Education Week - April 10, 2019 - 27

HOW INFLUENTIAL ARE LARGE DONORS?
Large national donors-wealthy individuals who gave at least $1,000 toward school board elections in
a single election cycle and funded at least one local campaign outside of their home state-accounted
for a tiny percentage of total individual donors, but a large share of the individual funding for reformbacked groups and candidates.
These donors accounted for:

0.015%

51%

18%

of all 8,714 individual donors

of funds contributed by individual
donors to reform-aligned PACs
and independent expenditure
committees

of funds contributed by individual
donors to reform-backed
candidates

SOURCE: Outside Money in School Board Elections (Harvard Education Press, 2019)

strategic fronts in a larger national battle over the future of
public education.
To understand how nationalization takes shape, we closely
examined school board elections in five cities: Bridgeport,
Conn., Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans.
We compiled a database of 18,809 campaign contributions
spanning election cycles from 2008 to 2014, including contributions from individuals, PACs, independent expenditure committees, unions, and businesses. Our research sheds light on
the changing dynamics in the world of education politics.

Teachers' unions-national, state, and local affiliates-are
still a force. They donated just over 25 percent of the total contributions coming from organizations. They were outspent,
however, by organizations promoting charter school expansion,
test-based accountability, teacher merit pay, and tenure reform.
These reform organizations accounted for almost 40 percent of
donations by organizations.
When we look at contributions from individuals, whether directly to candidates or through intermediary organizations, the
role of out-of-state donors further dwarfed that of the teachers'

Getty

to their curriculum during the 2016-17 school
year and 3.4 days when including prior years,
"Learning by the Book" found.
We offer a call to action on two fronts. First,
education policymakers can no longer simply exhort schools and districts to implement
curricula more thoroughly. We need to provide clearer guidance on an effective transi-

tion to more-rigorous curricula. States, districts, and the national philanthropies who
have been supporting the better materials
should test different packages of supports-
with different combinations of professional
development for teachers, training for principals on what to look for during classroom
observations, classroom coaching, videotaped

unions. Despite the growing share of funds from a small group
of wealthy national donors, outside funding did not automatically translate into a winning campaign. Reform-backed candidates in our cities won about 2½ times as often as they lost,
while union-backed candidates basically broke even.
The funding also influenced which issues were debated during the campaign and how those issues were framed. News
coverage of elections where outside funding was present often
focused on nationalized issues such as school choice and provided little to no coverage of more localized issues such as budget concerns and curricular offerings.
As emphasis on nationalized issues grew, candidates on both
sides of the debate took firmer, more ideological policy positions, leaving little room for compromise or pragmatic decisionmaking, historically a hallmark of local school board politics.
The candidates we interviewed connected this polarization
directly to outside funding. As one candidate told us, "most donors don't like the middle approach."
Rather than viewing the recent strikes, philanthropic investments, or donations to school board elections as discrete events,
we see them all as part of the nationalization of education politics. This nationalization reflects a growing realization that
local arenas are important sites for agenda setting and political
engagement over education issues. With nationalization, the
formal boundaries of local districts operate less as walls and
more as meeting places where national and local actors form
alliances around competing visions of what schools should be.
Nationalization does not mean teachers' unions are being
pushed to the margins. Nor does it mean that local actors are
being overshadowed.
Converting money into local political power requires connecting with voters who have their own issues and concerns. And
it means that teachers' unions have to work harder and more
creatively than they once did to stir their members and attract
new allies. The efforts to create linked themes and narratives
across disparate strikes and walkouts reflect their work to do
just that. n
JEFFREY R. HENIG is a professor of political science and education
at Teachers College, Columbia University. REBECCA JACOBSEN is an
associate professor of education politics and policy at Michigan State
University. SARAH RECKHOW is an associate professor of political
science at Michigan State University. Together, they are the authors
of Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of
Education Politics (Harvard Education Press, 2019).

practice sessions with teachers-and identify
the suite of supports necessary to generate
closer adherence to the curricula and to boost
student achievement.
Although they only received 1.1 days of
curriculum-related training, the teachers
surveyed for "Learning by the Book" reported
a total of 5.7 total days of professional development, on average, in a year. Obviously, it
would be costly to provide the same amount
of training as in Singapore-a top-performing system-where teachers typically receive
more than twice as many hours of professional development a year than in the United
States. Nevertheless, we should test the effect of devoting a much larger share of U.S.
schools' current professional-development
time to curricula.
Second, states must collect the data required for evaluating curricula on an ongoing
basis. Although the recent report found no
significant differences in achievement gains
for schools using different math textbooks,
discerning the true differences may simply
require larger sample sizes. States could use
their longitudinal data systems to compare
students' average annual achievement gains
in schools that use different curricula. Unfortunately, few state education agencies even
know which curricula are being used by their
own districts or schools, yet could readily add
textbook information to the reams of data
they already collect.
One reason why schools don't know how
to effectively use the more challenging curricula is that commercial publishers have not

created a full suite of resources (such as videos and coaching tools) that teachers might
need to succeed. Inevitably, such supports
cost money, and it is in no one's interest to
develop or buy them until there's evidence of
efficacy. However, if their reputations were
dependent upon the achievement gains of
schools using their products, publishers
would have a stronger incentive to package
their products with additional, instructionally effective supports.
Contrary to our (perhaps naïve) hopes,
we have learned that curriculum materials
alone are not enough. But the worst thing
we could do now would be to conclude that
teaching rigorous, demanding academic
content to all our students can't work. By
systematically identifying the package of
supports that teachers need to make full
use of stronger materials-and by attaching student achievement gains to textbooks so that publishers have an incentive
to provide the supports teachers need-we
can make progress. To close the book on
curricula now would be equivalent to closing the book on learning. Curriculum is the
foundation for what students and teachers
do together every day. n
THOMAS J. KANE is the Walter H. Gale professor
of education and the faculty director of the
Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard
University. DAVID M. STEINER is the executive
director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for
Education Policy and a professor of education at
the university.

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Education Week - April 10, 2019

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