In this post, Peter Greene spells out the difference between philanthropy and the desire to control the lives of others.
One is generous, the other is a blunt use of power to gratify one’s own ego.
One helps people achieve the goals they have set for themselves, the other imposes the donor’s will on unwilling and resistant recipients, whose voice is silenced.
“Modern fauxlanthropy is not about helping people; it’s about buying control, about hiring people to promote your own program and ideas. It’s about doing an end run around the entire democratic process, even creating positions that never existed, like Curriculum Director of the United States, and then using sheer force of money to appoint yourself to that position. It’s about buying compliance.
“It is privatization. It is about taking a section of the public sector and buying control of it so that you can run it as if it was your own personal possession.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is the best explanation of modern billionaire “philanthropy” that I’ve ever read. Dale Carnegie, in contrast, didn’t seek to control knowledge or librarians when he established libraries. He simply supported a public benefit.
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I think you meant Andrew.
Dale is the self improvement guru who sells the tapes.
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Andrew. Not Dale.
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Let’s not pretend that Andrew Carnegie was some kind of altruistic saint. Read, for instance, about his role in the Johnstown Flood. The extremely wealthy have always been about themselves and their playthings. Whatever “charitable” efforts they’ve made have always been about burnishing their legacy and dodging taxes.
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I thank Andrew Carnegie for the 2,500 public libraries he subsidized. He didn’t tell people what to read. He left a great legacy.
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Libraries are certainly better than charter schools. That’s for sure. The millionaires of the Guilded age, however, blazed a trail for the billionaires today, using private foundations as tax shelters. Billionaires have taken the idea and brought it down to a new low, that’s all. There simply shouldn’t be such vast wealth concentrated in so few hands. No good can come of it.
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There is surely still some philanthropy that is not carried out anonymously, but one thing is certain.
Any money given anonymously with no personal benefit and no strings attached is the real deal.
These days one should be skeptical of anything not done anonymously because chances are, it is done to improve the philanthropists tarnished reputation.
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And or, reduce taxes.
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So AGREE with Peter Greene.
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I just wish they’d be more honest about it. They have an agenda and it isn’t “great schools” – it’s “great schools within our very narrow view of what that means and how to get there”
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/09/06/czi-education-donations-list/
That’s a list of the Chan-Zuckerberg “donations”. They are specifically and exclusively promoting “personalized learning” as that is defined by Facebook and various ed reform and ed tech entities.
So tell people that. Stop telling them this is some kind of freewheeling, open debate and everyone has a shot at getting billionaire bucks. You’re not getting any money from Chan-Zuckerberg unless you sign on to their agenda. That’s the truth. That’s how they drive policy. There is a culling process going on here and billionaires are directing it. Ideas they don’t support never even get to the initial grant stages. THAT’S how they direct it.
They’ll never find any “evidence” that backs up ideas they don’t support because ideas they don’t support aren’t FUNDED. Their coyness and dancing around this basic truth is just infuriating. They really think we are dopes.
All of “personalized learning” revolves around one basic belief- that they can deliver small class size quality instruction on the cheap by using technology. They’re trying to replicate a class size of ten without hiring additional teachers. All the rest is rhetorical frills. Kan Academy at least admit it- they come right out and say they are a cut rate tutoring service, because what is a tutor other than a REALLY small class size?
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Many of the billionaires that get credit for philanthropy have ulterior motives. Most of them are seeking some type of tax avoidance strategy. We know with charter schools they get free money to socialize their risk and privatize their profit. In some cases like Zukerberg or Gates, they set up an LLC so people won’t be able to sue them over their bad ideas. They provide seed money for some vanity project or “vision” that will feed their egos and/or their wallets.
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They would lose most of the money to taxes anyway, so they set up an LlC or foundation to maintain control over how the money is spent, something they would not be able to do if it were merely lost to taxes.
This problem always comes back to taxes, which are really the only way to have any control at all over billionaires.
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Chiara, why don’t you write a short book laying out these and other hard truths about bogus education reform, from the perspective of an informed parent?
Take it a step further, though. Don’t just ask for honesty. Invite your readers to take action and defeat these charlatans.
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If they were honest, no one would go along with their plans –and they know it.
So dishonesty is their only recourse.
And they don’t just THInK we are dopes. They KNOW it.
If we were not dopes, they would not get away with their schemes.
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In fact, if we were not dopes, many of these folks would be sitting in jail.
