Chapter 6: Ford Foundation’S Efforts To Achieve Educational Equity: Measurable Reform or Quixotic Tilting?

This chapter describes the Ford Foundation (Ford)’s education reform activities, which were designed to decrease the funding differences between high-income and low-income communities. Specifically, the chapter describes Ford’s long-term, and successful, strategy to use litigation and public engagement to address inequities in K-12 education funding through initiating and advocating changes to state fiscal policies. It addresses two related research questions. First, is there evidence that state policymakers, advocates and grantmakers have improved educational funding equity in the United States? Second, if there is such evidence, what duration can these improvements be expected to have?

From 1966 to 1980, Ford showed that school finance equity could be measurably improved through strategic grantmaking. At that time, Ford was led by McGeorge Bundy, former National Security Advisor under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, all of whom had aggressive civil rights agendas. Under Bundy, Ford focused its grantmaking on school finance equalization by encouraging states to reduce interdistrict school spending disparities and intervening in some hard-fought school finance equity battles (Bott, 2012). Because of Ford grants and reform efforts, certain key school finance metrics improved between 1969-70 and 1979-80. Shifting the school finance burden from local property taxes to broader based, higher state taxes was one strategy of early reformers, and with Ford grants, they ultimately persuaded many legislatures to enact such shifts.