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America 2000 and Philanthropy's Education Agenda

President Bush’s announcement in his America 2000 education reform package of a privately funded New American Schools Development Corporation may represent a new era in philanthropy’s often symbiotic relationship with education reform. Historically, foundations have provided venture capital for educational innovation and intellectual capital for education’s political economy. For example, some thirty-five years ago, an intense period of education reform spawned a series of seminal foundation-sponsored commission reports (among them James Bryant Conant’s The American High School Today and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s The Pursuit of Excellence: Education and the Future of America’), which had a dramatic influence on education policy and the subsequent expansion of the federal role in education. Now, with education once more under intense scrutiny, the federal role is being redefined and philanthropy has been called on again-this time to fund, not shape, a dramatically circumscribed federal agenda. As if to underscore this striking reversal of philanthropy’s fortunes, the president followed up his America 2000 proposals with a commencement-address attack on the legacy of President Johnson’s Great Society, which had attempted to turn a social safety net into a springboard for wider educational and economic opportunity. To many observers, after the rollbacks of the Reagan years, his successor’s attack seemed little more than a strategy to shoot the wounded after the battle had been won. One of the deeper lessons in America 2000 is that philanthropy has ceded to politics control of the discourse of reform. With a few notable exceptions -largely commission reports such as the Carnegie Forum’s A Nation Prepared, the CED’s Investing in Our Children,. and NCEE’s America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages2 philanthropic-supported reforms have either followed in the van of politically demanded changes (choice, accountability, national goals, and exams) or pursued altogether different objectives (a focus on teaching and learning, the challenge of America’s growing diversity, the special needs of urban education) that moved them to the margins of conventional political wisdom though perhaps real national need.