Exceptional Proff 530f

Making Public Policy: The New Philanthropists and American Education

By ROBIN ROGERS*

ABSTRACT. Power in K–12 education is rapidly moving from local

school boards and government to extraordinarily wealthy private

philanthropists. Building networks among nonprofits, government

agencies, school districts, and others, private foundations such as the

Gates, Broad, and Walton family foundations are fundamentally

restructuring American K–12 education. The Common Core State

Standards, teacher evaluation, and charter schools are a few of the

initiatives these funders are backing. The massive influx of private

money into education policy and its influence over public education

raises questions around the proper role of philanthropy in a

democracy. In a society with increasing wealth inequality, should the

economic elite be able to gain further power to shape social institutions

through giving? Are there or should there be any limits to this power?

Examining specific trends and events in education philanthropy over

the last 10 years, this article identifies key players in philanthropic

education reform and argues that philanthropy in education is now

playing a policy-making role—without checks and balances—that is

qualitatively and quantitatively different than before. I conclude with a

cautionary note on the dangers of letting education policy become the

domain of the economic elite.

[A] foundation . . . is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to

nobody. It competes neither in capital markets nor in product markets . . .

and, unlike a hereditary monarch whom such a foundation otherwise

resembles, it is subject to no political controls either.

Judge Richard Posner (Reich 2013)

*Robin Rogers is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College, the City

University of New York. She is the author of The Welfare Experiments and writes on

policy, politics, and philanthropy.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 74, No. 4 (September, 2015).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12113 VC 2015 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Our foundation went through a strategic planning process to assess

where we could have the greatest impact on our nation’s public school

system in the future.

Broad Foundation Website (2015)

Gates’s speech [to the Governor’s Association], in February 2005, was a

signature moment in what has become a decade-long campaign to

improve test scores and graduation rates, waged by a loose alliance of

wealthy CEOs who arrived with no particular background in education

policy—a fact that has led critics to dismiss them as “the billionaire boys’

club.”

Newsweek (Beamish 2011)

Introduction

Billionaire Eli Broad (2012: 142), borrowing a phrase from Winston

Churchill, is fond of saying: “Never let a crisis go to waste. They are

opportunities to do big things” (Broad 2012b). Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the

Walton family, and other very wealthy philanthropists are doing big

things in American education through philanthropy. They are disman-

tling and rebuilding the system in the United States wholesale because,

Broad claims, the “data show the greatest positive outcomes for stu-

dents happen when entire school systems are either redesigned or

started anew” (Broad 2012a: 143).

But is it true? Are philanthropists really working with data that show

them unequivocally how to reform education? Perhaps more impor-

tantly, even if philanthropists are working with such data—and the evi-

dence is clear that they are not—do we want mega-philanthropists,

with their near total lack of transparency and accountability, making

education policy nationwide? Is policymaking an appropriate role for

philanthropists?

Wealthy philanthropists are coordinating networks among think

tanks, nonprofit organizations, federal agencies, and school administra-

tors on fundamental issues including Common Core State Standards,

teacher evaluations, and charter schools. Their reform agenda is taking

root with amazing speed. A Gates Foundation official explained, in an

interview with education policy researchers Sarah Reckhow and Megan

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology744

Tompkins-Stange (2015), that “anybody who cares to look would find

very quickly that all of these organizations [are] suddenly singing from

the same hymnbook.” Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange’s (2015) review

of congressional hearing records supports this official’s assertion. They

found that in 2003, 15 percent of experts testifying before Congress had

received funding from the Gates or Broad foundations. By 2011, it was

60 percent.

Funding from a few major foundations—primarily the Bill & Melinda

Gates Foundation, but also the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the

Walton Family Foundation, the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, and

the Dell Foundation—is now ubiquitous.

Gates-backed think tanks turn out media fact sheets and newspa-

per opinion pieces. Magazines and scientific journals get Gates

money to publish research and articles. Experts coached in Gates-

funded programs write columns that appear in media outlets from

the New York Times to the Huffington Post, while digital portals blur

the line between journalism and spin. Over the past decade, Gates

has devoted $1 billion to these programs, which now account for

about a tenth of the giant philanthropy’s $3 billion-a-year spending

(Doughton and Heim 2011).

Even media coverage of education issues on programs often

praised for their independence, such as PBS’s NewsHour and

NPR’s Marketplace, is often underwritten by the Gates Foundation.

The Seattle Times queried: “How can reporting be unbiased when

a major player holds the purse strings?” (Doughton and Heim

2011).

How, for that matter, can research or other media sources? Research

and media are supported and vetted for their alignment with core foun-

dation ideas. Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange (2015) quote a Gates

foundation official:

It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.

Making Public Policy 745

In 2009, the Gates foundation spent $2 million on a media campaign

supporting the blockbuster documentary Waiting for Superman.

Valarie Strauss (2011) of the Washington Post was among the journalists

who took the film to task for excessively glorifying charter schools and

demonizing the current school system.

Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they cannot be, by their very design. He unfairly demon- ized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teach- ers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim com- pared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.

Perhaps more critically, the film glossed over the findings—available

and widely known by then—that more charter schools underperformed

traditional public schools than outperformed them (Ravitch 2010).

Research released later, in 2013, showed charter school students out-

performing their public school counterparts by eight days in reading

and doing comparably in math (CREO 2013). While the debate is hardly

closed now, at the time the best evidence was slightly weighted against

charter schools in favor of traditional schools. But if you have ever seen

Waiting for Superman, you’d never know it.

There is, at the very least, a narrowing of voices in education reform.

That pattern began around 2000 and has accelerated since 2005, as a

result of big donor philanthropy. That is troubling.

What Could Be Bad About Doing Good?

What could be wrong with the rich giving billions of dollars to philan-

thropy? Wealthy philanthropists have done great things with their

money. Andrew Carnegie built libraries. John D. Rockefeller, Sr. built

universities. Other philanthropists have filled museums with art from

their collections. But might there be undesirable, perhaps unintended,

consequences to the wealthy giving so much? Is it possible that

increased giving by mega-philanthropists may further stratify American

society by class and amplify the perspectives of the extreme economic

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology746

elite in public discourse? Could philanthropy, especially the hands-on,

results-oriented philanthropy popular with today’s big donors, crowd

out other voices and perspectives in areas on which they focus, such as

education?

