How We Deal

Eduwonkette’s recent post on linkages between leading education think tanks poses a couple of important questions: Do the leading education policy shops amount to “multiple organizational outposts” for a small and insular group of thought leaders? And can think tanks claim to be independent evaluators when they share board members and funders?

Since Eduwonkette included Education Sector in her post and accompanying chart, it’s worth discussing how we deal with the issues that she raises.

To start with, we eschew government money and we don't do fee-for-service work. We are funded not by one or two foundations but by many different ones. We list them on our web site and we name them in individual reports if they fund that work specifically, though a substantial percentage of our funding is general-operating support rather than project-specific grants. Our contractual agreements with foundations give us editorial control over the work we produce. We’ve found that what our funders value most is good work—thoughtful analysis, clear writing, and an ability to advance our ideas effectively.

To further promote transparency, our web site includes biographies of all of our team members, directors, research advisory board members and non-resident senior fellows. In each instance, our goal is to draw on the expertise of smart people with differing backgrounds and perspectives. The fact that some of these people are also affiliated with other organizations means only that others recognize their talents as well.

What drives our work at Education Sector is a set of core principles about the purposes of education and the nature of educational reform. We posted them on our web site early in our history under the heading What We Believe. These principles undergird all of our research, analysis and commentary and they make it easy to tell where we’re coming from on policy questions. Agree with them or not, you know what they are.

We also have a Transparency Policy that governs potential conflicts of interest. Every Education Sector employee has sign the document anew every year. And we are developing for our web site documents that describe our “theory of action”—our sense of how to improve American education and how we as an organization propose to promote those improvements happen—in the policy areas where Education Sector does the bulk of its work.

In often makes sense in the course of doing our work to collaborate with other organizations. Such networking sharpens our thinking and helps us have impact. It’s what every good think tank and policy organization does in every field. Conversely, Education Sector does not as an institution sign policy manifestos or other multi-organization documents. Nor do we take institutional positions in policy debates, in contrast to membership and advocacy organizations, which frequently do. Each of us shares Education Sector’s organizing principles, but we often have very different takes on issues. It keeps us sharp.