Progressive Policy Institute

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to policy innovation and the modernization of progressive politics. Founded in 1989, PPI subsequently was dubbed “Bill Clinton's idea mill,” and many of its signature proposals (e.g., national service, public charter schools, community policing, and a work-centered approach to welfare) have been enacted into law.

Over the years, PPI's approach to education reform has revolved around a simple organizing principle: In public education, the interests of the children must take precedence over those of adults. Accordingly, PPI has earned a reputation as a rare progressive think tank willing to challenge the education establishment.

In 1990, the Institute published a pathbreaking report by Ted Kolderie on Minnesota's school-choice experiment. This report made the case for what later would become known as public charter schools. Even before the nation's first charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, opened its doors, PPI was defining and refining the concept for progressive lawmakers. President Clinton embraced the concept and created the first national program to seed the development of charters around the country. Since then, PPI has produced a substantial body of work on the theory and practice of public charter schools. This includes a series of reports on leading state experiments with charters, as well as assessments of the factors that make independent charter school authorizers effective.

In 2006, Paul Hill of the University of Washington—a longtime collaborator with PPI on education reform—authored an important paper calling for the abandonment of the traditional “command-and-control” system of public school governance, and for the embrace of a new organizational model Hill called “portfolio management,” in which “school boards would manage a diverse array of schools, some run by the school district and others by independent organizations, each designed to meet the different needs of students.”

PPI is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, and its education prescriptions tend to fit the orthodoxies of neither Democrats nor Republicans. Broadly speaking, PPI has tended to favor expanded investments in education at all levels, and to favor an active role for the government (including the federal government) in improving educational outcomes for students at all age levels and from all economic strata.

PPI has consistently urged progressives to take up the cause of educational accountability as passionately as they support education spending. Andrew Rotherham's 1999 PPI paper on the need for reforming the federal role in education, Toward Performance-Based Federal Education Funding, provided the intellectual framework for a Democratic “Three R's” education-reform bill in Congress, from which President George W. Bush borrowed key elements for his No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation.

Although NCLB has been heavily criticized by policymakers, PPI believes it is essential not to abandon two key principles embedded in the law: first, that districts be required to measure the education performance of all kids, so that schools can be held accountable; and second, that the federal government should withhold funding from school systems that chronically fail to educate children.

PPI has helped generate some of the leading young thinkers on education reform policy, including Eduwonk blog-founder Andrew J. Rotherham and policy-expert Sara Mead.

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