Venture Philanthropy and the Ongoing Neoliberal Assault on Public Education

[Hannah Bell]

...Venture philanthropy has a strategic aim of “leveraging” private money to
influence public schooling in ways compatible with the longstanding privatization
agendas of the political right...The central agenda is to transform public education
in the United States into a market through for-profit and non-profit charter schools, vouchers, and “scholarship” tax credits for private schooling or “neovouchers.”

Venture philanthropies such as New Schools Venture Fund and the Charter School Growth Fund
are being financed by the large givers and aim to create national networks of charter
schools, charter management organizations, and educational management organizations
(EMOs). These organizations are explicit about their intent to transform radically public
education in the United States through various strategies.

Along these lines the venture philanthropists are also working in conjunction with large urban school districts and business groups to orchestrate such plans as New York’s New Visions for Public
Schools, Chicago’s Renaissance 2010, and similar mixed income/ mixed finance schools
and housing projects in Portland, OR, and Boston, MA and elsewhere.

These coordinatethe privatizations of schooling and housing and gentrify coveted sections of cities. VPs are aggressively seeking to re-imagine teacher education through online and onsite
initiatives and educational leadership on the model of the MBA.

The key players of venture philanthropy in education -- including but not limited to such
leaders as Gates, Walton, Fisher, and Broad -- are able to exercise influence disproportionate to their size and spending power through strategic arrangements with charter and voucher promoting
organizations, think tanks, universities, school districts, and schools.

The seed money that underfunded schools desperately seek allows the venture philanthropists to
“leverage” influence over educational policy and planning, curriculum and instructional
practices, and influence the very idea of what it means to be an educated person.

The Obama administration’s approach to education shares the venture philanthropy
perspective and agenda imagining public schooling as a private market within which
schools must compete for scarce resources... Obama’s announcement in the summer of 2009 of
the “Race to the Top” competition among public school districts and states for a limited pool of money does not only replicate the punitive educational doctrine of the Bush administration but it
also is informed by the Eli Broad prize, discussed below, which uses competition
between locales for limited scholarship money in an attempt to steer educational policy.

Venture philanthropy initiatives...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... 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...

http://thebroadreport.blogspot.com/2009/11/saltman-on-venture-philanthropy-eli.html



1 Neoliberalism involves redistributing public goods to private controls while
espousing market triumphalism. As David Harvey explains, it is a project of class
warfare.