The Century Foundation is supposed to be a liberal foundation. I had numerous contacts with it when it was previously known as The Twentieth Century Fund. My most memorable experience involved my membership on a task force in 1983 or so, which prepared a critique of American education and the need for reform. For that era, our task force report was fairly run-of-the-mill. What was remarkable was that our staff director disagreed with the task force. He wrote a ringing defense of our public schools and took issue with the conclusions of the report. His name was Paul Petersen. He is now one of the leading critics of public schools, now one of the most widely published advocates for vouchers and charters. Well, we switched sides.
Fast forward to the present.
The Twentieth Century Fund is now the Century Fund. My ex-husband served on its board for many years. It has a reputation for its careful research and sober findings.
But last year, the Century Fund released a report about how charter schools can promote “diversity by design,” identifying 125 charter schools that promote diversity.
This raised eyebrows because charters have frequently been criticized for promoting segregation, most notably by the UCLA Center on Civil Rights.
The report was remarkable because it was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the anti-union, pro-privatization foundation of the billionaires who own Walmart. The Waltons say they have funded one-fourth of all charters in the nation. Since when does a liberal think tank take funding from a rightwing foundation and deliver a product that supports their charter crusade?
Last year, a parent activist complained about the bias of the report. She wrote her commentary on Leonie Haimson’s parent blog. Haimson, introducing her comments, pointed out a big flaw in the study. She wrote: This list of 125 schools was selected from 5,692 charter schools – only a tiny number. The methodology is also questionable. The authors identify these schools by analyzing their enrollment, websites and survey responses from school leaders. Though the Century Foundation sent their survey about diversity to 971 charter schools, only 86 responded – which means that nearly 40 schools were put on the list even though the school leaders couldn’t be bothered to answer their survey.
This year, the Century Foundation recently accepted a grant of $407,053 from the Gates Foundation “to support the Century Foundation in addressing misconceptions that charter schools exacerbate racial and socioeconomic segregation.”
Read the wording again. TCF is not being funded to inquire whether charter schools exacerbate segregation but to “address misconceptions” that they do. This is not research. It is a contract to provide support for an opinion that challenges the scholarship of people like Gary Orfield at UCLA and Helen Ladd at Duke.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Read the wording again. TCF is not being funded to inquire whether charter schools exacerbate segregation but to “address misconceptions” that they do.”
It is just amazing how completely the “choice” part of the ed reform political coalition captured all other parts of the coalition.
It is ALL they work on.
I suppose it was inevitable. The thing only ever consisted of two parts- 1. charters and vouchers and 2. testing for public school students, and there’s only so much testing one can possibly mandate or study.
But I don’t think they can deny that the money drives the focus. We get an “education debate” that consists solely of promoting charters and vouchers because that’s what the billionaire funders are paying for- if it wasn’t true the money would dry up. If ed reform had a focus on public school students the Waltons would go back to funding anti-union laws and pouring tens of millions into fighting a raise in the minimum wage. They’d never pay for anything that doesn’t advance the ideological goals.
“Since when does a liberal think tank take funding from a rightwing foundation and deliver a product that supports their charter crusade?”
Obviously, since 1983 might be an answer. Time to re-think the label?
Gates and Arnold fund what was once the liberal Urban Institute. It’s a step in the process that the oligarchy uses. The next phase in the pipeline to screw the 99%, is the lobby shop, BiPartisan Policy Center. BPC has meetings to explore policy that are funded by Gates/Arnold.
It doesn’t surprise me that charter school advocates are now embracing the “diverse by design” to justify their existence and it doesn’t surprise me that foundations who are entirely dependent on pleasing their funders would issue misleading reports that only include the most positive view of whatever their funders want to promote.
The “diverse by design” mission is the excuse that the dishonest charter movement now uses to justify why they have basically abandoned their “we really want to serve each and every one of those severely economically disadvantaged students stuck in failing public schools” mission.