If we think that the very wealthy have social goals similar to the rest

of society, it might not matter where donated money comes from, as

long as it shows up in the right places. But do they? Page et al. (2013)

suggest that they do not. They found that 58 percent of the top 1 per-

cent favor cuts in education. A majority of Americans are against these

cuts. When the researchers asked if the government should spend what

is necessary to ensure that all children have good public schools, only

35 percent of the very wealthy agree, compared to 87 percent of the

general public. If the public cedes education to the wealthy, they may

find an outcome that is very different from the one imagined.

But haven’t philanthropies always been involved in higher educa-

tion? Yes and no. Yes, there has always been some involvement but,

no, not to the extent that we are seeing today. What Bill Gates and, to a

lesser extent other new philanthropists, are doing is different from what

other foundations have done in the past. Quoting Tim Ogden, Editor-

in-Chief of Philanthropy Action, Preston (2011) noted:

While other philanthropies are trying to help get the ball across the goal

line on issues they care about, . . . Gates is “creating the ball, building the

team, hiring the referees,” and “funding the instant replay.”

There has not been a generation of hands-on, self-made donors of

this magnitude in over 100 years and their has never been one with

quite the same focus on leveraging public tax dollars to ultimately

finance their projects.

There is incredible new wealth in this country. Bill Gates, by Forbes’

estimate, had 81 billion dollars in 2014. If he had earned a dollar a

minute for every minute he was alive, awake or sleeping, it would have

taken Gates 2,592 years to earn that much money. He is not alone in his

wealth. The richest 400 Americans are worth 2.3 trillion dollars — far

more than most small countries. The top 1 percent of Americans,

including, but not limited to, these 400 billionaires, controls one-third

of the country’s wealth, with estimates that that proportion may rise to

Making Public Policy 747

one-half in a few years. Much of this money is self-made. Although it is

true that few of the new economic elite were born poor, a good num-

ber earned their stratospheric wealth in the technology and finance

booms.

With new money comes new philanthropy. One of the biggest differ-

ences between the wealthy philanthropists of the turn of the last cen-

tury and those of the turn of this century is the faith that the current

generation has in the methods of capitalism—its technologies and its

habits—in what used to be considered the separate arena of philan-

thropy. This philosophy is sometimes called venture philanthropy or

philanthrocapitalism. To perhaps oversimplify, while previous genera-

tions might have wanted to endow libraries, this generation wants to

find a more efficient way to store books and not to fund the storage of

those books in perpetuity.

For education, this means that they are pouring money into reform

efforts with the express intent of changing how things are done that

will ultimately be funded by taxpayers. From teacher evaluation, to cur-

riculum, to technology, to pedagogy, to school design and leadership,

wealthy reformers want to change K–12 education. Then they plan to

leave the field. This is therefore a moment of opportunity, but also of

peril. Public education in the United States is a hard-won foundation of

our democracy. What happens when its future is placed in the hands of

an elite few?

The Common Core

To understand the new—and different—role of philanthropists in edu-

cation, let us start with one of the more controversial current education

reform efforts: the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The idea

behind the Common Core is that all public school students in the

United States should be able to meet roughly the same quantifiable

standards—a “common core” of standards. Layton (2014) described its

origins:

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group

of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for

the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology748

near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their

idea into reality.

Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied

so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all mean-

ing, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial

classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign

competitors.

The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled

innovation because textbook publishers and software developers

were catering to a large number of small markets instead of explor-

ing breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man

who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating

system . . .

After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a

call: Gates was in.

What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in

education policy in U.S. history.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the devel-

opment of what became known as the Common Core State Standards.

With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support

across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and

costly changes . . .

Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influ-

ence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major

booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated

by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration

designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward

states that accepted the standards.

The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle

meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the

Common Core State Standards.

Proponents take pains to point out that it is not a core curriculum

but rather a set of standard skills that they believe every child

should have mastered by a certain grade-level. Critics counter that it

amounts to a common curriculum because textbook publishers and

school districts are moving to align their curricula with the

standards.

Making Public Policy 749

The Gates Foundation was involved in one episode that gives credi-

bility to critics. The Pearson Foundation (2011), the charitable affiliate

of the Pearson textbook giant, announced

a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support Amer- ica’s teachers by creating a full series of digital instructional resources. Online courses in math and reading/English language arts will offer a coherent and systemic approach to teaching the new Common Core State Standards. (Pearson Foundation: 2011)

Blogger Patrick Riccards immediately noticed the conflict of interest

writing, “was the Pearson Foundation simply developing curriculum,

on Gates’ dime, that the parent company, Pearson, would then turn

around and sell?” (Riccards 2012). It turns out, they were.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman did not think this

was a good idea: “The law on this is clear: non-profit foundations can-

not misuse charitable assets to benefit their affiliated for profit corpo-

rations” (Layton 2013). In 2013, the New York Attorney General’s Office

settled for $7.7 million with the now defunct Pearson Foundation for

developing Common Core State Standards (CCSS) aligned teaching

materials with the aim of generating tens of millions of dollars for its

for-profit parent corporation. The Pearson parent company then

bought the already developed materials for a reported $15 million — a

small fraction of the tens of millions that Attorney General Schneider-

man estimated the company stood to make with them. Still, the ruling

drew a very faint line in the sand.

Bill Gates

Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the [Gates] foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought,

while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Insti- tute realize they are underwritten by the [Gates] foundation.

Dillon (2011)

To understand the new education reform philanthropy, you have to

understand the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its evolution.

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology750

Their first education reform efforts in 1997 were a natural fit for

technology-oriented billionaires: “With the aim of diminishing the digi-

tal divide, the Gates Foundation funded training programs for educators

to learn how to use technology in the classroom and for wiring for

libraries in low-income neighborhoods” (Solomon 2009: 17). There was

nothing particularly radical about this form of philanthropy.

