The Rise of Venture Philanthropy and the Ongoing Neoliberal Assault on Public Education: [View All]

[tonysam]

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.