The billionaires understand the growing rage caused by inequality on an unprecedented scale. They worry that the rage might be directed at them. This far, it has been captured by rightwing populists like Trump, whose tax policies deepen the crisis of inequality by transferring more wealth to the one tenth of the one percent.
Jacobin explains that multibillionaires like Bill Gates are trying to buy time through their philanthropy and “the giving pledge,” which commits them to give away a big chunk of their billions when they die. Unfortunately, or fortunately for them, their capital is so vast that they make more money than they give away, without working. At a certain point, capital multiplies just by sitting in stocks and bonds.
Anand Girihadaras hit a nerve in his book Winners Take All, where he described the elite Charade of pretending to save the world through philanthropy, while building mechanisms to control the lives of others.
Charter schools are a perfect example of elite philanthropy that offers a way to “save poor children” while destroying democratically controlled institutions and transferring control to private boards directed by financiers. The parents of the children being “saved” will never have a voice in the education of their children, will never meet face to face with a board member, will never gain admission to a board meeting, and-if they complain too much-will be told to take their child and go elsewhere.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I coin the phrase: philanthropical bully (add “ism” when necessary)
David Di Gregorio
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We want democracy not oligarchy.
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We also need to look at more local philanthropy as well. In Jax, for instance, a group of (mere) millionaires got together and pooled $50 million for initiatives in the 35-or-so ‘turnaround’ schools in our district. Quite a bit was for teacher bonuses based on the highest performance on state tests. So proud that several teachers from my school were awarded these $15-20k bonuses. They’re ALL gone. These same (mere) millionaires fund all the non-profits, including TFA & KIPP, in their quest to charterize and privatize public schools. They do not get that their band-aids are temporary. —And they get angry when they don’t get what they want.
I am much more concerned about them than Gates: a lot of people have fallen for their nice parties.
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You should be concerned about your state employees in SETDA (you can read their names at the site).
According to a former SETDA director, public employees are lobbying government. SETDA’s goals are public-private partnerships and presumably state statutes that require implementation of digital instructional materials.
Who funds SETDA? Gates.
Through SETDA, state government employees are partnered with the private sector to offer pitch fests and scaling up seminars for ed tech firms.
WTH- that’s oligarchy not democracy
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One of many reasons we should be concerned about Gates is the CEO of the Gates Foundation is on the Facebook board. Other members of the Facebook board are Marc Andreesen who said India was better off under colonialism, Reed Hastings who called for an end to democratically elected school boards and Peter Thiel, who described women voting in a capitalistic democracy as an oxymoron.
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great description of the game: NICE parties
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There is no voice that better reflects the arrogance and control of the foundations and villainthropies than the articles found at the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
When the government of the people takes over, one item on the agenda should be relabeling higher ed. institutions, dividing them into, for-hire think tanks with students as opposed to universities.
Why does Columbia Teachers College allow faculty to withhold their CV.’s from review, denying the public the right to see grants that could drive the professors’ puffery serving billionaire interests like anti-unionism?
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agree
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I think there’s a secondary and perhaps larger effect- they’re buying the public debate.
They fund all these ed reform orgs. They pick the set of speakers before the debate even starts- speakers who agree with them and will promote their agenda. They don’t have to suppress dissent- speakers who disagree with the ed reform party line don’t even make to it to the forum. They’re excluded from the start up funding that creates the org.
In one of the stories critical of Summit Learning one of the people interviewed admitted that ed reformers are reluctant to criticize Chan Zuckerberg projects because they’re all funded by Chan Zuckerberg.
It’s an echo chamber and it extends past philanthropy because the same orgs and ed reform-captured university programs provide all the policy staffing for federal and state governments. They simply go from Gates or Zuckerberg or one of the ed reform orgs Gates or Zuckerberg funds right into government. Then they leave government and become consultants or contractors SELLING to public schools. They’ve utterly dominated every aspect of the market, from creation to execution and it’s ALL the same
It would be difficult to do because a public school advocacy group or org would be excluded from funding, but public schools should think about creating their own pipeline.
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The “ed summit” held in Ohio, sponsored by Gates, and hosted by mayors had two featured speakers, a Gates Impatient Optimist and a Stanford think tank professor who has a posted c.v., 37 pages in length that omits the grants he receives.