By 2000, Bill and Melinda Gates were looking for a more comprehen-

sive education reform strategy. They were impressed by New Visions

for Public Schools (2015), a nonprofit funded largely by wealthy hedge

funders in New York City, and NewSchools Venture Fund. New Visions

had a “small school” vision for American education, hoping to convert

the large urban high schools of the city into smaller schools with

distinct themes and more personalized attention for the students.

NewSchools Venture Fund provides philanthropic support to entrepre-

neurial charter schools.

Joel Klein, then-chancellor of the NYC Department of Education,

also had a small school vision. Klein had previously been involved with

the government’s prosecution of Microsoft, which, of course, was

headed by Gates. Nevertheless, Bill and Melinda Gates liked Klein’s

vision for New York, and, in 2003, they provided a grant of $51.2 mil-

lion to turn a dozen large, low-performing New York City high schools

into 67 smaller schools (Gates Foundation 2003). A principal at one of

these schools famously remarked to Klein: “51 million. That was pretty

impressive. Imagine how much you would have gotten if you hadn’t

sued the son of a bitch” (Brill 2011: 108).

In 2003, charter schools were still a fledgling concept. The idea of

charter schools emerged in the late 1980s when Ray Budde (1988), a

professor of education, published “Education by Charter: Restructuring

School Districts.” Although originally intended to simply be sites for

educational innovation, charter schools would come to be seen as a

way to, in the words of Senator Joseph Lieberman, “break the grip of

‘ossified bureaucracies governing too many public schools’” (Ravitch

2010: 125).

By 2007, Gates would go on to give $135 million to fund his educa-

tion initiatives in New York City. The charter school movement grew

rapidly. In 2003, there were only 24 charter schools in New York City

serving less than 1 percent of NYC students (New York City Charter

Making Public Policy 751

School Center 2010). By 2013, about 56,600 New York City students

were enrolled in over 150 charter schools. (New York City Charter

School Center 2012–2013). From 2003 to 2007, New York City would

receive roughly $350 million in philanthropic money for education

reform. But for Gates, in 2003, the focus was still on small schools rather

than on charter schools in particular.

Gates turned his attention to charter schools more sharply after his

initial investment in small schools had shown discouraging results.

When Gates turned to education reform in 2000, he believed that the

current studies pointed to school size as the variable that most influen-

ces education outcomes.

In 2006, a Gates-funded evaluation of the foundation’s small

school initiative found that students in the new high schools had

higher attendance rates but lower test scores than their peers in tradi-

tional high schools. The data that had initially converted Gates to the

small schools philosophy were probably misconstrued. Barken

(2011) explains that University of Pennsylvania statistician Howard

Wainer (2009) used the Gates Foundation’s small schools programs

as a case study of ambiguous data. Wainer pointed out that small

schools, when lumped together as a statistical group, tend to appear

to outperform larger schools because small schools tend to produce

extreme results, whether on the low end (very bad results) or the

high end (very good results).

Wainer (2009: 11) writes: “When one looks at high-performing

schools, one is apt to see an unrepresentatively large proportion of

smaller schools.” Likewise, small schools are also unrepresentatively in

the category of lowest-performing schools. In fact, small schools are

more likely to produce very bad results than very good results, and the

data show that larger high schools—large high schools of the very kind

that were broken down to implement Gates’s small schools initiative—

actually have better results. Wainer (2009: 12–14) parses the data using

an equation known as De Moivre’s equation:

The small schools movement seems to have arrived at one of its recom-

mendations through the examination of only one tail of the performance

distribution. Small schools are overrepresented at both tails, exactly as

expected, since smaller schools will show greater variation in

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology752

performance . . . Our examination of fifth grade performance suggests that school size alone seems to have no bearing on student achievement.

This is not true at the high-school level, where larger schools show better performance. This too is not unexpected, since very small high schools cannot provide as broad a curriculum or as many highly specialized

teachers as large schools . . . Expending more than a billion dollars on a theory based on ignorance of De Moivre’s equation suggests just how dangerous that ignorance can be.

The Gates Foundation initiative on small schools had failed, but

Gates still had hope for teacher evaluation, charter schools, and what

would come to be known as the Common Core.

In November 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced

at a private press conference at the Gates’s home in Seattle that their

education program had not produced substantial results. The founda-

tion acknowledged “we have not seen dramatic improvements in the

number of students who leave high school adequately prepared to

enroll in and complete a two- or four-year postsecondary degree or

credential” (Ravitch 2008).

Still, Gates believed that evidence-based, strategic investments in

public education programs could have an impact that would surpass

previous programs. Social programs, including public schools, could be

viewed as experiments. If the right variable were changed, such as the

size of the school, then critical outcomes, such as test scores, would

also change. Perhaps the right variable was shifting the schools to a

charter system.

During the same November 2008 press conference at which Gates

announced the failure of the small schools initiative, Gates (2008) confi-

dently announced that the foundation was shifting strategy, and that

“[a] growing body of evidence tells us that teacher effectiveness is the

single most important factor in student achievement.” This was the

beginning of the push for performance-based assessment of teachers.

Gates claimed that evidence shows that teacher effectiveness

improves outcomes. This pronouncement galled many educators, who

viewed this not so much as a reform strategy that would work but as a

tautology. By definition, good teachers are better. And everyone wants

good—or better yet, great—teachers. What today’s philanthropic edu-

cation reformers seek to do, however, is to quantify “good teaching” in

Making Public Policy 753

very specific ways and to fill schools with teachers who fulfill these

new, quantified definitions of a good teacher, which are based, in large

part, on how well their students perform on standardized tests.

In Gates’s model, schools are like products that can be improved

upon. It is a “silver bullet” approach, albeit one that Gates knows is not

simple. Gates (2009) noted after the failure of the Small Schools

Initiative:

Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific

certainty what works in schools. If one school’s students do better than

another school’s, how do you determine the exact cause? But the diffi-

culty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve.

But Gates is intent on cracking the code.

