Destructive Democrats have taken over education reform

A once-heterodox movement is now monochromatically blue. That’s bad for the cause.

The K-12 education-reform movement was once led primarily by conservatives and libertarians with centrist Democrats as junior partners. But over the past decade, education reform has taken a hard left turn. Republicans are now almost entirely invisible within the ranks of its activists. This progressive capture of education reform—like the capture of much of the media and academia—will undermine the quality and effectiveness of the movement’s work.

We’ve seen this trend firsthand over two decades of work in education reform, so we decided to quantify it. In a new study, the first of its kind, we examined the political preferences of people working in education-reform groups. To identify these groups we focused on those receiving support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. These are the two leading backers of school reform. Almost all major education-reform groups receive funding from one or both foundations (as have we). We then searched OpenSecrets.org for all political campaign contributions made by the staff of these groups to gauge their political leanings.

We tracked staff contributions to political campaigns in a sample of 73 education-reform organizations funded by the Gates Foundation, including Achieve, Teach For America, the New Schools Venture Fund, Alliance for Excellent Education, Jobs for the Future, Turnaround for Children, and Bellwether Education Partners. In total, we found 2,625 political campaign contributions from the staff of Gates grantees. Of those contributions, more than 99% supported Democratic candidates or the Democratic Party. Only eight (that’s eight, not 8%) of the 2,625 campaign contributions went to Republicans.

More: https://www.aei.org/publication/democrats-have-taken-over-education-reform/

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Destructive Democrats have taken over education reform

Destructive Democrats have taken over education reform

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