Research Funders and Framing Economic Opportunity: Conflicts of Interest

• In Event: Methodological Innovations in Comparative Research on Labor

Abstract

The influence of research funders has been the subject of extensive debate in the natural sciences and medicine in recent decades. A voluminous body of work on this subject has shaped policies such as the federal government’s Open Payments database in which citizens can search the financial relationships of their medical providers. Yet the influence of research funders has not been adequately considered in social science generally and education policy research specifically.
I argue that scholars of education have not addressed critical questions regarding sources of funding is because the larger agenda of the education reform movement appears apolitical. The overarching policy goal of all major funders – foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals -- centers on increasing post-high school educational attainment, which, according to conventional wisdom, is unimpeachable.

Yet since its inception in the 1980s, the modern education reform movement has been built on the political foundation of human capital theory. Human capital theory has origins in mid-twentieth century economic opposition to the New Deal, and posits that income levels are, and implicitly should be, a function of formal education and training. In turn, human capital theory has been an essential component of neoliberalism, the political economy set in motion during the late 1970s and early 80s premised on the purported supremacy of the unfettered free market, including the offshoring of jobs, total opposition to organized labor, privatization of public services, perpetual austerity, the increasing monopolization of major economic sectors, as well as reflexive hostility to taxation and regulation.

Yet foundations, corporations, and the wealthy have a huge interest in keeping the discussion of economic opportunity focused on education and away from the policies and practices of neoliberalism that have allowed a small percentage of the population to prosper while the wages and wealth of a significant majority have stagnated. As a result, education reformers have firmly established the mainstream farming of economic opportunity by focusing exclusively on education as the sole solution to growing inequality and stagnant wages to the exclusion of the commonly accepted neoliberal policies and practices cited above. As a monumental deflection away from the political economy, I argue that this framing of economic opportunity represents a significant conflict of interest for the major funders of the education reform movement as well as of education policy researchers.

The paper includes case studies examining some of the most influential institutions and reports of the education reform movement, including an interrogation of key data and empirical claims. Case studies include two projects funded by the Reagan administration -- the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia’s Teacher’s College and the Hudson Institute’s 1987 report, Workforce 2000 – as well as the Center on Education and the Workforce, founded in 2008 at Georgetown University and initially funded by the Ford, Lumina, and Gates Foundations.

Author

• Neil Kraus, University of Wisconsin, River Falls