The contexts in which student achievement happens or fails to hap-

pen—impoverished neighborhoods, households in which there is

domestic violence, poor nutrition, or other factors that have been

shown to affect educational outcomes—tend to be analyzed by Gates

as factors that exist outside the realm of the problem: the school. Bos-

worth (2011) observes: “The ideological presumption is that the donor’s

philanthropic projects, like the commercial products that made him

wealthy, have been rigorously tested in a Darwinian marketplace,

where only the best ideas can survive.”

Two Billion Dollars

Between 2000 and 2008, the Gates Foundation invested $2 billion in

education reform, helping to open 2,602 small schools in 45 states,

influencing over 780,000 students, in many cases closing schools and

relocating students (Barkan 2011). Two billion dollars is a lot of money

by most standards. It is, however, almost trivial in American public

education, which consumes around $600 billion a year. The Gates

Foundation and others who argue against the idea that wealthy

philanthropists have an oversized role in education policy in the United

States point to this fact as evidence that philanthropy has a minimal

impact on education policy. How can foundation philanthropy, which

contributes about 0.15 percent of education dollars, be driving

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology754

education policy (Green 2005: 55)? The answer lies in the strategic

nature of philanthrocapitalism.

Think about the daily operations of a school district. Each dollar

spent does not equally affect the nature of the education that a district

provides. Capital expenses such as buildings and maintenance might

have an impact on students’ education. If students are too uncomfort-

able to focus because of poor facilities, for example, this might harm

their academic performance. For the most part, however, these every-

day expenses—buildings and bureaucracies as they have been called—

do not shape the students’ education. In contrast, the selection and

training of the supervisor of the school district might well have an

impact on the content and style of what is taught. Similarly, curriculum

and pedagogy are high-impact areas.

Philanthrocapitalists focus on these areas of high impact to leverage

other dollars in support of their reforms. Therefore, the right measure

of how much impact philanthropists’ dollars are having is not the per-

centage of the total expenditure that they fund, but rather it is the extent

to which they fund and control key areas of policy development and

implementation.

Eli Broad

Eli Broad is arguably the second most powerful education philanthro-

pist. He freely admits that he “didn’t know anything about curricula and

had no idea how to teach” when he started out in 1999 (Brill 2011: 92).

What he did know was management. Broad became convinced that the

primary problem with American public schools was bad management.

His first attempt to change the management culture in education was to

provide training for people who had recently gotten seats on school

boards but he was quickly disillusioned. Brill (2011: 92) noted:

[T]hey’d learn management or finance or human resources and get all

enthusiastic and then go home and fall into the same traps of doing

things the way they were always done, hiring the same people they’d

always hired.

In 2002, Broad decided that schools needed better management—

teachers, principals, and superintendents with backgrounds in business

Making Public Policy 755

rather than in education. Through his private family foundation, the

Broad Foundation, he created the Broad Superintendents Academy to

train public school superintendents, and the Broad Residency to con-

nect business school graduates with positions in public education. The

Broad Foundation in effect selects the administrators for urban public

school systems. By 2011, graduates of the Broad Superintendents Acad-

emy filled 48 percent of all superintendent openings at large urban

public schools (Jehlen 2012).

Critics of the Broad Foundation, notably Diane Ravitch, point out

that Broad-trained superintendents tend to surround themselves with

other Broad-trained people and to favor privatization above all other

types of reform—an outcome that is not unexpected given the Broad

philosophy of building networks of like-minded people committed to a

management- (business-) based approach to education reform and stra-

tegically placing them in influential positions within targeted school dis-

tricts. Most of all, Broad does not shy away from the idea that he is

buying power and influence with his philanthropy, “We take an untra-

ditional approach to giving. We don’t simply write checks to charities.

Instead we practice ‘venture philanthropy.’ And we expect a return on

our investment” (Broad Foundation 2012).

Other Foundations

There are other large foundations actively involved in education philan-

thropy, notably the Walton Family Foundation, run by the Walton fam-

ily of Walmart fame. Deeply involved in the KIPP and other charter

schools, the primary focus of the Walton Foundation has been school

choice, including vouchers, and charter schools. The Walton Founda-

tion also had an initiative called “Shape Public Policy” through which,

as previously described on the foundation’s website, “Walton Family

Foundation grantees engage in a variety of public information and

advocacy efforts to influence public policy and practices.” (The descrip-

tion of the program has subsequently been removed from the website.)

They too are interested in making public policy through philanthropy,

as evidenced by the more than $263 million the foundation poured into

“Shape Public Policy” from 2011 to 2014 (Walton Family Foundation

2011, 2012, 2013, 2014).

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology756

Smaller but still important players are the Michael and Susan Dell

Foundation and John and Laura Arnold Foundation, both led by young

technology entrepreneurs. They may be the future of education philan-

thropy. The Dell Foundation focuses on urban school districts and

tends to prefer opening new schools to putting money into low-

achieving older schools. The Dells are also big supporters of charter

schools. The Arnold Foundation website proclaims: “Philanthropy

should seek transformational change, not incremental change.” The

Arnolds are the most explicitly philanthropcapitalist in their rhetoric

and freely mix politics, philanthropy, and business; A little media savvy

goes into the mix. They are also strong backers of the charter school

movement.

Why Are the Wealthy So Interested in Education Reform?

Why are the very wealthy so interested in education reform? Ravenel

Boykin Curry IV of Eagle Capital management, a New-York-City-based

hedge fund founded by his father Ravenel Boykin Curry III, explained

it this way:

People like us—long-term value investors—like education reform

because, first, typically we are geeks who care about numbers, and we

can see that the numbers in public education don’t add up: more and

more money but no better results. Second, it is easy to see that education

is a really great investment if what you invest in really changes things.

It’s classic leverage. A relatively small amount of money produces better

lives and people who can support our economy instead of having to get

handouts from it . . .. Third, it is classic long-term investing, which is

what all of us do. Fourth, it’s something where we think we can add

value, because we can help create good business plans for charters . . ..

[And fifth,] because so many of us got interested in this at the same time,

you get to work with people who are your friends. (Brill 2011: 116–117)

Whitney Tilson, who runs a hedge fund firm, explained his interest

in education reform, and why he thinks hedge fund managers have a

special expertise, to a New York Sun reporter in this way. A big inner-

city school system is like General Motors. “I see very, very similar

dynamics: very large bureaucratic organizations that have become

increasingly disconnected from their customers; that are producing an

Making Public Policy 757

inferior product and losing customers; that are heavily unionized.” A

successful charter school, on the other hand, is like “Toyota 20 years

ago” (Green 2007).