Relative to media- Hechinger’s is funded by Chan’s group and Gates.
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“had two featured speakers, a Gates Impatient Optimist and a Stanford think tank professor who has a posted c.v., 37 pages in length that omits the grants he receives.”
All ed reform forums are like that.
DeVos now regularly holds “public education” events that completely exclude anyone from a public school. It has started to be noticed by local media in the state she visits, I think because to anyone outside the echo chamber holding a “public education” event and excluding 90% of students and families seems nuts- it IS nuts.
They’re actually getting worse. They feel they are under attack so they’re circling the wagons, demanding more and more cheerleading and adherence to the faith.
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BUYING THE PUBLIC DEBATE. yes
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Controlling the research and the discourse.
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What good are the vanity projects of billionaires and multi-millionaires? The public gets trickle down poison that attacks our public institutions and undermines the efficacy of our public schools that have served our nation well. We would be so much better off if these wealthy had paid higher taxes which could be use to improve public education, crumbling infrastructure and combat climate change. Instead, we live under the thumb of these biased individuals that make the government dance to their tune, and the tune they play suppresses democracy.
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They’ve so captured the federal policy debate on K-12 public schools that the federal government now uses public funding to support the exact same agenda as Gates or Zuckerberg. They were able to use private money and then essentially match it with public funding, and thereby entrench their approach for what is now DECADES at the federal level.
It’s a monopoly. Go look at the federal focus and see if you can discern any difference at all from one of these orgs. It’s identical. Often they are in lockstep at the same time. The giant marketing push for “blended learning” in ed reform coincided with the exact same push at the federal level. This way the billionaires actually leverage their initial funding and capture the entire policy debate. There’s no dissent at all.
We joke about how ed reformers use the same slogans over and over, but think about that. Think about how that shows such a uniformity of thought they literally all use the same (limited) language and phrases. They don’t even have the vocabulary to criticize or object or dissent anymore. The slogans are a kind of term of art that shuts down any disagreement.
I really blame our politicians. They outsourced their entire jobs to these people. It’s lazy. They come into this with this ridiculous deferential attitude that assumes because these people are wealthy they all must be brilliant and we all must follow them. It’s just appallingly subservient. How can we respect them when they don’t even respect themselves enough to do their own thinking and work?
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Chiara-
Am intrigued by the notion that politicians are to blame. Certainly they’re part of it. I extend the blame further, however: to parents who insist on pathways for their children to continue social reproduction—we take advantage of magnets, gifted programs & meritorious schools; to colleges such as Columbia, who have actual contracts w/ TFA; to venture philanthropists, who COULD use their $ for good; to non-profits which provide pipelines for typically—already-privileged young people (and whose neo-liberalism claims to solve problems) but who are funded by those who wish to destroy public education; to public school systems which accept all of this; and to voters who keep electing the politicians about whom you write. In other words, this hydra is…US.
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Relative to Gates, is the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services any different than the Dept of Ed.?
Did HHS fund the paper advocating academics for pre-schoolers?
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In the red states they are copying and pasting ALEC’s dystopian agenda and making it the law of the land.
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They’ve so captured the federal policy debate on K-12 public schools that the federal government now uses public funding to support the exact same agenda as Gates or Zuckerberg.
Exactly. The whole debate has been bought, top to bottom. Everywhere you look, there is an astroturf organization led by one of the paid Ed Deform hirelings who does the musical chairs bit from one of these organizations to another, and they all have names suggesting that they are grass roots organizations (Students First! Parent Revolution! The 74!) instead of shill and shell outfits funded by the same few billionaires. And every time you look at the funding of a research study or a study from the Department for the Privatization of US Education (formerly the USDE), it comes from the same few billionaires or from one of those organizations. It’s all more than a little incestuous, and it’s all fertilized by that great river of green running from the billionaire coffers like the Nile through Egypt.
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Here is what ed reformers are asking us to believe about “self interest”. They submit that public school teachers and public school leaders are “self interested” and should be ignored because they are paid by public schools so therefore have a conflict.
On the other hand, ed reformers, who are paid by these billionaires, are not self interested and do not have a conflict.
Can they explain this? It seems to me they have to decide- people who are paid by an entity either have a conflict of interest or they do not.
