Should We Allow Conservative Philanthropists to Run Our Schools?

A final source of charter school funding is the New Schools Venture Fund created in 1998, which hosts funding by conservative-leaning mega charities, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walmart family foundation.

 

Microsoft founder Bill Gates

Why do millionaires and billionaires donate hundreds of millions of dollars to charter schools? Attorney and progressive education reformer Danny Weil (*see below) calls it priming the pump. Neoliberals have strong ideological reasons for seeking to dismantle traditional public education. They know that the charter school movement has the potential to capture billions of public education dollars for profit-oriented ventures. However owing to the low per pupil equivalents for disadvantaged students, new privately run charter schools are unlikely to succeed without outside support. And despite claims to the contrary, corporate donors know that “throwing money at schools” allows them to attract and retain the best teachers – and in the long run, improves student achievement.

Moreover in a number of cases, these donors have been invited to serve as board members on charter school chains with major governing responsibilities – offering them an extraordinary amount of power and control over curriculum, textbooks and potentially the ideological bent of the schools they oversee (e.g. whether they teach evolution or its fundamentalist Christian alternative Creative Design).

For-profit Companies: Circling Like Sharks

The massive growth in charters and the funding to support them has also led to a burgeoning industry that applies for and distributes grants, in addition to hundreds that sell “educational products and services.” And although technically all charter school financing schemes are non-profit – they generate a phenomenal number of for-profit contracts for companies marketing curriculum and textbooks, computers, software and administrative, clerical and security services.

One example is Ignite, an educational software company founded and run by the former president’s brother Neil Bush. It sells its wares to Florida charter schools, thanks to another brother, ex-governor Jeb Bush. (See http://progreso-weekly.com/2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1592:evidence-that-bush-family-profits-from-florida-education&catid=43:this-aint-disneyland&Itemid=62)>

Neil Bush with his illustrious brothers

*Danny Weil is the author of the groundbreaking 2009 expose The Charter School Movement: a Reference Handbook. He has published several eye opening chapters from the book in Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/weil08262009.html and Dissident Voice http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/11/neo-liberalism-the-leveraging-of-charter-schools-with-public-and-private-funds/

To be continued with a discussion of Obama’s pro-privatization agenda.

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