In 2004, Tilson was invited to a cocktail party given by George

Soros. An up and coming young politician named Barack Obama

also attended the affair. After the party, Soros sent out an email

announcing that, after years of saying that Cory Booker, now a New

Jersey Senator, would be the first black president of the United

States, he had just met the man who he thought would beat Booker

to the job, Barack Obama. He thought Booker would be the second

black president of the United States. Soros went on to note, “most

Democrats are afraid to take on the teachers’ union and support

charter schools and school choice, but Obama (like Cory) cham-

pions this issue” (Brill 2011: 115).

In another story of hedge funds to education reform, John Petry and

Joel Greenblatt, partners in the hedge fund Gotham Capital, were intro-

duced by a friend to Joel Klein. Klein was by then the chancellor of

New York City schools. Greenblatt, following the chancellor’s advice,

began to think “putting money into the politics of education reform

might be the most leveraged investment of all” (Brill 2007: 117). In

2005, they formed Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).

DFER became an extraordinarily powerful kingmaker in politics. Joel

Klein himself noted the hedge fund education reformers were turning a

group of unlikely people into an army of foot soldiers for the move-

ment. Diane Ravitch, Professor of Education at NYU and former Assist-

ant Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, noted the tight

relationship between DFER and Wall Street political money:

When Andrew Cuomo wanted to raise Wall Street money for his guber- natorial campaign in 2010, he quickly learned that he needed the bless- ing of Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is the voice of the Wall Street hedge fund managers, the men who make eight-figure incomes (or more . . . DFER’s interest, strategies, even its membership overlap with similar groups, such as Education Reform Now, the Education Equality Project, and Stand for Children. (Ravitch 2008: 278–279)

DFER also has strong ties with Michael Bloomberg — such strong

ties that the New York Times commented, “at times, Democrats for

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology758

Education Reform seems an extension of the mayor’s own platform”

(Gabriel and Medina 2010).

Certainly, social networks and power are at play but there may be

something more subtle drawing men from the financial sector to educa-

tion reform. The trend toward quantifying educational success put edu-

cation in numerical terms that are familiar to people in finance and

technology. It may be that as the discourse in education shifted away

from topics such as “whole child learning” and toward topics such as

“benchmarked gains” members of the finance and technology com-

munities felt that they had something to offer.

The Peculiar Politics of Foundations

As government funding for medical and social research shrinks, the

experts’ dependence on foundation money soars, and, desperate for funds, local school districts cannot easily resist the national reform initia-

tives now being dictated by billionaire donors with no local connections.

David Bosworth (2011)

Reckhow (2013) regards foundations as peculiar political actors.

They do not have a constituency, and they tend to operate in national

rather than local contexts. This proves to be particularly important to

K–12 education policy, which is usually worked out at the local level.

For foundations to be effective actors in education policy, they must

shift the national education agenda. Their vast wealth, however, gives

them the opportunity to fund sympathetic political allies and to quickly

build a national network in support of particular policy ideas in a way

that traditional social movements cannot do. Their lack of a political

constituency, and therefore public accountability, gives great power to

the foundation funders or staff (Reckhow 2013: 143). As political scien-

tist Rob Reich (2013) has noted: “Foundations are, virtually by defini-

tion, the voice of plutocracy.” This is particularly true for the new

foundations that have living, involved founders, such as the Gates and

Broad foundations.

One way to sway the national agenda is to influence the appoint-

ment of political actors who are responsible for education policy. Eli

Broad, George Soros, and Bill Gates gave a combined $60 million for

Making Public Policy 759

an initiative called “ED in ‘08” to make education a priority issue in the

presidential campaign. This level of spending for issue advocacy in a

presidential campaign was unprecedented. Bill Hogan, a senior fellow

at the Center for Public Integrity and director of the Buying of the Presi-

dent 2008 project, noted at the time: “If we are talking about efforts in

presidential campaigns to promote discussion or debate of an issue,

there has been nothing like this. This would be off the charts” (Herszen-

horn 2007). “ED in ‘08” worked with DFER to fund, among other things,

education reform seminars before the Democratic convention. Publicly,

“ED in ‘08” ended up amounting to very little. The funders, however,

seemed to get what they wanted in the form of Arne Duncan and Race

to the Top.

Race to the Top

On January 29, 2009, just days into the new administration, newly

elected President Barack Obama, his advisor David Axelrod, Chief of

Staff Rahm Emanuel, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met with

Jon Schnur, who unveiled a proposal to use $15 billion from the $800

billion federal stimulus plan to create an education reform contest for

the states. The contest was called “Race to the Top” (RTT) and it was

ultimately funded for just under $5 billion from the stimulus plan. Race

to the Top was backed by the Broad, Gates, and Walton foundations

(Brill 2011). This is much the same group of philanthropists that created

the Common Core State Standards.

The poor economic conditions faced by most states in 2009 made the

RTT money critical to the states, cash strapped in the best of times. The

New York Times’ Sam Dillon (2009) reported: “With nearly all states fac-

ing huge deficits, those sums have motivated officials in many states to

start drawing up detailed applications, due early next year.”

The Gates Foundation then went one step further and selected 15

states to get $250,000 in Gates Foundation grants to help them to pre-

pare their federal RTT grant application. Sam Dillon (2009), quoting a

Gates Foundation official, noted:

Foundation education officers picked the 15 states “through our own

due diligence process,” taking into account “where our education strat-

egy is now and where the best opportunities are,” Mr. Williams said. The

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology760

15 included states “where we’d done a lot of work and knew the land- scape,” like New York and Texas, he said, as well as those “where we haven’t done as much work but were considering doing more,” like Arkansas and Arizona.

