David Callahan wrote an insightful article in “Inside Philanthropy” about something that most of us have noticed: the growing power of foundations that use their money to impose their ideas and bypass democratic institutions. In effect, mega-foundations like Gates and Walton use their vast wealth to short circuit democracy.
Callahan identifies five scary trends but they all boil down to the same principle: Unaccountable power is supplanting democracy.
He writes:
“1. The growing push to convert wealth into power through philanthropy
“Look at nearly any sector of U.S. society, and you’ll find private funders wielding growing power. Most dramatic has been the reshaping of public education by philanthropists like Gates and the Waltons, but the footprint of private money has also grown when it comes to healthcare, the environment, the economy, social policy, science, and the arts.
“Whether you agree or disagree with the specific views pushed by private funders, you’ve got to be disturbed by how a growing army of hands-on mega donors and foundations seem to get more clever every year about converting their money into societal influence. Love it or hate it, the Common Core is a great example: In effect, private funders are helping determine how tens of millions of kids will be educated for years to come. And to think that we once saw public education as America’s most democratic institution!
“Inevitably, the upshot of all this is a weaker voice for ordinary folks over the direction of American life. The veteran funder Gara LaMarche has a recent piece in Democracy that crystallizes the worries that many people have that philanthropy has become a powerful agent of civic inequality.
“2. How philanthropic dollars have become another form of political money
“Zeroing in on politics, we see philanthropic money increasingly shaping public policy and legislative outcomes. This trend isn’t new, of course, and along with Sally Covington, I wrote in the 1990s about the huge influence that conservative foundations like Bradley and Olin had over policy debates of that era by funding a network of think tanks and legal groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Perhaps the greatest achievement of these funders was knocking off the federal welfare entitlement, after investing millions in work by Charles Murray and others.
“What’s different today is that many more funders, with much more money, are playing the policy game.”
The money quote: “And to think that we once saw public education as America’s most democratic institution!”
In city after city, state after state, wealthy funders are underwriting charter schools to replace democratically controlled public schools, school closings, mayoral control, state takeovers, and other means of removing democratic institutions. These funders have no compunction about privatizing “America’smost democratic institution.” They think they are acting in the public interest by removing the public from public education. Their wealth leads them to exercise power recklessly. They think they know everything because they are richer than almost everyone else. They are wrong. And their arrogance is dangerous.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com.
Democracy in America will end with a whimper rather than a bang. Voters buy into a commercialized form of governing comparing brands rather than substance.
At a recent youth activity, one mom was ranting about Common Core and how she wrote letters to the school board and complained to the principal and teachers about adopting this curriculum. My 14 year old daughter politely explained Common Core is a national standard from the governors. The mother looked confused. So goes low information voters.
” My 14 year old daughter politely explained Common Core is a national standard from the governors.”
It is????
Sure, NGA, Achieve, Chamber, and throw in a few billionaires with hoodies and Lambrogoni’s.
Phony Phoundations and the whole armory of Think Tanks have become the slickest way for corporations to plump their bottom lines while tax-sheltering the dollars they use to do so.
But this is just a repeat of what happend at the turn of the last century, when the Carnegies, Fords, and Rockefellers (among others) used their fortunes to create the current public education system. They funded the Progressive education schools, the teachers colleges, and just about every scheme to apply Fredrick Taylor’s “scientific management” scam to public education. Nothings really changed, except the demand that schools resemble call centers and distribution centers rather than factories, since that’s what passes for industry today.
I really encourage readers to picku Diane’s Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform and Raymond Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency. These books really explain how our current schools were designed for social control and economic repression, not intellectual development.
And read abotu Cox and Reese commissions, which, while flawed by partisan edges, nevertheless started to expose a lot of the influence the great philanthropies had on our society.
This isn’t new. The only to stop it is to control the distribution of wealth and power.
What we have here is the Cult of Efficiency 2.0… and with the market-based Republican economists driving the direction of Congress and Lamar Alexander promising to bring the reauthorization of ESEA to a vote one shudders to think what will replace RTTT waivers…
Good points, but don’t forget how Common Core and RttT are the products of the Gates Foundation working with Obama. The cult has spread across both parties. In many ways, our current mess reflects the basic philosophical ideas hat arose with progressive education. Maybe it’s time to return to a liberal education and stop the attempts at social engineering.
“Foilanthropy”
The billionaire’s foilanthropy
Transforms and foils democracy
It circumvents the people’s voice
Replacing it with a wealthy choice
SomeDam Poet,
I love your poems. Thank you. They are priceless and so right on.
