This Coalition of Funders Aims to Cool the Culture War Flames and Protect Public Schools
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Public School Strong Members in North Carolina. photo courtesy of public school strong.
The Education Future Fund recently went public with a new website and an official name, but the funders driving the coalition have been working together for some time. The seven philanthropies teamed up as education culture wars erupted in school districts across the country during and in the wake of the pandemic. The conflicts were ignited by mask mandates and school closures, but morphed and spread as conservative groups hammered educators, administrators, school librarians and school boards about how history is taught, the books on library shelves and the rights of transgender students, among other issues.
The Education Future Fund’s landing page charts the impact by the numbers: 1,557 books have been banned in U.S. schools — a 33% increase in book bans since 2021 — and 392 educational gag orders have been introduced in state legislatures since January 2021. The fund’s aim is to counter these measures by supporting efforts to protect public schools.
Collaborating funders include William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Lozier Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Spencer Foundation and Pivotal Ventures. It’s an interesting and varied line up: Kellogg, for example, was established almost 100 years ago and has kept a singular focus on the wellbeing of young children. Hewlett, Raikes and Schusterman are committed K-12 funders that support an array of other program priorities as well. Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures aims to accelerate social progress in the U.S.; it recently supported several initiatives to promote teen mental health.
Lower-profile funders include the Nebraska-based Lozier Foundation, which was started by manufacturer Allen Lozier and includes education among its program areas, along with social services and the wellbeing of women and children. The Spencer Foundation was created by Lyle Spencer, who founded Science Research Associates, an educational publishing firm; it is the only national foundation focused exclusively on supporting education research.
Some of these philanthropies, including Hewlett, Raikes and Schusterman, have been public about their involvement in the group, which previously called itself Education Forward, while others have preferred to stay in the background until recently.
On its new site, the coalition declares that “public education is the cornerstone of an inclusive, strong democracy,” while calling out “politicized attacks on inclusive education.” It’s backed policy work, state-by-state activism at the school board level, and advocacy and education around school boards and school board elections to increase public awareness of this hyperlocal, often overlooked sector of government. The Education Future Fund has granted $14 million in pooled funds to date, and this year, intends to raise $10 million for pooled fund grants and spur $20 million in aligned funding. Funding partners support the work at various levels.
Zoe Stemm-Calderon, senior director of youth-serving systems at the Raikes Foundation, said the group began having discussions in the winter of 2021 and made its first round of grants in the spring of 2022. “We launched in 2022 and have been public since that time, but we haven't had a web presence because we've been focused on the work and people knew how to reach us,” she said.
Why adopt a higher profile now? “More people want to get involved because these attacks are contrary to what the majority of parents and communities want for our education system,” Stemm-Calderon said. “Our partners are making progress and we want to be as accessible as possible for anyone else who wants to contribute.”
When IP wrote about the role of philanthropy in these education battles last spring, the culture warriors appeared to be in ascendance, as countless news reports featured headlines about strict curriculum restrictions, school board clashes and the mounting list of books and authors banned in school districts across the country. A year later, a growing number of students, parents, educators, school board representatives and community members appear to be resisting these attacks — with some success.
In fact, this resistance has been going on for some time, but has received less attention and news coverage than the attacks themselves. In any case, it seems to be making a difference. In Idaho, for example, parents and local leaders repelled a conservative take over of the school board, as Vanity Fair reported in December. Moms for Liberty, one of the primary on-the-ground groups championing the conservative education agenda, appears to be on the defensive after a series of missteps, and school board candidates affiliated with the group fared badly in elections last fall.
It’s impossible to gauge whether or how much the Education Future Fund and the groups it supports have influenced the current climate, but Stemm-Calderon believes that many communities don’t want what those fueling the attacks have to offer.
“Polling shows that 92% of parents oppose book bans and 78% of folks are less likely to support candidates who stand for restrictions on curriculum,” she said. “I think in the beginning, people may not have understood what the implications were going to be, what the impact was of these laws and these actions. But once most Americans see these efforts to ban books, or limit who can learn about heroes in our history, particularly Black Americans in our history, we've really seen a rejection of these kinds of approaches and policies.”
HEAL Together
John H. Jackson, the president and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, also believes that efforts to raise awareness about threats to public education are having an impact. Schott has been at the forefront of the resistance to conservative attacks through HEAL Together, which the foundation launched with partners NYU’s Metro Center and Race Forward. HEAL Together has supported grassroots groups in 19 states. Schott plays an intermediary and grantmaking role; NYU Metro Center provides research, tools and training; and Race Forward provides organizing infrastructure for the partnership. The Education Future Fund has been a consistent supporter of HEAL Together’s work.
“We haven’t been sitting on our hands,” Jackson said. “This happened because there were investments, many organizations and activists and racial justice organizations were pushing back in school districts and engaging voters around elections. Moms for Liberty lost a lot of traction in the last election cycle, but they aren’t going to stop. Still, we are confident that if we have the infrastructure to elevate the truth and to engage a large base of voters, they will see the same level of defeat that they saw in the last election. There's another election coming up that is just as critical as the last one.”
North Carolina is one of the states where HEAL Together has focused its efforts. Its state affiliate, HEAL Together North Carolina, launched Public School Strong, a campaign that has trained activists throughout the state. The activists, which include students, parents, teachers and community members, attend school board meetings to advocate for “honest, accurate, equitable, safe and fully funded public education,” according to the website.
The Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED), based in Charlotte, North Carolina, is part of the HEAL Together North Carolina coalition. James E. Ford, a former educator who founded and now heads the organization, agreed with Stemm-Calderon and Jackson that the work they’re doing is having an impact.
“I think that we're beginning to gain some traction,” he said. “When Public School Strong folks who are part of these local chapters show up in their T-shirts, and when they speak up and are visible at school board meetings, we know that it matters. And we know from our own polling of voters in North Carolina that the voting population is more aligned with our perspective than they are with these far-right extremist groups. They have just been louder. So it’s important to speak up, even if our voices are sometimes shaking as we do it.”
Stoking the pipeline
The mission of the Pipeline Fund, another Education Future Fund grantee, is to help ensure the nation’s political representatives look more like the people they represent. The fund’s website highlights the scope of the challenge: less than 3% of seats in state legislatures and less than 2% in Congress are held by working-class people, even though working-class jobs make up over half of of the country’s labor force. In another example, while people of color comprise 39% of the population, they represent only 11% of elected officials.
The Education Future Fund supports the Pipeline Fund’s 501(c)(3) work specifically through the organization’s Pipeline Education Fund, which launched School Board Spotlight. That project provides information on school boards and elections, and identifies school boards “with records of putting politics above students’ needs” by imposing book bans, limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ students, opposing so-called Critical Race Theory, and other actions.
The Pipeline Fund also has a 501(c)(4) that identifies potential candidates for state and local offices, including local school boards. The fund is a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund. (See IP’s report on Arabella Advisors, which supports the work of the Sixteen Thirty Fund.)
“Increasingly over the last couple of years, as school boards have become kind of ground zero for some of these culture wars, we have been focusing on school board elections,” said Denise Feriozzi, the Pipeline Fund’s cofounder and executive director. “We’ve been doing school board advocacy as well and making sure that we're supporting school board members who are really trying to focus on their students.”
Feriozzi said that the Pipeline Initiative works by providing a convening space for groups around the country that offer leadership development so they can network and share best practices. The fund also compiles data and information on state and local offices and elections, which it shares with its partners.
“One of the biggest challenges that the field has had — and I think this is particularly relevant to school boards — is just the sheer number of offices in the country,” she explained. In the U.S., there are close to 100,000 public schools and 14,000 school districts; with close to 95,000 school board members. “And they're all different,” Feriozzi said. “They're different sizes, they vote on different days — there's no consistency. So we compile all that data and we provide it in an organized and easy-to-use way for partners so they can understand who represents them. We also put a priority on understanding the demographic information of elected officials so we can see when folks are out of step with their communities from a demographic perspective.”
Like others I spoke to for this article, Feriozzi was cautiously optimistic. She pointed to what she called a “sea change” over the last year or so. “The dynamics are really different depending on the area, but candidates we work with won about 45% of our school board races in 2022, and in 2023, it was more like 70%. We also started to see conservative school board candidates in some of these campaigns wiping references to book bans and Moms for Liberty off their websites mid-election.”
The Education Future Fund also provides support for School Board Partners, a national nonprofit that “trains, supports, connects and re-elects diverse school board members across the country to lead with courage, competence and impact,” according to its mission statement. The organization conducts research and develops and distributes policy toolkits; its fellowship program offers personalized coaching and mentorship to school board members. Ethan Ashley, who cofounded and is now co-CEO of School Board Partners, serves on the board of NOLA Public Schools.
No adult left behind
It’s too early to say if the culture wars are peaking, or may even be on the decline. In any case, conservatives have clearly achieved some of their short-term goals. Education Week has been tracking related legislation around the country, and found that since 2021, “44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism.” Eighteen states have implemented these bans and restrictions either through legislation or in other ways.
In fact, journalist Jennifer Berkshire and education professor Jack Schneider, authors of “The Education Wars: A Citizens Guide and Defense Manual,” say that groups like Moms for Liberty aren’t going anywhere, noting that they are part of a longstanding conservative campaign to privatize public schools. As they wrote recently in The Nation, “The more bitterness and resentment in and around the public schools that groups like Moms for Liberty can generate, the easier it will be to privatize education.”
Ohio State University political scientist Vladimir Kogan makes the case that these conflicts reflect the political priorities of adults — at the expense of the students the education system is intended to serve. He points out that the education culture wars have been going on throughout U.S. history, including conflicts over the teaching of evolution in the 1920s. Kogan looked at data from 500 school districts that had culture war conflicts between 2010 and 2018 and found a statistically significant decline in math scores in schools that had such conflicts compared to schools that did not.
“Too much attention, time and money is being devoted on political battles that rile up adults,” Kogan wrote in the draft of his forthcoming book “No Adult Left Behind.” “School children pay the price in the form of a worse education.”
In an increasingly polarized political atmosphere and with a presidential election on the horizon, we’re likely to see debates over the direction of education continue to flare. The coalition of funders backing the Education Future Fund don’t think it’s an option for philanthropy to stay on the sidelines. As their website puts it, “The future of public education and those it serves is at stake. Please consider joining us.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to clarify that the Education Future Fund only supports activities that are 501(c)3 permissible and for charitable and/or educational purposes.
It has also been updated to clarify the fact that Arabella Advisors supports the work of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, but does not oversee it.