There was widespread concern that this technical assistance and

funding brought the Gates Foundation too far into the selection process

of what was supposed to be an open competition for the states to

receive a government grant on the basis of merit. A spokesman for the

National Conference of State Legislatures explained: “We expressed

concerns that it appeared that Gates people were involved in helping

the department pick winners and losers” (Dillon 2009). Vermont’s edu-

cation commissioner Armando Vilaseca “was not pleased when he

learned that the foundation had offered to help 15 states but not his.

‘That seemed like stacking the deck’” (Dillon 2009).

Facing criticism for giving some states a considerable edge over

others, the foundation changed its approach and offered the funding to

any state that met the criteria on an eight-point checklist of the Gates

Foundation’s education priorities. In other words, the foundation did

away with the appearance of playing favorites with the states but not

with the content of the policy proposals. In the end Gates provided

funding to 24 states, nine of which were selected for RTT funding. Of

the remaining 26 states, only three received RTT funding (Reckhow

2013: 151–152).

President Barack Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as U.S. Secre-

tary of Education was certainly welcomed by many of the key foundations

in education reform. Duncan had worked closely with the Broad and

Gates foundations when he was in Chicago and was widely seen as their

nominee. As the Broad Foundation noted in its 2009–2010 annual report:

The election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as the U.S. Secretary of Education, marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investment—charter schools, perform- ance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds that we and other reformers have planted. (Quoted in Reckhow 2013: 150)

Making Public Policy 761

DFER also claimed some credit for Duncan’s appointment, noting on

its website: “Thanks in part to our efforts, President Obama has been

extraordinarily bold on this issue [education reform], starting with his

selection of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.”

Duncan also recruited his chief of staff Margot Rogers and his assist-

ant deputy secretary James Shelton from the Gates Foundation. This

was overtly aimed at strengthening the ties between the Obama admin-

istration and the Gates Foundation as, according to the New York Times,

“the administration waived ethics rules to allow both officials to consult

more freely with the foundation” (Dillon 2009).

Overtly Political Intervention

There has also been other overtly political education reform philan-

thropy. Michael Bloomberg, for example, gave a $1 million donation in

2013 to Los Angeles’ Coalition for School Reform. Los Angeles Times

reporter Steve Lopez (2013) wrote about the controversy this created:

I kept hearing last week from readers who were having conniptions over New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $1-million donation to the local Coali-

tion for School Reform. They said he should mind his own business, and they called this another example of an attempt by rich guys to privatize pub- lic schools, or at least turn them over to their charter school cronies . . . I called Bloomberg’s office to find out if he was aware that at least part of his money is being spent to distort the truth and misinform voters, which I’ll

explain in a minute. “Mike Bloomberg is proud to help level the playing field on behalf of children and their families,” a Bloomberg spokesman

responded. “The union may not like it, but they should get used to it because he is just getting started.

Similarly, an article in the Washington Post by Strauss (2012) noted:

It turns out that billionaire school reformers Eli Broad, Michael Bloom-

berg and other fabulously wealthy individuals who don’t live in Louisi- ana contributed money to influence the outcome of races for the [2012] state board of education.

Professor Peter Dreier, who teaches urban policy at Occidental Col-

lege in California, notes: “In Los Angeles alone, the Walton Family

Foundation has donated over $84.3 million to charter schools and

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology762

organizations that support them, such as Green Dot Schools, ICEF

schools, and the Los Angeles Parent Union . . .” (Dreier 2013).

Although it is perfectly legal, there is something unseemly about the

very wealthy—who, as many people have pointed out, do not often

send their children to public school and certainly do not send them to

the inner-city ones targeted by reformers —buying so much policy-

making power in K–12 education.

The Apsen Controversy

There have also been controversies, in this post-Citizen’s-United world,

over how political nonprofits should be and how much they should

work on behalf of their funders’ political interests. One of the most

notorious controversies came to light at the Aspen Institute in Aspen,

Colorado, although its origins, as we will see, were the far less bucolic

streets of Chicago.

Wealthy Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke founded the Aspen

Institute in 1950 as a secluded retreat for artists, intellectuals, and politi-

cal thinkers to share ideas. Since that time, it has evolved into a unique,

bipartisan gathering ground for the leading politicians, intellectuals,

philanthropists, and businessmen of the world, from presidents and

prime ministers to Supreme Court justices.

Today, the Aspen Institute is based in Washington, DC, with the Col-

orado campus serving as a remote location for meetings, where ideas

can be discussed in a secluded and collegial environment. During the

day, meetings are scheduled with major presentations and smaller

break-out groups. Some of the sessions are filmed, but unlike similar

meetings that take place in Washington, DC or at academic conferen-

ces, meetings at the Aspen Institute feel remote from the hustle and

bustle of the outside world.

It was in this environment that Jonah Edelman, CEO of Stand for

Children, an educational advocacy organization with both a 501c(3)

and 501c(4) wing, one of whose major funders is the Gates Foundation,

gave a talk about how private billionaire funding and political maneu-

vering affected education legislation in Illinois, leaving teachers’ unions

relatively powerless. A video of this talk to a small gathering of Aspen

Institute attendees went viral under the moniker “How to Fool Unions

Making Public Policy 763

and Bribe Politicians” (Schulz 2011). This led to outrage and a public

apology from Edelman (Guzzardi 2011).

According to Guzzardi (2011), the outrage at Jonah Edelman’s Machi-

avellian tactics in disarming unions was influenced by Edelman’s family

background, which blends the legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and

Robert Kennedy. Jonah’s mother is Marian Wright Edelman of the

Children’s Defense Fund. She worked with Dr. King on the Poor Peo-

ple’s Campaign, a movement for economic and racial justice. Jonah’s

father is Peter Edelman, who was a young legislative assistant to Sena-

tor Robert Kennedy. The name of Jonah Edelman’s organization, Stand

for Children, is a reference to the Rosa Parks quote: “If I can sit down

for justice, you can stand up for children.”

In July 2011, Jonah Edelman was joined by third-generation billion-

aire Jim Crown to lead a small classroom lecture at the Aspen Institute

to discuss how Illinois Senate Bill 7 (SB7) passed, and why it should be

used as a model for privately financed education reform in all 50 states.