Because charter advocates have absolutely no ethical core, they will not admit that they failed in their original justification for charters. If charter advocates had an ounce of integrity or any concern for the severely disadvantaged students they clearly feel are worthless and should remain invisible, they would admit that even with the tens of millions of dollars in extra funding they received, they could only cherry pick a small number of the most motivated students from those failing public schools and teach them. But the truly reprehensible charter CEOs would rather see those children rot than admit that they could not teach them even with millions of dollars in extra funding from anti-public school billionaires to help.
So instead of admitting failure, they have pretended that there was a different mission all along — “diverse by design”. In other words, charters will cherry pick the most motivated and easiest to teach low-income non-white students and teach them in charters with middle class and affluent students of all races but only if there are a disproportionately low number of severely economically disadvantaged non-white students and a disproportionately high number of affluent and middle class students and a disproportionately high number of white students.
In other words, open up a charter in a city with 15% white students and have white students comprise 30 or 40% of the charter’s population. Open up a charter where 72% of the students are economically disadvantaged and have economically disadvantaged students comprise 50% or less of the charter population.
What a way to undermine public schools! When a charter educates a disproportionately low percentage of severely economically disadvantaged students, it means the concentration of severely disadvantaged students in public schools becomes even higher! But now charters can claim they are serving a higher purpose when they work to increase the percentage of the most severely disadvantaged students in public schools – “diversity”.
There are many examples of PUBLIC schools in NYC that are more diverse than the NYC charters on this list that the Century Foundation has “certified” are really truly devoted to diversity now that they have abandoned any pretense of wanting to teach the majority of disadvantaged kids stuck in failing public schools.
There is no need to have charters for “diversity” and the people at The Century Foundation know this. The Century Foundation could be promoting honest efforts to diversify public schools. But charters are truly desperate for something to justify their existence now that people realize that the ugly methods they use to shed students demonstrates their false claims of wanting to teach all kids stuck in failing public schools.
So now the Century Foundation will pretend that there have never ever been diverse magnet schools ever in the history of public education, and charters have discovered a new and never before heard of idea — have a school that draws students from all over instead of having to teach all students in a given catchment area and make it diverse! The true brilliance of those charter advocates who came up with that never before heard of idea should be acknowledged! And I love their new “spin” on the idea — let a private entity profit from offering this magnet school and give that private CEO the bragging rights that come from saying “my magnet school is superior to the public school that has to teach every kid.”
Truly disgusting display that reminds me of the Republicans who listened to the impeaching hearing testimony. Just ignore all facts and say whatever you want to promote the people whose approval you are desperate for.
When Mark Berends of Notre Dame spoke in 2011 about the Impact of Charter Schools in Indiana he was described as the Director of the National Center FOR (my caps) School Choice. Has there been a name change to the awkward, National Center ON School Choice, as it is labeled currently? Where do the Center and Berends get their funding?
The “diversity by design” meme/theme is being propogated by the Fordham Institute and Bellwhether Partners, both charter supporters. In this respect the Century Foundation report (which I have not read) may well be just another example of coordinated messaging in an effort to salvage some respect for the charter industry, and to put critics on the defensive….You are against “diversity/” How dare you be so bigoted? See if you can follow the logic in this report.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/inextricable-links-among-school-choice-school-integration-and-school
There’s reason to believe that promotion of Catholic schools also reflects coordinated messaging. Bellwether’s clients include Catholic school systems. Reportedly, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met with Betsy.
The Catholic, political “action networks” don’t exist as benign intermediaries for “charities”. Data shows $134,000,000 in vouchers went to Indiana Catholic schools and $50,000,000 went to Ohio Catholic schools. One report showed there are parishes that receive more revenue from vouchers than from worshippers.
The politicized Knights of Columbus gave $500,000 to New Orleans Catholic schools after Katrina. New Orleans recently closed its last remaining public school.
Maybe charter shills can take a page from the Republican playbook and get Vladimir Putin to design their messaging – he’s very effective at hatching divisive disinformation to manipulate the aliterate.