The Rise of Venture Philanthropy and the Ongoing Neoliberal Assault on Public Education:

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation


This is a must-read about one of the most insidious assaults on American public education, and by extension, democracy:

In the past decade educational policy and reform has come increasingly under the sway of
a new form of philanthropy. Venture philanthropy is modeled on venture capital and the
investments in the technology boom of the early 1990’s. VP not only pushes
privatization and deregulation, the most significant policy dictates of neoliberalism1 by
championing charter schools, voucher schemes, private scholarship tax credits, and
corporate models of curriculum, administration, and teacher preparation and practice, but
Venture Philanthropy is also consistent with the steady expansion of neoliberal language
and rationales in public education, including the increasing centrality of business terms to
describe educational reforms and policies: choice, competition, efficiency, accountability,
monopoly, turnaround, and failure. Venture philanthropy in education whose leading
proponents include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad
Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation departs radically from the age of
“scientific” industrial philanthropy characterized by Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford.
These traditional philanthropies, despite pursuing a largely conservative role of
undermining radical social movements, nonetheless framed their projects in terms of the
public good and sought to provide individuals with public information through schools,
libraries, and museums.

Venture philanthropy treats schooling as a private consumable service and promotes
business remedies, reforms, and assumptions with regard to public schooling. Some of
the most significant projects involve promoting charter schools to inject market
competition and “choice” into the public sector as well as using cash bonuses for teacher
pay and to “incentivize” students.

VP treats giving to public schooling as a “social investment” that like venture capital,
must begin with a business plan, must involve quantitative measurement of efficacy, must
be replicable to be “brought to scale”, and ideally will “leverage” public spending in
ways compatible with the strategic donor. In the parlance of venture philanthropy grants
are referred to as “investments”, donors are called “investors”, impact is renamed “social
return”, evaluation becomes “performance measurement”, grant reviewing turns into
“due diligence”, the grant list is renamed an “investment portfolio,” charter networks are
referred to as “franchises” -- to name but some of the recasting of giving on investment.
Within the view of venture philanthropy, donors are framed as both entrepreneurs and
consumers while recipients are represented as investments. One of most significant
aspects of this transformation in educational philanthropy involves the ways that the
public and civic purposes of public schooling are redescribed by venture philanthropy in
distinctly private ways. Such a view carries significant implications for a society
theoretically dedicated to public democratic ideals. This is no small matter in terms of
how the public and civic roles of public schooling have become nearly overtaken by the
economistic neoliberal perspective that views public schooling as principally a matter of
producing workers and consumers for the economy and for global economic competition.
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A whole lot more of this important article by Kenneth Saltman is here.

Well, things might not look too good, but I ain't taking this shit laying down, and I don't think teachers will either!

Excerpt:

The point not to be missed here is that policy will be “data driven.” In reality, data
cannot “drive” policy. The very expression conceals the motives and politics under
girding human beings’ decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, teacher education, and
administration. Implementing practices used in high-scoring schools in low-scoring
schools will not only result in misapplications of pedagogical approaches, it naturalizes
the unthinking consumption of information as the essence of achievement while
imagining teachers as little more than fleshy delivery machines. What does not get
interrogated in all this is the process whereby some people with particular values,
perspectives, and ideological convictions determine what is important for students to
know.

NOW I understand why I feel like I've just been ground up by a tractor passing over me. :7 This describes my district perfectly.

The deskilling of teaching has been going on for years, but now it has accelerated with the likes of NCLB and Arne Duncan.

...de-professionalized...and have felt its consequences. This paper clarifies the underlying background for me. It answers the who and why more clearly.

Sadly, it also brings the 'fight for public education' into better focus. These folks are powerful. If unions don't take on this fight...if TEACHERS don't take on this fight...it's pretty much a done deal.

Thank you for posting the paper.

Administrators and privatizers have the teachers by the throat. Meanwhile the teachers' unions are doing little to combat this. It's as if they have been co-opted.

...with the actual work of teaching, that they are oblivious to what is happening.

I agree with much of the article, but the title doesn't follow.

"venture philanthropists" such as Eli Broad and Bill Gates; what they are doing in effect is trying to privatize the non-profit, governmental sectors of our country and they are doing it by wholesale bribery, i.e., "Race to the Top," etc.

for decades, so unless this professor is 18, it's quite disingenuous of him to focus on Democrats as the authors of the destruction of the public education system.

towards privatization of public schools.

One need look no further than "Race to the Top," and states are gutting teacher protections in order to get the dirty money.

(ask any teacher of any age), surely this author can't be blaming the Democrats. He's either a kid or he's a Repugnican.

Their policies are absolutely NO different than the GOP's--they are NEOLIBERALS--NOT liberals, when it comes to education. They are HUGE supporters of charter schools, for example, and they are BRIBING states to gut teacher protections.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it is a FACT. Arizona is gutting teacher protections, so is Nevada, in order to try and get "Race to the Top" money.

To deny this means you are not paying attention at all.

but you're moving in that direction.

I detested Rod Paige and Margaret Spelling but Arne Duncan is much much worse.

If you think that makes me a neo-con, so be it. I'm really far more interested in policy that works for kids, not the party who is proposing it.

between Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats, who are supposed to stand for liberal ideas and democratic ideals such as public education, are throwing them by the wayside, thanks to these crooked billionaires.

Just because Obama and Arne are for wholesale privatization of public schools, which is what their policies are really about, doesn't make them less objectionable because these two are "Democrats."

I so agree with this article. Thanks for posting it.

Faculty are forced to chase dollars as part of tenure and promotion. If they can't directly chase it from these foundations, which are often now driving their own agendas and specifically contracting out to pre-chosen schools/systems/universities and therefore not even putting out discretionary RFPs, then they must chase it from federal agencies, the RFPs of which are increasingly influenced by "dialogue" with these venture philanthropists. Deans and provosts trip over each other trying to get audiences with these foundation officers, and then come back and drive the agendas of their faculty with the same "values."

Venture philanthropy initiatives including those of the Broad foundation need to be
recognized for their hostility to public and critical forms of schooling as well as their
alignment with the broader movement to privatize and dismantle public schooling. It is
incumbent upon educators to challenge the promotion of retrograde positivism, the use of
private money to steer public educational reform debates, and the corporate hijacking of
public institutions especially at a moment when the central tenets of neoliberal ideology
are revealed to be utterly untenable. The wealth of the venture philanthropies is only
made possible by public subsidy in the form of tax incentives through which the public
pays to have public control over public services given over to elite private interests.
Private foundation wealth including that of the Broad, Gates, and Walton foundations
ought ideally to be nationalized and channeled into public institutions with strong public
governance, oversight, and control. Public schools are crucial for making publiclyminded
citizens capable of interpreting and acting on matters of public importance.
Consequently the preparation of teachers and administrators can not be turned over to
elite private interests promoting corporate ideologies but must become increasingly
determined in public domains and institutions. The struggle for critical and public
democratic forms of administrator preparation must be waged not only discursively but
also through accreditation bodies, state boards of education, and state legislatures, as well
as in university education program development.
_____

Most people aren't even aware public education is being assaulted, and it's being done from within thanks to Eli Broad flaks and others with the same philosophy running public school districts.