Crown began by informing the small group before him that this particu-

lar lecture was not really about education, as had been advertised. “We

put this forth as being an education-centric session, but this is really

going to be about politics and political action,” Crown warned. “There

might have been a little camouflage in the titling because while the

nobility of the outcome—we hope—is something that we can all be

proud of, what you’re about to hear is a story of straightforward politi-

cal activism.”

With Jim Crown sitting beside him, Jonah Edelman gave an account

of how Stand for Children united with Jim Crown and now Illinois Gov-

ernor Bruce Rauner, also reportedly a billionaire, to help fund the

reelection of Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. Ever since the

Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that permits corpora-

tions to make political contributions, billionaire involvement in political

races has become ubiquitous. But this was different. This was not only

about funding campaigns; it was also about writing policy.

What Jonah Edelman outlined was a strategy to implement particular

education policies that they hoped to expand nationally. The intent was

to use Madigan as a tool to pass an education reform bill that would

institute new approaches to education that are widely lauded by weal-

thy education philanthropists:

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology764

� Longer school days and shorter summer vacations. � Opening more charter schools. Charter schools are defined as

schools that receive public money but are independent. They

are not subject to many of the same rules, regulations, and stat-

utes of regular public schools and may be run by for-profit

companies.

� Dismantling the tenure system and replacing it with a “results- based” system, so that teachers are hired and fired based on

measures of performance rather than the tenure system of

seniority.

� Dismantling teachers’ unions and limiting collective bargaining; reducing teachers’ pensions and other benefits. This is often

tied to charter schools.

In the Aspen video, Jonah Edelman appears to be a self-assured,

clean-cut man in his late 30s with curly, dark brown hair, a simple,

button-down blue shirt, and a still-boyish demeanor. He spoke with

confidence, often pausing to smile. He told the group that his plans

began when he noticed a growing breach between Democrats and

teachers’ unions in Illinois due to fiscal issues caused by the eco-

nomic recession. Upon noting that Speaker Mike Madigan (D) was

seeking to reduce teacher pensions, Edelman decided that “to get

involved in the midterm elections [of 2010] . . . we had to show our

clout.” The collective “we” refers to Bruce Rauner and Jim Crown,

the nonprofit consortium Advance Illinois, and the private founda-

tions that help foot the bill for Edelman’s Stand for Children, includ-

ing the Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropy, and the Walton

Family Foundation.

Edelman went on to say that they “interviewed 36 candidates in tar-

geted races” for the Illinois mid-term elections. “I’m going to be quite

blunt here,” Edelman said. “The individual candidates were essentially

a vehicle to execute a political objective, which was to support Mad-

igan.” Edelman said that Crown, Rauner, and Stand for Children’s finan-

cial support was meant to be an indication to Madigan that “we could

be a new partner, to take the place of the Illinois Federation of Teach-

ers. That was the point. Luckily it never got covered that way [in the

press].”

Making Public Policy 765

Edelman then describes that, after Madigan was reelected, Edelman

and private financiers “drafted a very bold proposal called Performance

Counts.” Edelman said this model legislation tied tenure to test perform-

ance, “streamlined” the dismissal of tenured teachers—“substantially,

with very little likelihood of legal recourse”—and called for the reform

of collective bargaining. Edelman then recounted how they hired 11

lobbyists, “including four of the absolute best insiders and seven of the

best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them.” They

then went forward with the actual writing of the piece of legislation

that was to become SB7. Edelman summarized the process in no uncer-

tain terms:

And so essentially what we did in a very short period of time was shift the balance of power. And I can tell you there was a palpable sense of concern, if not shock, on the part of the teachers unions in Illinois that speaker Madigan had changed allegiance and that we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal [for SB7] down their throats, the same way pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier.

Edelman then detailed that he told public officials, including Chicago

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, that Edelman himself, along with other finan-

ciers and nonprofits, would approve the “small print” of the bill. To this

had been added a clever specification: a line stating that in order to go

on strike, the Chicago Teachers Union would need to agree to the strike

by a vote of 75 percent. Edelman thought this to be impossible, since

his research indicated that a 48.3 percent vote was the highest threshold

that had ever been reached in a comparable situation. “The unions can-

not strike in Chicago,” Edelman said. “They will never be able to muster

the 75% threshold necessary to strike.” Contrary to Edelman’s predic-

tion, the following year teachers in Chicago did strike, with an unprece-

dented vote of 90 percent union membership to commence the strike.

And the bad blood and mistrust were as thick as one might imagine

(Payne: 2012).

In the end, Stand for Children and Edelman himself were able to

weather the storm, but the city suffered through a terribly divisive

teachers strike. It remains unclear whether the controversy arose

because one relatively young man spoke boastfully about fairly normal

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology766

political machinations or whether the economic elite really did use the

power and influence of a national nonprofit to write and impose local

law in an undemocratic way.

Leveraging Public Money

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the

Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the hedge fund reformers in

New York are all designing their reforms to leverage public resources.

The public, however, does not always want to be leveraged. At this

writing there is a controversy in the city of Philadelphia over a pro-

posed $35 million philanthropic gift to the school system, which is

$80 million in debt for the school year 2015/2016. The controversy is

so great that the school system is considering turning the money

down. Under what circumstances would a cash-strapped school sys-

tem consider turning down $35 million? Exactly the circumstances

that the new large-donor philanthropists seek to create: one that lev-

erages taxpayer money to reform schools and turn a profit (Hall

2015).

The organization offering the $35 million is Philadelphia School Part-

nership (PSP), a local and reputable philanthropic organization funded

by the Gates, Dell, Walton, and other foundations active in education

reform. The $35 million would not be a discretionary gift. Of the total,

$25 million of it would have to be used to open new charter schools

serving an additional 15,000 students. Once these schools were open,

public funding that had gone to the Philadelphia public school system

would now go to these schools instead. As the newsletter Inside Phi-

lanthropy noted:

Groups opposed to accepting the PSP gift say doing so could actually worsen the district’s financial condition. Whenever a Philadelphia child enrolls in a charter school, the district loses money. PSP estimates peg that figure at about $2,000 per child and based its gift on that estimate. The district, meanwhile, cites Boston Consulting Group estimates that charter schools cost the district about $7,000 per child. Considering not only the start-up costs that PSP’s gift is designed to offset, the district esti- mates opening additional charter schools to enroll 15,000 could cost $500 million in the coming years—more than 10 times the amount of PSP’s gift. (Hall 2015)

Making Public Policy 767

Further muddying the waters, the source of the donations for the $35

million is unclear. (Although it is known to come from the PSP, the

donor who put stipulations on the gift is anonymous.) There is some

speculation that it comes from charter school operators themselves,

who stand to make a profit if new charter schools open. The political

wing of PSP, a new PAC called Excellent Schools, made a donation to

mayoral candidate Anthony Williams, the only Democratic mayoral

candidate not to call for Philadelphia to reject the gift.

