Note: This blog is adapted from paper presented by our
research team at the 2014 AERA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. This research is
funded by the William T. Grant Foundation’s program on Understanding the
Acquisition, Interpretation, and Use of Research Evidence in Policy and
Practice. The Principal Investigators of this project are Drs. Elizabeth DeBray, Chris Lubienski, and Janelle Scott. Please
contact Priya La Londe with any
questions.
Philanthropies and Intermediary Organizations in Denver,
Colorado: Incentivist-Oriented Advocacy Coalitions
Philanthropist
involvement in education policy has contributed to the emergence of a dynamic
sector of intermediary organizations (IOs). These IOs broker the production and
use of research evidence targeted at government and education policymakers. We
frame this relationship between foundations and intermediary organizations by
drawing on the analogy of a hub and spoke structure, whereby parts of a wheel
work together to move an incentivist policy agenda forward. Philanthropists see
their investments in IOs as a way to realize more promising and effective
educational interventions whose “profit” is understood to be a scaling up of
reforms they favor. Foundations exercise investment in the following ways:
·
provide
the financial backing for many charter management organizations;
·
place
system and district leaders in positions of authority;
·
scale
organizations to expand across multiple school districts;
·
actively
promote the successes of their investments to policymakers in an effort to
convince them that such reforms and reformers are also worth public support and
alterations in public policy;
·
and
help to support local, state, and national coalitions.
Drawing
on data from a larger study of research use
and dissemination,
we examined the role of foundations in Denver, Colorado, a key site for incentivist
reforms including teacher pay-for-performance and charter schools. To analyze
how foundations support new networks of IOs to channel the production and
consumption of research, we drew upon the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF)
(Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999) as well as Local Intermediary Networks
(DeBray et al., 2014), a relatively new and important dimension of the “supply
side” of research in support of incentivist reforms. Since 2011, we have
reviewed a range of documents and conducted 35 interviews in Denver with policymakers,
representatives from over 25 intermediary organizations, researchers, and
journalists.
Proliferation of Incentivist Reforms in Denver Public
Schools
Denver Public Schools (DPS), a
school system that is diverse across several markers, adopted
school choice and teacher pay-for-performance early on. Forty of the 161 public
schools in Denver were created as charters and magnet schools. The 2005 Denver
Plan accompanied a voter initiative approving salary increases for teachers
that included merit pay, raising over $25 million from taxpayers. With support
from the Janus Foundation’s Education Alliance, the program Denver Plan has
expanded. ProComp allows teacher to earn and lose salary increases based
on improvements and declines in student performance as well as earn raises
based on commitment to teaching in hard-to-staff schools, knowledge and skill
development, and student growth. Drawing on support from teachers unions and
the Board of Education, philanthropists played a key role in the implementation
of these reforms. Since ProComp
was implemented, incentivist reforms goals
remain important to DPS visionaries. Still though, despite alignment with many of the Obama
Administration’s priorities for educational reform, Colorado was unsuccessful
in its application for the RttT program.
Findings: Denver foundations invest in and proliferate
incentivist reforms through translation of research, targeted partnerships with
policymakers, and funding preferred IO agendas
Local philanthropies have catalyzed much of the recent
policy movement in Denver, and intermediary groups have responded to funding
possibilities and to meet the needs of marshaling research evidence in support
of the agendas the philanthropies are promoting. Denver had been relatively
free of the adversarial politics that characterize such reforms in other
cities, and the local philanthropies saw themselves as building bridges across
political constituencies, including reform organizations and teachers unions. Intermediary organizations are increasingly
creating a more acrimonious policy climate as they embrace a politics of
opposition to advance their agendas. Several
smaller philanthropies have indicated ambivalence toward the incentivist
reforms they fund, yet they lend support in their goal to be seen as “players”
in the philanthropic and policy worlds, with direction from the policy agendas
of larger, national foundations (e.g. Gates Foundation) and federal reforms
(e.g. Building Charter Schools Quality) that fund reforms in their cities. Denver philanthropies have positioned
themselves as visible champions of ProComp and charter management organizations.
Foundations invested in these reforms in two ways: 1) Advocating through
selective dissemination and translation of research to a targeted audience of policymakers;
and 2) Funding preferred agendas practices that lead to reform proliferation. The Daniels, Piton, and Donnell-Kay Foundations provide most
of the funding. Furthermore, the Denver Public Schools and Denver Classroom
Teacher Association worked with the private sector actors to form a unique
coalition in their convergence on ProComp1 and ProComp2, the teacher
pay-for-performance programs implemented in Denver.
Foundations as Private Policymakers?
Our analysis suggests that foundations “outsource” the
“work” of research production and advocacy to intermediary groups. Working in
ideologically defined coalitions, while perhaps intending to preserve the credibility
of philanthropies, those operating within interstices may instead lead to a
more divisive rather than monolithic policy environment. Foundations are therefore not just funders—they
are also investors and private policy makers. They view their financial support
as an investment in realizing the adoption and implementation of incentivist
reforms. In this sense, we argue that foundations are the “hub” that moves the “spokes” in a local IO coalition. In Denver, we see the importance of foundations for the
production of evidence, the communication of evidence to policymakers, and the
overall support to IOs to scale their organizations. Without this hub of
funding and alignment around the importance of incentivist reforms, it is
unlikely that such reforms would have moved forward at the size and scope that
we witness in Denver and within the Colorado legislature.
Further Reading
DeBray, E., Scott, J., Lubienski, C., & Jabbar, H.
(2014). Intermediary organizations in charter school policy coalitions:
Evidence from New Orleans. (30%) Educational Policy 28(2), pp. 175-206.
Gonring,
P., Teske, P., & Jupp, B. (2007). Pay-for-Performance
Teacher Compensation: An Inside View of Denver's ProComp Plan. Harvard
Education Press.
Lubienski, C., Scott, J., & DeBray, E. (2011). The rise of intermediary
organiza- tions in knowledge production, advocacy, and educational policy (ID
No. 16487). Teachers College Record. Available from http://www.tcrecord.org
Sabatier,
P., & Jenkins-Smith, H. (1999). The advocacy coalition framework: An
assessment. In P. Sabatier (Ed.), Theories of the policy process (pp.
117-166). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Scott, J., & Jabbar, H. (2013). Money and measures: Foundations as
knowledge brokers. In D. Anagnostopoulos, S. Rutledge & R. Jacobsen (Eds.),
The infrastructure of accountability: Mapping data use and its consequences
across the American education system (pp. 75-92). Cambridge: Harvard
Education Press.
Scott, J., & Jabbar, H. (2014). The Hub and the Spokes: Foundations, Intermediary Organizations,
Incentivist Reforms, and the Politics of Research Evidence. Educational
Policy, 28(3), pp. 233-257. doi:10.1177/0895904813515327
Wiley, E. W., Spindler, E., & Subert, A. (2010). Denver ProComp: An
Outcomes Evaluation of Denver's Alternative Teacher Compensation System. Denver
Public Schools.
Wohlstetter, P., Smith, J., Farrell, C., Hentschke, G., & Hirman, J.
(2011). How funding shapes
the growth of charter
management organizations: Is the tail wagging the dog?
Journal
of Education Finance. 37(2),
pp. 150-174.
By: Priya La Londe