Because I can’t square this unless I assume ed reformers themselves, as people, are better and more ethical people than public school advocates. We operate out of “self interest”. They operate out of some higher calling. Is this how they explain this? Because it doesn’t make sense.
In ed reform, charter groups and voucher groups may lobby for funding without charges of “self interest”. However, if public schools lobby for funding they are “self interested” and to be ignored. Either neither are self interested or both are- having two standards is nonsensical.
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These are extremely important points. Of course, pointing out logical problems with thinking has never served to really help political discourse in this country.
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Had we a people centered economy and not a profit centered economy, all would be different. If we had a robust tax funded but completely independent media (along with profit media), all would be different. A society must not be placed in the position to enable a kind philanthropy based on the whims and beliefs of the philanthropist – this is not democratic. And schools for our children’s young minds would be much different! I feel the largest reason for the big “social / emotional” learning push results from a profit perverted mission in education resulting in wrong reasons to learn, making learning and teaching less of a joyous endeavor for both the teacher and the student.
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But David, don’t you understand how much better it is to have a roomful of oligarchs making all the education decisions instead of millions of classroom practitioners, researchers, and professors of education, English, mathematics, and so on? So much more efficient a means for command and control of the proles who might, if they get out of hand, start having ideas and showing initiative far beyond their ordained caste.
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Because this is how you get innovation: every few years, Mr. Gates convenes his commissariat to do the new thinking for us. Just ask him, he will tell you. The secret is to standardize everything under his command.
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“making learning and teaching less of a joyous endeavor for both the teacher and the student”
Joy is they key. You said it all there, Mr. Gregorio! Our Prime Directive as teacher/learners must be to cultivate in students an intrinsic motivation to learn.
Instead, we give them exercise sets on applying standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.8.5.666 to snippets of text about random subjects in preparation for THE TEST THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS. Because, you know, according to Ed Deformers, everything in life is a test. It’s all about racing to the top of that stair and leaving the poor suckers who couldn’t keep up with the boss’s random directions panting on the landings far, far below.
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Your references Joy is reminiscent of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. He used the word happiness, that reference that causes some to call him a hedonist, but it is the same idea. The greatest good to the greatest number.
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One of the problems with a simple hedonistic calculus is that joys are compound and incommensurate. How does one compare the joy of seeing your child graduate, of drinking or eating after long thirst or hunger, of seeing one’s creative work achieve recognition, of finishing that marathon or standing at that summit, of simply being present to a beloved, of that skit by Gilda Radner, of being engrossed in a fascinating book, of having a great idea, and so on? Robert Nozick poses a thought experiment that you probably know that he believed to be conclusive contra hedonism: suppose, he says, that you could go into a Happiness Machine and experience, there, for the rest of your life, absolute bliss, as long as you didn’t leave it. Would you? Most people say they wouldn’t, and so, Nozick argues, joy is not the ultimate good. But I think he’s wrong, for the problem with the Happiness Machine is that we would have to forego the joys that come, part of the parcel, with the muck in life, and that’s what we really want–fulfillment–the coast down the hill AFTER the long climb up. But certainly Bentham’s hedonistic calculus, as he calls it, is a reasonable rule of thumb for considering policy. How many will this help or hurt and to what degree?
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On this issue: an interesting set of arguments: https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm
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I think we all are searching for the idea of balance in society. Bentham took his stab at it, and we all must do so as well.
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I agree. I’m also tired of being told they’re nice people. I’m sure they’re nice people. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t about them. It’s about us. I don’t want to be dependent on 15 nice billionaires for public education policy anymore than I want to be dependent on 15 mean billionaires. It isn’t about them personally. It’s about how we gave them these hugely powerful unelected positions and status and about how they have leveraged that by buying up the whole debate.
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We didn’t give those billionaires all that power. They bought it.
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The people who do the billionaires’ bidding, nice?
SETDA-a public employees organization partnered with the private sector, and funded by Gates.
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Diane we sent the money to the top, spawning a plethora of billionaires with the power to buy it, through legislation enacted by our representatives, late ‘70’s through ‘90’s & counting. The people are not helpless pawns in this.
