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

[tonysam]

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation

This is cross-posted from the Education forum. This is a very important--and disturbing--article which should be shared far and wide:

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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More

This is not only an open war against public education but against democracy itself. Our so-called Democrats are heavily in bed with the Broads and their ilk.

[brentspeak]

1. Vulture philanthropy

[tonysam]

2. Or good old-fashioned bribery such as "Race to the Top." n/t

[tonysam]

3. A kick for this article about the most recent assault on democracy. n/t

[UP_4012]

4. K&R

There is nothing worse than watching the slow destruction of democracy's most important instruments of sustenance.

[tonysam]

5. Especially when privatization of public services has been thoroughly discredited,

yet it marches on.

[UP_4012]

6. I know, right?

There are things you should just never privatize: Public Education, Prisons, Utilities, etc. These just end up bringing down the level of service (especially education and utilities), drive the prices of these services up, and people lose their jobs (most importantly their benefits). Oh well,I guess we just won't learn until we become a third world country.

[tonysam]

7. I am afraid you are right.

The march to privatize public services continues unabated, evidence be damned.