Why the Walton Family Foundation, a K-12 Funding Leader, Is Focusing on Career Pathways

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K-12 education has long been a pillar of the Walton Family Foundation’s work, and given its vast wealth, it has the means to tackle this complex issue from a variety of angles. Over the last few years, the foundation has trained its focus in a new direction, supporting education programs that create job and career pathways for students after graduation and beyond. 

Other major funders are doing the same. The Annie E. Casey Foundation recently announced that it was investing in internships, apprenticeships and jobs programs for young people in the cities of Albuquerque, Atlanta and Baltimore. The Joyce Foundation includes college and career readiness in its education agenda, Carnegie’s education focus areas include its Pathways to Postsecondary Success; job and career pathways for K-12 and postsecondary students are a priority for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

In fact, interest in developing student job and career pathways has grown across the ed funding world in recent years, as Grantmakers for Education found in its 2018–2019 benchmarking overview: “…more than 2 out of 5 respondents (42%) provide funding for workforce and career readiness, an increase over the share recorded in the 2015–16 benchmarking study.” The report goes on: “Workforce and career readiness also ranked third among the factors or trends that respondents believe have the greatest potential for a positive impact on education over the next five years.” 

Walking off a post-graduation cliff

What’s behind that trend? Why are the Walton Family Foundation (WFF) and other major education funders increasing their focus on jobs and careers? For one thing, a large percentage of U.S. students are floundering after high school, and more of them are electing not to go to college. College enrollment has dropped sharply in recent years—by over 7.4 percent, or close to 1.3 million students, since 2020, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Stratospheric college costs and the prospect of enormous college debt drive many away. Others appear to be taking advantage of the post-COVID job market, but it is unclear how sustainable those jobs will be over the long term. 

Black, Latino and Indigenous students face the greatest challenges when it comes to getting into the workforce and earning a livable wage. According to a Center for American Progress (CAP) brief, “These students’ and workers’ rates of dropout, remediation, under- and unemployment eclipse those of their white counterparts — not to mention the ever-widening wealth gap between whites and communities of color.” 

CAP identifies three systemic gaps in education that many students face: “From early grades, students are not prepared across a wide range of skills; students are not exposed to a rich set of career preparation activities; and school accountability systems are not oriented around successful career and civic outcomes.”

Rural students also face significant employment challenges, according to Kim Alexander, who worked as a superintendent of a rural Texas school district. “As I became superintendent, our disadvantaged students would do really well in school — good grades and good test scores — but for many of those students, walking across that graduation stage was like walking off a cliff. The best part of their life was now behind them,” Alexander said in a WFF video. 

Building more opportunities for students to attain job skills and networking resources in high school (and even earlier) makes sense, and as the Hechinger Report pointed out recently, some businesses and state governments are doing just that. In a speech early this year, education secretary Miguel Cordona encouraged school leaders to create “stronger college and career pathways between our pre-K through grade 12 systems, our two- and four-year colleges and our workforce partners…”

WFF has supported a number of schools that included career pathways in their education models over the years, but as the foundation developed its most recent strategic plan, staff decided that this was an area it needed to address more comprehensively.

“As we created our new strategy, we confronted the sobering fact that, nationally, our K-12 system still tolerates a significant opportunity gap, which exacerbates downward mobility for too many children, rather than propelling them upwards,” a Walton spokesperson wrote in response to questions from IP. “To accelerate breakthroughs in student success, focused on the families most in need, we made the decision to evolve our north star — from educational success to life success, putting economic and social mobility at the center. This required us to think more deeply about the skills and experiences needed to navigate choice-filled lives. Building deeper connections across high school, higher education and workforce increases exposure to jobs, career paths and different opportunities earlier in life.”

WFF is backing a number of job- and career-focused education initiatives. One is Collegiate Edu-Nation (CEN), which was founded by Alexander, the former Texas school superintendent quoted above. CEN works with schools to provide career pathways for rural students, taking into account the needs of local communities. The organization was a winner of the Catalyze Challenge, a grant competition backed by multiple major philanthropies and “designed to improve young people’s career readiness and engagement with education.” WFF supports Catalyze Challenge; other funders include the Joyce Foundation, Arnold Ventures and the Charles Koch Foundation. 

The Catalyze Challenge is just one of the “career-connected learning” projects that WFF is supporting as part of a $20 million commitment it announced last year. The goal of that funding, according to the announcement, is “to increase the number of students experiencing quality, real-world learning opportunities connected to future work.” WFF plans to invest over $75 million in this focus area as part of Strategy 2025.

Charters and beyond

The Walton Family Foundation’s enormous size gives it a major footprint in the world of education philanthropy, so its priorities are worth keeping an eye on. Built on the Walmart fortune and overseen by members of the richest family in America, WFF is one of the largest ed funders in the country. According to Candid data, education is by far the foundation’s largest funding area: between 2016 and 2020, WFF’s education funding topped $1 billion. 

Over the years, WFF has been a leading champion of charter schools, a position that IP has followed over the years. The foundation isn’t backing away from charters. On its website, WFF points out that it has “invested more than $407 million to grow high-quality charter schools since 1997.” But Walton, like a number of other education funders, appears to be broadening its focus and exploring other ed funding areas. Job and career pathways are one of those areas.