Thanks,
Glad you like them.
I enjoy writing them, especially the goofy ones.
This trend is no more than bullying with money. Unless Congress makes a move to limit money in politics, the wealthy will continue to exert undue influence over the populace. Congress is further paralyzed from making decisions to benefit the middle and poor because these same wealthy individuals own their vote through campaign contributions. The system is corrupt. There must be some fundamental changes if we are ever going to move forward. At least the 19th century robber barons built libraries and museums for all to enjoy and use. Today’s group is more interested in using their wealth to insidiously shape the thinking of the proletariat.
Money is God to a lot of people and underfunded education systems just don’t think about the consequences of accepting money on their programs. Conservative state governments play into the needs by cutting the budgets for education so that the school systems have little choice but to accept the foundation money and follow the rules for its use.
This reminds me of when the grants were developed for Abstinence Only. The biggest qualification was that the schools could not teach comprehensive sex ed, just a narrow “don’t do it” curriculum that was laced with conservative religion. When the grants were first being funded the peer reviewers, those who read and checked the grant requests for accuracy and quality were carefully screened and selected when asked to stay in DC for another week to review the grants after they reviewed other grants. Of course they got an additional week in a plush hotel with most meals provided free. But the criteria for being chosen seemed to have little to do with qualifications and much to do with one’s philosophy regarding abstinence—-for it.
Even though the Abstinence grants were government funded, I believe they opened the eyes of rich, conservative philanthropists to the power they had when they offered money for particular kinds of behaviors by educators.
What we need to counter these conservatives who would destroy the democracy of public schools is rich liberal donors with the same amount of money providing an alternative. How different would have been the outcome of the devastating mid term elections is the more moderate candidates had been able to overcome the Koch Brothers lies. Trouble is the rich get their money by being conservative and denying equality to the working people.
“What we need to counter these conservatives who would destroy the democracy of public schools is rich liberal donors with the same amount of money providing an alternative.”
No, twinkie1cat, that’s not what we need. We need adequate funding for all schools with solid curriculum bases for all levels and subjects. And we need teachers and administrators to quit being GAGAers and show some cojones and stand up against all the current educational malpractices of the edudeformers.
As Unca Ronie’s wife implored with drugs: “Just say no!” And as it used to be said “Do the right thing!”
Watch out for anything from the Heritage Foundation. There head guy is from Louisiana, the state with some of the worst schools and is extremely influential. He was once a state legislature and when he says “jump” it seems that other politicians say “How High” That and any group associated with the American Family Association or Focus on the Family are extremely dangerous to freedom and democracy in the schools.
Who is that guy t1c? Name names please.
Hegemony…enough said!
TRUE and spot on.
Thanks for posting my article, Diane. Here’s another money quote for your readers that relates to education.
4. The rise of the know-it-all funder
Just because you were great at making software or shorting stocks doesn’t mean that you’ll be great at eradicating malaria or ensuring that kids can read by third grade. If you’re worth billions, though, nobody may tell you that.
Self-prepossessed funders are hardly a new phenomenon, but there are more of them running around these days, and with bigger bank accounts. Why? Because great fortunes can be made much more quickly in today’s information economy, and so it’s not uncommon to find retired multi-billionaires in their 30s and 40s launching second careers in philanthropy. Many of these people have very high confidence in their problem-solving abilities.
In an age of hands-on living mega donors, the possibilities for big screwups are self-evident and we’ve seen some doozies so far—like, say, turning urban school districts upside down to create small high schools and then realizing that this idea wasn’t as brilliant as MS-DOS.
David Callahan’s article serves a good purpose but, it also perpetuates the Arnold Foundation’s false “philanthropic” message, about pensions. If Mr. Callahan read Matt Taibbi’s article, in Rolling Stone, “Looting the Pensions”, John Arnold’s Wikipedia entry, Keith Brainard’s take-down of the pension manufactured crisis,
and, if he shared with readers, that average pension costs are just 3% of state budgets, the average pension is $19,000 and, many people pay into pensions, in lieu of Social Security, it would have been a better article.
“But this is just a repeat of what happend at the turn of the last century, when the Carnegies, Fords, and Rockefellers (among others) used their fortunes to create the current public education system. ”
Easy does it there, moosensquirrels, heaven forbid we view ourselves no brighter
than Adam munching on that magic apple…
Carnegies, Fords, Rockefellers, among others, created public education to HOBBLE
themselves. Before they worked their magic, democracy was created, to hobble power.
