Why They Give
Posted: November 16th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 5 Comments »
Walmart’s growth has made the Walton family quite wealthy. They created a charitable foundation. It has donated more than $1 billion to K-12 education.
Many charter schools, including ours, have gotten support from them. In fact, the first big check I got in 1999 for Match was from Walton Family Foundation, for $125,000.
I’d held 6-figure checks before. Never made out to myself, alas. One of my first jobs out of college was working for a Broadway theater producer as a flunkie. These guys.
One of my tasks was taking large amounts of box office receipts to Chemical Bank, then stopping on the way back to get matzo ball soup for my boss. Another task was sending $100,000 royalty checks to A.R. Gurney, for Love Letters. Theater companies all over the country put on the play constantly, and he was raking in the royalties.
But I digress. The Walton check to the “Media and Technology Charter School” was the first I had any “control” over. There were no restrictions. One of the first expenditures was for a tiny office near Boston City Hospital. Man, I cooked up a lot of dumb pedagogical ideas in that office (which later needed to be unwound once we actually had a school). But the cash was sorely needed: hard to imagine how I could have limped to the starting line without it. I bet a bunch of charter founders would say the same thing.
Here’s a new 3-minute video about the Walton Family Foundation’s vision.
Great video and I obviously love that the Walton Foundation does so much to support ed reform but, while watching, I couldn’t help but think that maybe we would all be better off if Walmart used this money to pay their workers a higher wage and to give them good healthcare. More stable, healthier and happier families would translate into more successful schools though it would be much harder to measure. Don’t you think?
Walmart’s video is just one perspective in an-ongoing debate about the role of such organizations in shaping public education policy. Robin Rogers of Queens College has written extensively about what she calls “philathropolicymaking” and her findings complicate the Walton family’s (and other billionaire philanthropists’) relationship to education.
She argues that as the nature of philanthropic giving has become concentrated in the hands of a super-wealthy few, it has become increasingly political and is more akin to a new form of governance. She argues this is why Gates, Walton, and Broad foundation money should be considered with the same critical eye we cast on political money and business profits.
To read more on the topic check out: http://eduoptimists.blogspot.com/2011/12/billionaire-education-policy-guest-post.html
Hi Amanda,
Good question! I don’t know. I suppose I reflexively think of anyone wealthy running a business…why don’t you pay a higher wage? Though I suppose that puts the burden on the seller.
That is, I could ask the same question of myself. Would I choose to shop at a store called Walmart+20%, where the company pay higher wages, all subsidized by me as a customer paying a higher price than market rate? I probably would not.
I do sometimes choose to pay more on purpose, to a hyper-local small business. But in that mode I’m subsidizing a struggling owner, not a laborer.
Chris, thanks for the link, I’ll check it out.
Chris, I read the post.
I generally think disclosure is good. My reaction:
a. Don’t Gates and Broad and Walton foundations disclose? I assume they do but maybe I’m missing something.
I would have thought they’d have to publicly file their 990 forms every year, and list every donation and its amount. Wasn’t sure what the author wanted beyond that.
(b. Ironically, politicians themselves seem to be getting less scrutiny….with the advent of SuperPACs w/o limits or disclosure, which I see as a terrible development).