The Manifest and Latent Policy Functions of Philanthropy

Sociologist Robert Merton differentiated between manifest and latent

functions of social institutions. The manifest function refers to the stated

goal of the action. In the case of the Gates small schools, the manifest

function was to increase test scores, graduation rates, and college pre-

paredness levels at large urban high schools. Latent functions are best

described as outcomes that are either unanticipated or unintended, and

thus not publicly announced. They are just as real and significant as

manifest functions, but they often go unnoticed because they were

never stated as goals. This distinction is useful in understanding the role

of mega-philanthropy in social policy.

The latent functions of Gates’s education initiatives between the years

2000 and 2008 were to dismantle the older, larger, urban public high

schools, to change people’s expectations of what high school in places

like Oakland and New York should be like, and to produce a gap that

new charter schools would fill. I doubt these were the intentions of the

Gates Foundation. They sought to fix specific problems. They were

thinking about graduation rates and test scores; they were not necessar-

ily thinking about the irreversible structural changes that would be left

behind if their programs were abandoned. That said, some reformers,

and certainly Broad among them, were in favor of such effects.

Policy change is never just a matter of convincing administrators,

legislators, or voters that a new policy—a new way of doing things—is

better than the old policy. When a new policy becomes entrenched

into everyday life, it becomes more difficult to challenge. This is an

example of path dependence, a concept borrowed from economic his-

torians (David 1985; Arthur 1989).

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology768

Path dependence is a concept with many variants. For our purposes,

I am using it simply to mean that once an action is taken, it changes the

relative costs of all future actions and can have large impacts over time.

Perhaps ironically, given Gates’s involvement in philanthropy, one

example that makes the idea of path dependence clear is technology.

Let us say that you have been buying and using Microsoft products

for years. A new application is developed that is perfect for organizing

your home finances. It is intuitive, aesthetically beautiful, and, since this

is a hypothetical example, it gives you $25 a month. Perfect. But it does

not run on PCs. Another application does sort of the same thing but is

ugly, hard to use, and does not give you any cash back. It also costs a

dollar. Which one do you buy? Probably the “less good” one. Why?

Because your choice is dependent on another choice you already

made: your operating system. Could you change your operating sys-

tem? Yes. It might even make sense to do so. Maybe this new applica-

tion is so much better that you will save more time and money than

you spend switching to a Mac. But you still probably will not do it. This

example is an oversimplification of path dependence, but it gets at the

core insights. Once you make a choice it affects future choices. Not sur-

prisingly, the cost and force of path dependence is much greater at the

social level.

When the small schools initiatives were implemented throughout the

previous decade, schools were opened, closed, consolidated, and built.

There were logistical issues: Who gets which rooms? Are there enough

toilets for both boys and girls within each new small school? Do they

share bathrooms with the other small schools in the building? Will that

result in changing the individual cultures of the small schools—which,

remember, are often housed within the old “big schools.” Once the

changes are made, it takes a behemoth effort to retrace one’s steps and

change it back.

The failure of the Gates small schools initiatives actually served to

move school reform forward. New policies were needed to address the

new realities created by the dismantling of large urban schools. Private

education reformers like Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros,

and Bill Gates now seek to build a new system, as if the old one never

existed—in Gates’s words, to create a new “mainframe”—or perhaps

more accurately a new operating system. With school reform initiatives,

Making Public Policy 769

private financiers increasingly seek to build from scratch, and to funda-

mentally alter the American public education system.

Wealthy philanthropists are playing all of the roles in the political act.

They identify the problem, fund research, craft policy solutions, select

and train the individuals to implement the policy, influence the elec-

tions and government appointments, fund the cities to start up new

programs, and even finance media coverage. Then, once reform is in

place, the goal is for the philanthropists to withdraw and for the public

to fund the programs they created. That is how philanthropic money

leverages tax dollars.

I do not think that there is anything sinister about the intent of these

individuals and foundations. They are responding to true need. Many

students are not being well served by the current school system, and

changes in our economy and labor market necessitate changes within

our education system. Nonetheless, the United States now finds itself in

a situation where a handful of extraordinarily wealthy men are defining

our education policy—from education research to curriculum to man-

agement to privatization to media coverage—without any public

accountability.

Danger?

What is the danger here? So what if the most brilliant minds of our time

want to put their time and money into fixing the education crisis? My 11

year-old recently had a homework assignment that specified it had to

be done using Microsoft software. Is that the greatest danger, if it was

anything other than coincidence? Eleven year-olds running around

robotically learning Microsoft? No, there is a greater danger than that.

Public education could lose its connection to democracy. That would

be a terrible loss. K–12 education makes citizens as much or more than it

makes workers. Education policy could become the domain of the

extreme economic elite rather than the general public. Once that hap-

pens, our democracy is gone in all but name. As a college professor at a

large public university that serves mostly first-generation college students,

I see every day how much our current system fails even the best and

brightest. I am still not willing to sell that system to the highest bidder. No

matter how smart or well-intentioned that bidder might be, no one man

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology770

or woman (and they are not women) in a democracy should be able to

direct the public agenda without accountability. Philanthropy in itself is

not a bad thing. There is a place for it in education reform. The American

public should welcome philanthropists who give money transparently

and with accountability to researchers, schools, and journalists. But no

one should ever be allowed to create the ball, build the team, hire the ref-

erees, fund the instant replay, and call the game fair—or conducive to

democracy.

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