This temporary “blip” (wealth concentration/poverty) is just a “bug”, not to be confused
as proof of a strategy.
Santa Claus is coming to town…
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse.
Sort of related…. there’s a bizarre editorial in National Review that suggests the best governing strategy for Republicans the next two years is not to govern. So they’ve gone from total obstruction to doing nothing – guess that is an improvement. Maybe I can get them out of my classroom now.
A fairly recent book titled Think Tanks in America (Thomas Medvetz. U of Chicago Press) traces the evolution, since the 1960s and 1970s, of think tanks as holding companies for intellectual talent into media hounds and drivers of policy formation. Many emerged as “counterintelligence” for conservatives who were licking their wounds after the defeat of Barry Goldwater. The author traces the development of political and media savvy at the Brookings, and other think tanks enabled by big money, including formation of the Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute.
The author, a sociologist, says that think tanks now hire people who have one or more “skill sets”– as political aides, media specialists, entrepreneurs, or scholars. Scholars are on board to lend the intellectual credibility and “evidence” for reports that are carefully edited and graphically designed for the intended audiences. The reports are user friendly–with executive summaries, press releases, and talking points. These media-savvy techniques lighten the load of “thinking” and tend to forestall critical investigation by the public, reporters, staff who prepare members of Congress. The styling of reports so they seem to be fair and informed helps in framing “public debate” and media uptake.
Think tanks are now captives of what I call it the Andy Warhol effect: “Fame is a function of publicity.” The scholars who find a home in think tanks produce opinions and policies that make news. Any intellectual seriousness or practical wisdom is politically impotent without the media hype that forwards the agenda of the thing tank.
Same with foundations, who are collaborating on projects while hiding from public view and the IRS–aided by companies such as Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and professionals in the game of grant-making. The interlocking directorates and partnerships are complex. Diane Ravitch has served in the capacity of investigative reporter and whistleblower, as have others. Dismantling the infrastructure that is intent of vanishing the public from the public sphere is another problem altogether.
A book was written or possibly a column of some sort, do not remember the title nor author, on how these philanthropic endeavors actually make money for the people who produce them. As a non economist it is unclear to me now just how this happens but the tax laws enable it to happen evidently.
TOO
It is NOT just in philanthropy that big money is destroying democratic government.
Try anything written by Lee Fang of The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/article/181762/venture-capitalists-are-poised-disrupt-everything-about-education-market
I feel like a broken record here, but it’s the tax credit, not a deduction, that makes investing in low income charter schools, and education organizations so worthwhile.
According to Lee Fang, Ed Reform is a $788.7 BILLION industry. We could finance another Iraq War with that kind of money. Even if the CCSS is marginally better than the status quo, it’s not worth the cost.
Costs include government expenditures and loss to the Treasury from tax avoidance.
See How Buffett Saves Billions On His Tax Return
Now, perhaps most “interesting” is the case in which a billionaire donates to his very own “charitable foundation” (with the subsequent tax savings) and then uses those foundation monies for purposes which might just happen to relate to his business (by pure coincidence, of course)
I’ll just give one purely hypothetical example: a software magnate uses monies donated to his foundation to develop “national standards” for schools that effectively ‘standardizes students’, making it possible to write “standard” curriculum and/or testing software that could be sold to a very large number of schools across the country.
But this is all hypothetical, of course.
Sorry, messup up the link above
see How Buffett Saves Billions On His Tax Return
We need to do as Jefferson advised regarding corporations, limit their life span and revoke their charters whenever they enter the arena of politics. Clearly our robed rulers did not read what the founders did early on to the first national bank, and to corporations thereafter. They certainly did not regard them as people, but had no problems jailing the bad actors hiding behind them. They warned that corporations should never be allowed to be involved in elections in any form or fashion. We have lost our heritage.
Agree.
Adding, when the corporate self-servers, from the financial sector, are forced to stop the pretense of philanthropy, the tide of “The Campaign for America’s Future”, will flood over them. While claiming to have fixes for manufactured crises, they drag down GDP and make a mockery of American progress. It speaks to their deep character flaws.
The arguments of their defenders, like David Brooks, are so obviously absurd, they should be dismissed.
Good riddance to the “philanthropists” at San Jose University, who failed to be decent human beings. (Huffpo)
Because they can, plutocrats corrupt good institutions and demoralize good people.