision perfectly. Its goal was to liberate parents from unrespon- sive bureaucracies and give them the tools to make educational choices themselves on behalf of their children. The battle still rages. Defenders of the status quo continue to resist the decentralization and de-monopolization of public schooling. Some jurisdictions now offer parents wide and wondrous choices, while oth- ers allow nothing but the conventional assigned public school. Growing numbers of places, though, fall somewhere between those two poles. (For Today’s explosion of new school offerings would be hard to imagine absent the pioneering Milwaukee experiments of the Bradley Foundation. much more detail on how philanthropists have advanced school choice and education reform generally, see The Philanthropy Roundtable’s sev- eral guidebooks on giving to schools, and our list of Major Achievements in Education Philanthropy.) Scores of cities and states are now tinkering with alternatives like char- ter schools, privately funded tuition vouchers, state education tax credits, mechanisms for including religious schools among family options, and choice (rather than assignment) of district schools. Places like Washington, D.C., and New Orleans that were one-size-fits-all,single-option educational deserts a decade ago are now bursting with variety and excellence. The U.S. will never go back to the old factory-style public-school model of the past. Today’s explosion of new school offerings would be hard to imagine absent the pioneering Milwaukee experiments funded during the 1980s and ’90s by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Since 1985, Bradley has spent more than $75 million on school choice, primarily for schools serving the lowest-income families. The foundation’s efforts 132 proved both that there is an enormous appetite among urban parents for better educational choices, and that inventive independent schools of various kinds can take children who were moldering in conventional public schools and propel them into mainstream success. Bradley’s money was invested in exceptionally canny and creative ways, so as to bring success on both local and national levels. The local grantmak- ing, focused on neglected students in Bradley’s own backyard, was the indis- pensable beginning. It shifted school choice from the realm of promising theory to proven practical strategy. It produced a gratifying crop of poster children illustrating the human fruits of an approach that respects the right of a parent to seek the school match that best fits her child. When future historians look back at the last quarter century, they will identify the school-choice experiments that began in Wisconsin as one of the great success stories of public-policy philanthropy in our era. The lessons for other public-policy philanthropists are many: Ground your investments on solid intellectual work by fresh-thinking scholars. Seize political opportunities. Build broad coalitions, including with unexpect- ed allies. Make bold investments and sustain them. Work across a wide range of fronts—not only offering direct aid but also paying for the intellectual, communications, political, and legal work needed to build, sustain, and protect the charitable breakthrough. Donors who under- stand these precedents will be better equipped to instigate or accelerate policy reforms in other areas as well. The story begins long before the Bradley Foundation became a force in philanthropy. In 1955, economists Milton and Rose Friedman proposed giving the parents of school-age children vouchers worth “a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school.... The injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools.” A separate movement for school choice began to emerge in black communities in the 1960s and 1970s. The activists who supported it were not reading the libertarian theories of the Friedmans. Instead, they saw vouchers as tools for empowering parents to exert more control over schools in poor neighborhoods that were doing little more than warehousing students. Neither the libertarians nor the black activists got much traction on their own. Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s the Bradley Foundation managed to marry the two movements. By offering Agenda Setting 133 GIVE LOCALLY, ACHIEVE NATIONALLY generous private financial support, the foundation moved the discus- sion beyond rhetoric into real life, and linked two strange bedfellows in a powerful alliance. Bradley’s engagement started in 1986 when it provided a grant of $75,000 to launch research by John Chubb and Terry Moe, two scholars who wanted to look deeply into the alarming failures of America’s urban schools. Four years later when Chubb and Moe were completing their work, the foundation ramped up its investment with a new gift of $300,000 to make sure that their results were distributed widely and given a full public airing. Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools became one of the most important books on education in a generation when it was published in 1990. Chubb and Moe marshaled a range of evidence to show that central- ized government schools, shackled by bureaucracy and teacher unions, were incapable of performing as well as decentralized schools. Using data from the Department of Education, the authors showed that public education’s problems were so fundamental that solving them required a new set of schools that relied on competition. “We believe existing insti- tutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the problem—and that the key to better schools is institutional reform,” they wrote. They called for something along the lines of what the Friedmans and the black activists had suggested. The book was persuasive on its own terms, but it gained special notice because it was published by the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank known for its conventional, establishmentarian tendencies— exactly the sort of place that isn’t supposed to favor a system-shocking idea like school choice. This wasn’t the predictable product of a conservative think tank driven by ideology, so it attracted special attention from the media and policymakers. The Bradley Foundation had known its grant to obscure scholars operating in a different ideological milieu was risky. “There were some questions around the board table about whether we should support Brookings,” recalls Bradley vice president Dan Schmidt. “But it was definitely the right thing to do.” In the end, the gamble paid off in spades. Around the same time, the Bradley Foundation helped start the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank devoted to state issues. The new organization produced a series of reports calling attention to the need for school reform in Wisconsin. This included one 134 report written by Chubb that previewed the arguments he would make in his book with Moe. That set the stage for the next important development: a 1988 budget proposal from Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson to start a school-choice program. It went nowhere because conventional partisan politics got in the way. Thompson was a Republican, and his natural allies on school choice were black community leaders who were predominantly Democrats. There was no existing mechanism for political collaboration. Undaunted, Thompson began a deliberate campaign to reach across the aisle. He put on a school-reform conference in Milwaukee that featured Chubb and Moe. He attracted the interest of a black Democratic state leg- islator named Polly Williams. She knew about school choice from her days as a community activist, when she saw choice as an attractive alternative to desegregation policies that had bused many black children from their neighborhoods to put them in predominantly white schools. Working with Thompson, Williams proposed legislation that would create a school-choice pilot program for poor families. It was small and limited, affecting only about 1,000 students and restricted to non-religious schools. But it was a start. And it would grow. The first phase of the Bradley Foundation’s commitment to school choice involved helping create the conditions for this breakthrough leg- islative success. The second phase involved fending off counterattacks. The new pilot program immediately came under fierce legal challenge. Bradley provided $500,000 between 1988 and 1992 to bring in attorney Clint Bolick, then with the Landmark Legal Foundation, to defend the program in the courtroom. In 1992, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the school-choice program was valid under the state constitution. Reformers had jumped a critical hurdle. Yet new challenges awaited. Blocked by law from attending Catholic or other religious schools, voucher recipients found that their actual options for finding seats were quite limited. In the program’s first year, only 341 students were able to use their vouchers. So in 1992, the Bradley Foundation donated $1.5 million to Partners Advancing Values in Education.

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