Dallas City Wire

A parent advocate is suspicious of a community journalism partnership at the Dallas Morning News in which benefactors are footing the bill to train education reporters. 

The project, investing $210,000 annually over 24 months, will be paid for by different universities, foundations and families, including the Meadows Foundation, SMU, the Dallas Foundation, the Todd A. Williams Family Foundation, Communities Foundation of Texas and the Beck Group, according to media reports.

“The overarching issue that we've seen in Dallas is privatization and funders who are listed, especially the Todd A. Williams Family Foundation, have been behind most of the privatization agendas in Dallas through charter schools, which move them to a privatized model,” said Lynn Davenport, a parent advocate and member of Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, a group that actively defends the rights of parents and students to protect their personal data. 

In fact, there’s a charter school named after Todd Williams called Uplift Williams Preparatory near Love Field in Dallas and proponents of public education who support charter schools are concerning, Davenport told the Dallas City Wire, because although they accept public funds, charter schools don't have democratically and locally elected boards. 

“They remove the taxpayer's voice,” she said. “Their meetings are supposed to be public but they're very difficult to access. It's easier to access open meetings through public schools than it is charter schools.”

Davenport isn’t the only skeptic. In a Twitter tweet about the newly announced Morning News’ community-funded partnership, New York Times reporter Matthew Haag said he covered Dallas schools for five years.

“These groups and their allies, especially Todd Williams, tried behind the scenes to derail our tough reporting, including trying to get me fired. Looks like they found another route to influence the coverage,” Haag posted June 20.

Dubbed the Education Lab, Davenport says reporters enrolled will likely be indoctrinated with a limited view of schooling that will include reforms, such as year-round classes, merit pay tying teacher salaries to test scores, standardized testing, full-time e-learning or distance learning and wrap-around services, including health care, meals and mental health counseling, that replace the academic institution schools are intended to be. 

“These reforms will collapse the public school system, which will divert funds so that federal money will follow the child instead of school buildings,” Davenport said in an interview. “It’s a neo-liberal agenda and a neo-liberal agenda basically aims to decrease public funding in order to increase the private sector by diverting funds.”

Another one of the foundations involved in the community-journalism partnership, which concerns Davenport is the Communities Foundation of Texas, which is entwined with Educate Texas of Communities Foundation of Texas, according to their website.

“They're funded by Bill Gates’ foundation and the Gates Foundation has had a huge influence on Texas education,” she said. “He controls education through grants and dangling the money carrot. Everybody grabs for it, which then forces them to comply with whatever he wants them to do.”

Ideally, Morning News coverage of schooling will be balanced with input from teacher and parent voices but Davenport says people on the front lines of education are often silenced.

“They stick these young people on the education beat who don’t have children in the school system and many are members of the Education Writers Association [EWA], which is also funded by Bill Gates,” she said. “So it's difficult to get journalists who not only understand the day-to-day but also are objective and not influenced by benefactors.”