A force for good

THE STORY was deep inside the news section of Saturday’s paper. We noticed the headline and the New York Times byline, and steeled ourselves for the usual hatchet job on the Waltons and maybe Wal-Mart, too. (“Walton hand in reshaping schools extends across U.S.”-Arkansas Democrat Gazette, P. 9A, April 26, 2014.) Boy, were we disappointed. Or rather surprised and elated.

For here was a fairly objective, and quite comprehensive, round-up of the many ways the Walton Family Foundation is giving the underdogs of American education a chance at a decent education and the American dream-kids now held captive in failing public school systems in big cities and rural counties all across the country.

Thank you, New York Times. You’ve noticed one of the biggest stories and most encouraging developments in American education in years, a revolutionary development capable of reshaping the whole system for much the better. And how the Waltons are promoting, financing, and expanding it.

The signs of a promising breakthrough in American education are everywhere-like the explosion of charter schools all across the country, a whole department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, and the presence of some of the highest-achieving graduates at our most prestigious colleges and universities as teachers in some of the nation’s poorest school systems. Whether out in hardscrabble rural America or in one of the blighted neighborhoods of our big cities. Those welcome new teachers are being provided courtesy of Teach for America, which has been a boon for schools that really needed them.

Talk about the least of these, the Walton Family Foundation has set its sights on helping those who need our attention the most-and not just our attention but our active involvement. It was George W. Bush who called education the civil-rights issue of our time, and the Walton Family Foundation has been a leader in the fight to free kids from the iron grip of stultified ghetto schools.

In too much of America, public education has been turned into little more than a job factory run by the teachers’ unions and the school boards they control. For an example to beware, see Little Rock, Ark., which is still struggling to break the chains forged by the kind of “leadership” that doesn’t provide education so much as job security for those who have an in with the system.

SAM WALTON, the legendary patriarch of this Arkansas dynasty, would surely approve of his family’s dedication to the least of these, for he built an immensely successful business empire on the simple principle of offering families of modest means the most for their money. His family foundation is now doing much the same for American school systems and the kids who ought to be its focus. Motoko Rich, the reporter for the Times, went down the list of the Waltons’ investments in American education. And the success stories they’ve produced.

For example, DC Prep in the nation’s capital with its 1,200 students in four charter schools that go from pre-school through the eighth grade. Most of those are poor and black, and their test scores consistently rank among the highest in Washington, refuting the much too widespread belief that a kid’s class or race limits what he can hope to achieve educationally. Call it socio-economic determinism, and charter schools like those run by DC Prep disprove that theory/assumption every day. And remind all of us that this is still America, where dreams are unlimited.

DC Prep has received more than a million dollars in direct grants from the Walton Family Foundation, and a lot of other help besides. That investment is paying off daily. (A third of its teachers come out of Teach for America, and it shows.) The success of DC Prep is being matched by charters across the country, which is another testament to the more than a billion dollars in grants that the Waltons’ educational foundation has made to innovative programs across the country.

The Walton Family Foundation has provided hope, and a record of hopes fulfilled, unmatched since the efforts of Andrew Carnegie, the namesake of Carnegie libraries across the country, and Julius Rosenwald, the Sears Roebuck magnate who lent his name to Rosenwald elementary schools in rural communities across the South, where they did their best to offset the pernicious effect of Jim Crow educational systems that shortchanged generations of black kids.

NOW ANOTHER social revolution is taking place, and you can be sure the forces of the status ever quo are doing what they can to derail it, this time not with police dogs, water hoses and seg academies but with specious arguments about how charter schools are depriving traditional public schools of tax dollars and the most motivated students.

Yes, we’re supposed to believe that the competition charter schools offer the usual kind will not raise educational standards in general-even though that’s the way competition works in every other field of human endeavor. And that justice is served by keeping these promising kids and the families who want only the best for them locked into failing schools.

But any line will do when the object is to rationalize a policy that promotes not the kids’ best interest but a self-serving establishment dedicated to keeping public education mediocre. Like the stand patters in the overstaffed educational bureaucracy and the kind of teachers, their union dues paid in full, who are just sleepwalking their way to retirement, secure in the knowledge that the system makes it almost impossible to get rid of them, no matter how many generations of students they may ruin.

The moral of this story: Education is too important to be left to the educators.

ALL OF WHICH brings us to another good cause the Walton Family Foundation supports: Students First, the outfit headed by Michelle Rhee, who used to be chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., till she offended all the deadwood in the system. She had to go because she tried to promote and demote teachers on the basis of how good or how bad a job they were doing-instead of how long they’d been on the public payroll, and how much clout they had with the schools’ administration.

And now Michelle Rhee is out to reform not just one city’s educational system but the country’s. And the same way: by stressing quality and innovation in American education instead of relying on the same old excuses. (“But that’s how we’ve always done things around here. It’s policy.”)

This is not to say that charter schools are some kind of panacea for all that ails American education. They can fail, too.Though the great advantage of charter schools is that, when they do, they can be shut down for not meeting the objectives spelled out in their charters.

Sure enough, a couple of years ago the Walton Family Foundation announced a $5.2-million grant to the National School Authorizers Association to be used specifically to push regulators on both the state and local levels to close hundreds of charter schools whose performance didn’t match their promises. If only all school systems were as tough on their incompetents.

To quote the Walton foundation’s Marc Sternberg, its aim isn’t to make ideological points but to achieve practical results, like better performance and more opportunity for the next generation. If only the same could be said for all of American education.