A number of factors are causing this shift. Charter schools have long been controversial because they are perceived as anti-union and a way to funnel money away from traditional public schools. In addition, charter schools, despite the fanfare over the years, have proven to be something of a disappointment. Not only have there been numerous high-profile charter scandals, but the model has failed to scale as its advocates had once hoped. As of 2019, only 7% of students in the U.S. attend charter schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The charter versus traditional public school debate is more confusing than ever today because, like so many other issues, it has become distorted by the gravitational well of extreme partisan politics. When the concept of charter schools first came to prominence in the 1990s, it had bipartisan support from both the Clinton administration and many conservatives. Many leaders in both parties supported the concept of “school choice,” an umbrella term that included charters. Today, many Democrats, including the current president, don’t support the charter model (“I’m not a charter school fan,” Joe Biden said when he was campaigning for president) and the Biden administration proposed new charter rules that have triggered a backlash.

At the same time, some conservatives are using the term “school choice” to push for education vouchers (also called “education savings accounts”), which are being introduced in states around the country. Some education experts consider the vouchers — which let parents draw on public dollars to send their kids to private schools — a right-wing effort to undermine public education.

When we asked a Walton spokesperson about the foundation’s position on education vouchers, they didn’t respond directly but provided this statement: “Spurred by the pandemic, millions of parents chose new learning options for their children. As many as 1.2 million students left the public school system between 2020 and 2022. Many now attend private or parochial schools, or are home-schooled. But Bellwether Education Partners estimates that 600,000 children, 30% of them kindergartners, didn’t enroll in any form of school in the 2020–2021 year. The more resources, information and access families have, the more children can learn in environments that meet their unique needs and help them fulfill their full potential.” Still, it’s interesting to note that WFF has funded the work of education expert Joshua Cowen, who recently wrote a powerful critique of vouchers for the Hechinger Report.

Given the controversy and confusion, many ed funders today seem to be avoiding the charter versus traditional public school issue altogether. Bruno Manno, senior advisor emeritus for the K-12 education program at WFF, says it’s not a matter of “either-or,” but of “both-and.” According to Manno, the foundation continues to support charter schools, but not exclusively. “Historically, the position at the foundation has been support for good schools, across all sectors,” he said. “That ended up, over some period of time, being a predominant focus on charter schools, but not just charter schools — we support good district schools, too. So there has been a certain agnosticism about governance.” Manno said that he thinks many other ed funders share this agnosticism.

Not your traditional vocational ed

For Manno, who has helped lead WFF’s more recent focus on job and career pathways, this both/and approach fits into a framework he calls “opportunity pluralism.” That is, the idea that just as there are many good schools, both charter and traditional, there are multiple avenues to student success. For some kids, that will be a degree at a four-year college; for others, it will be a certificate program that qualifies them for a job right out of high school, or some combination of college and job training.

“While not abandoning the degree pathway, the new opportunity action plan creates more specialized, skills-based pathways and credentials linked with employers and labor market demand,” Manno has written. “It exemplifies opportunity pluralism, or making the nation’s opportunity infrastructure more pluralistic by offering many pathways to success.”

Manno emphasizes that he isn’t talking about traditional vocational education. “Just to make sure we’re clear on this, this is not the vocational education going back 20 or 30 years that so many people are rightfully revolted by,” he said. “In those days, kids were tracked based on their socioeconomic status, race and all that stuff. That’s not what we’re talking about at all. We’re talking about providing kids a core set of knowledge and skills. Some kids may go one direction, some may go another, with high standards for everyone — not the soft bigotry of low expectations for certain students.”

Opportunity pluralism

Manno is quick to say that he didn’t invent the term “opportunity pluralism” — author Joseph Fishkin seems to have first used it in his book, “Bottlenecks.” But Manno employs the term throughout his recent book, “The Opportunity to Rise,” which details examples of innovative career pathway programs. 

Manno is hopeful that opportunity pluralism will not only create more opportunities for young people, but could bridge some of the sharp divisions in the U.S. He points out, for example, that leaders in both red and blue states are working to create and strengthen career pathway programs in schools. “If we can build a new opportunity framework for K-12 education, it won’t just make for stronger schools,” Manno writes. “It will advance a more equal and just society and a more robust and adaptable economy. Ultimately, it could even help restore our frayed and fractured society as the ‘exhausted majority’ unites in spite of the noisy extremes to produce these great, tangible goods.”

If this seems like a quixotic vision, the Center for American Progress also suggests that providing access to better jobs can boost civic engagement. CAP defines good jobs as “… the kind of jobs that afford economic security and participation in civic life as opposed to occupations that require few skills, pay low wages, or are vulnerable to outsourcing.” It cites research showing that workers in good jobs are “… more engaged as citizens and are better able to influence the laws and policies that affect their lives.”

Manno and CAP are right that civic disengagement — as well as the political tensions simmering across the country — are caused, at least in part, by inequities in opportunity. Making more and better jobs available to more students will address these inequities, but doing so will also require a more robust and empowered labor movement — an area that could always use more philanthropic support. It’s not clear if labor empowerment is a cause WFF will be willing to back along with career pathways (particularly given its connection to a certain retail giant), but it’s another case in which philanthropy’s approach shouldn’t be a matter of either-or, but rather of both-and.