Last week, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and In the Public Interest released a highly critical report on the Walton Family Foundation's K-12 education philanthropy, which ended with a call for increased transparency and accountability in the charter sector. The gist of the report is that the Walton Family Foundation-which has kick-started about one in four charters around the country-"relentlessly presses for rapid growth of privatized education options" and has opposed serious efforts to regulate and monitor fraud and abuse. While the foundation supports rapidly scaling up charter networks that have produced promising results, the AFT and In the Public Interest cite a 2013 Moody's Investment Services report which found that dramatically expanding charter schools in poor urban areas weakens the ability of traditional schools to serve their students, forcing them to lay off teachers, increase class sizes, and cut programs to make ends meet.
A month earlier, Philamplify, an initiative of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), published its own report on the Walton Family Foundation's impact, and found that although they have achieved meaningful results through their environmental philanthropy, "an overreliance on specific market-based vehicles" hinders their ability to create "sustainable and equitable" improvements in education. Philamplify also criticized the Walton Family Foundation for "insulating itself among like-minded peers rather than connecting with the broader field."
While the Walton Family Foundation did not return my request for comment, Education Week reported that their spokesperson, Daphne Moore, defended their commitment to high-quality schools. Education Week also cites Greg Richmond, the president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA)-an organization that receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation-who argued that the foundation has long demonstrated a commitment to accountability and transparency.
This discussion is sure to continue over the coming months, but what was particularly striking was something in the Walton Family Foundation's response to the Philamplify report-a statement that has been reiterated by the foundation many times over the past several years. Marc Sternberg, the foundation's K-12 program director, said, "Education is the set of work we can support that will most directly end the cycle of poverty and change the trajectory of young people's lives."
The notion that education is needed to break the cycle of poverty is a popular mantra of the education reform movement. The problem is, it is simply not true at all. The most direct way to break the cycle of poverty is actually to give poor people more money, something that high-quality educations, even college degrees, do not in any way guarantee. So when it comes to the question of redistribution-an integral component to any comprehensive anti-poverty program-the political work of the Walton family deserves far greater scrutiny.
Waltons, Walmart, and Politics
The Walton family heirs own a majority of public shares in Walmart, the U.S.'s largest private employer, which easily makes them some of the richest people on earth. Today, the Walton family has more wealth than 49 million American families combined. The six Walton heirs together have a net worth of at least $148.8 billion.
The Walton family engages in quite a bit of political work outside of its environmental and education philanthropy-much of it to advance conservative legislative goals. In the 2014 electoral cycle, Walmart spent $2.4 million through its PAC and individual donations, and $12.5 million through lobbying. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Walmart was far and away the biggest big-box retail spender in the election cycle, and has been ranked among the top 100 political donors since 1989. Demos looked at the Walton family's political contributions between 2000 and 2014 and found that their $7.3 million in campaign contributions heavily favored Republican candidates over Democrats.
Outside of political campaigns, Walmart employs an array of Washington, D.C., lobbyists to advocate on issues like labor, taxes, and trade. Up until May 2012, Walmart was a longtime member of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which works to promote an ideologically conservative agenda around the country. Moreover Walmart has given millions to the Republican State Leadership Committee, the Republican Governors Association, and other organizations that push right-wing policies.
Their animus towards union and labor is no secret, and Walmart has fought strengthening labor law in Washington, D.C., as well as supporting efforts to expand right-to-work laws in state legislatures. In addition, as veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse reported for The Atlantic this month, Walmart "maintains a steady drumbeat of anti-union information at its more than 4,000 U.S. stores"-much of which is patently false.
Beyond their efforts to elect conservative candidates and promote right-wing causes, the Waltons also fight against efforts to promote a greater redistribution of wealth through taxation.
According to Treasury Department estimates, closing just two estate tax loopholes that the Waltons use would raise more than $2 billion annually over the next decade-but they have long lobbied against any effort to do so.
Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 400 national and state organizations that seeks to promote progressive tax reform, found that Walmart and the Walton family benefit from an estimated $7.8 billion in annual tax breaks, loopholes, and subsidies-much of which stems from the fact that so many of Walmart employees earn meager wages and are forced to rely on public assistance.
After years of worker organizing and public pressure, Walmart recently announced that it would raise its hourly wages to $9 an hour by April and $10 an hour by February 2016. While encouraging, such measures alone are unlikely to mitigate the economic hardship most Americans face-especially when, at this point, many cities are pushing for a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Economic Inequality and Public Education
The evidence that shows impoverished kids are disadvantaged in school is well-documented-and yet many education reformers insist that despite this, we can still provide every child with a high-quality education so that everyone succeeds. We shouldn't use poverty as "an excuse," they say.
The idea that we can redesign education to be excellent and equitable without reducing poverty and economic inequality certainly sounds politically pleasant, but we know it's just not true. That's why the education agenda of the Walton Family Foundation has so many internal contradictions. The Waltons say they want to create more high-quality schools to help kids in poverty, but they back candidates who support eroding the already crumbling social safety net and fight against paying their fair share of taxes. And while the Waltons continue to advocate aggressively against unions, the Economic Policy Institute has found that the decline in unionization has mirrored the rise in inequality "to a remarkable extent."
Not only does poverty hurt one's chance for success in school, but growing levels of economic inequality also further exacerbate these issues-problems that the Walton heirs do not seem interested in addressing. Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago-though the academic performance of poor students has not declined during this time. He also found that before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students when it came to academic performance, but "the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor." In other words, growing economic inequality has contributed to disparities in academic achievement across the board, even for those not living in poverty. Other researchers have found that the rich now have much greater access to extracurricular opportunities than the poor. In districts across the country, enrichment programs like art, music, journalism, and athletics are being cut-creating even greater divides between the haves and the have-nots in education.
If we want to reduce poverty and economic inequality-things we know hurt student achievement and life outcomes-then we have to address how the education aims of the Walton Family Foundation are incongruous with their political agenda elsewhere.
Closing the achievement gap, as Demos analyst Matt Bruenig points out, will not even reduce poverty; it would merely change the distribution of it. In the education-reform world, unfortunately, grantees are unlikely to criticize foundations because they fear they will be blacklisted or de-funded. This makes sense, as there are incredible power imbalances in the philanthropic sector and money is scarce.
The Walton Family Foundation talks a lot about creating high-quality schools. If Walmart, with its billions of dollars in profits, created high-quality jobs with living wages and benefits, children would be far less likely to grow up in poverty and would perform far better in school. Relatedly, if the Waltons backed candidates who supported a more equitable distribution of wealth and stronger social-welfare policies, then children would be far less likely to grow up in poverty, and perform far better in school. It's certainly true that every child deserves a high-quality education. How to get there, however, is not rocket science.