There are laws regulating experimentation on humans that some of these billionaires have violated (in some cases repeatedly)
The Nuremberg code * highlighted 3 key elements (voluntary informed consent, favorable risk/benefit analysis, and right to withdraw without repercussions) which later became the foundation for further human research regulations*(from Wikipedia)
All three of the above elements have been violated by billionaires in the course of their experiments on school children.
Not only was informed consent not part of Common Core and all the testing that went along with it, but there was never any risk benefit analysis nor a right for parents to withdraw their children with no repurcussions.
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Rhode Island Office of Innovation
Grant Amount: $1.5 million
Grant Reason – RI Office of Innovation spokesperson: The grant is going “to support the state’s personalized learning initiative.”
Why did Rhode Island get this grant? Not because of “evidence” or “data”. They got the grant because they (foolishly) committed their entire public school system to “personalized learning” as promoted by ed reform billionaires. None of them have any idea if any of this has value that equals or exceeds the cost and effort- they just believe it.
If you don’t do that you don’t get the money. That is as top-down controlling as it gets.
Now maybe they believe in it as much as Zuckerberg does! But the fact remains they weren’t getting this money unless they do.
It’s like Arne Duncan saying schools voluntarily and of their own volition adopted his agenda because they understood it was clearly superior. That isn’t what happened. It was accept his agenda or you’re not getting the money.
Go ask Zuckerberg for a grant for your new district, unionized school that had a class size limit of ten where students will have to forgo technology and social media use for the school day because there’s plenty of data that says it’s harming them. Don’t wait by the mailbox for that acceptance letter. That’s one experiment that won’t be funded.
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LeBron James was on ‘Ellen’ the other day talking about his school. Ellen had him play some games to win money for his school. Walmart is one of Ellen’s sponsors. It made my day when LeBron got a $100,000 check from Walmart, though it was probably a tax deduction for the Waltons.
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I love that.
The Waltons never give to public schools other than a few dollars to those in Bentonville, Ark, their HQ
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Yep–it was a tax deduction for the villainthropist Waltons.
Just like villainthropist Bezos will get a hugomongous tax deduction.
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Good column by Peter Greene. Here’s the comment I left:
I think the situation is even worse than Peter Greene describes… because a lot of the “reform” money is coming from hedge fund philanthropists who made their $$$ as vulture capitalists. These “philanthropists” dodge federal, state and local taxes which starves public schools of the money they need to operate effectively. These same “philanthropists” then invest in “grassroots” tax-exempt organizations, some of whom promote the notion that market competition is the solution to all problems and others of whom promote the notion that standardized test scores are the ideal proxy for “success”. These “philanthropists then persuade the public that they have a “product” that can improve the “failing” schools. In some cases the “product” is a technology-based solution like ECOT, but in most cases the solution is the same blunt instrument they’ve used in the private sector: outsourcing the work to lower wage employees who can deliver the same product for a lower cost.
The hedge fund philanthropists view “failing” public school districts the same way they view “weak” corporations. Their plan is to take them over the same way they’ve taken over businesses in the private sector: by getting enough seats on the boards to dictate the “corporate policy”. They are using their vulture capitalism skills to take over the school boards… then replace experienced teachers with high legacy costs with low-wage charter school chains or CAI companies they operate. They can then pocket the “profit” and use it to start the cycle all over again. These vulture philanthropists look at the tax dollars currently going into public education as a pot of gold… and they are going after the big fish in the urban pond first knowing that eventually the smaller fish will follow.
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You got it right! Hedge funds are a symptom of hyper-capitalism. They build nothing but wealth and misery. They attack and destroy the weak. They also target a company or, in this case. an institution. Hedge funds seem to be about profit at any cost. If anything, they are some of the biggest “takers” in our society. They not only take money. They take people’s dignity, their livelihood, and, in some cases, their futures. They are corporations without conscience.
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I would just disagree with one thing.
Hedge funds don’t really build wealth.
They are a parasitic entity that feeds on the work a double wealth of others.
Wall Street is basically a collection of lamprey eels that have attached themselves to our economy and continually suck out several percent of GDP to their own bank accounts each year.
Matt Taibbi called it a vampire squid, but that’s actually not a good analogy because the vampire squid is a predator, not a parasite. A predator kills it’s host outright, while a parasite feeds on it for an extended period. It may kill it eventually, but in many cases it merely weakens it.
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Predator kills it’s prey outright while parasite feeds on it’s host
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Yes, it’s about gratifying the egos of these malanthropists, but thanks secondary. It’s primarily about them gaming the tax system, and getting taxpayers to subsidize their interests and the ideologies that buttress them.
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Sorry, it should read “… but that’s secondary…”
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It should be called Predatory Giving.
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