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exactly said: “nice” is a ridiculous word when discussing ability to understand disconnect
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David, I believe this gets to the root of the problem. As Diane knows, public education is not a “fix” for a “broken” economy. Our schools are going to serve the economy more than the other way around. Therefore, we have to fundamentally change our economy if we are to fundamentally change our schools.
Jacobin Magazine is an explicitly anti-capitalist magazine. The writers would assert that we cannot fully solve our “education” problems within a capitalist economy, because the capitalist economy is what allows these problems to flourish. When we talk about things like privatization, under-funding, inequality, and so on, these are the result of an economy driven by profit.
What is an economy that is “people-centered” rather than “profit centered”…? And how do we create that…?
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Bill Gates is so rich that he doesn’t even have to do the thinking for us. He can hire David Coleman to do that. All he has to do is to conceive of the experiment that he wants to conduct on us—the one that just happens, purely by coincidence, to involve testing on computers and teaching by computer and cradle-to-grave stack-ranking and surveillance by computer of the gritfulness of the performances of the proles at their part-time service jobs with no benefits. Yes, he is in the computer business, but this is just coincidental. Such synchronicity!
“Will you be taking that latte on the verandah, Mistuh Gates?”
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Gee, I hope I was sufficiently obsequious in that note! Very important to my social credit ranking!
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Your social credit ranking is directly proportional to your willingness to go along to get along. No dissent allowed. As Coleman said, “Nobody gives a [hoot] what you think.”
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Hmmm. Then I’m going to have some issues. Rm. 101 for me.
Perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps that’s what Coleman heard all the time when he was growing up. Maybe that’s why he now insists on doing the thinking for all K-12 educators nationwide.
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Microsoft soars, Gates to top worlds richest list again. Doing well by doing good?
Bill’s non-profit:
“Do you believe technology can improve lives around the world? We do! We are IT at the Gates Foundation. Do you have the entrepreneurial spirit needed to guide an organization through new technologies like cloud computing…”
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/enterprise-architect-at-bill-melinda-gates-foundation-769668797
Bill’s profit:
“Customers across Africa, including local startups and NGOs, will be able to use the cloud services delivered from these new regions to power innovation and opportunity for Africa and the world…”
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/05/18/microsoft-deliver-microsoft-cloud-datacenters-africa/
“Or is it all “A profit deal?”
“Microsoft has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the cloud revolution…”
https://mspoweruser.com/microsofts-market-cap-leaps-over-apples-on-black-
Gates does well by doing good:
“An app that lets patients do quick health checkups on themselves is the centerpiece of a Gates Foundation-backed project to bring better care to poor regions of Africa. The app stores information from past conversations, and general health information entered by the user, in a secure cloud…”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-10/gates-foundation-backs-self-checkup-app-s-expansion-in-africa
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Gates funds SETDA an organization governed by public employees working for states like yours and mine in the departments of ed. They partner with and further the tech agenda of private companies as well as the Gates agenda, while being paid as employees of the citizens. The SETDA state employees are listed by name and state at the SETDA site. If Gates wanted an ALEC, would it look like SETDA?
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(My initial comment seems not to have been accepted, so I’ll paraphrase).
I do not hold legislators as THE culprit if we’re looking for blame. Plenty of blame for voters—and voter apathy; parents; teachers; school systems; non-profits; venture philanthropists; universities; school boards; business; et al.
In short…US.
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Yes, time for voters to wake the hell up. Teachers have been taking to the streets lately and striking–showing people what can be done. In other words, teaching.
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The students in our communities have no blame. Outside forces have encouraged the testing abuse in the schools that our kids attend and that we pay for.
The blame should be prioritized so that it can be exorcised – greedy politicians, villainthropists, political parties represented by groups like CAP and various PACS that sell a narrative to the media, media, including social, that disseminates falsehoods, organizations like Fordham/AEI who have undue influence in the capitols, self-serving professors and think tank staff, public employees who fail to recognize and expose corruption. And, far down the list are voters too busy making a living and paying for healthcare to be fully informed and who are too dispirited to care.
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The French are taking to the streets to fight neoliberal policies. We should not emulate the violence of the “gilets jaunes,” but their spirit of protest and refusing to accept the status quo. Lots of Americans are “asleep at the wheel” accepting the trickle down poison of the 1%.
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You’re right Kelley. It is US….but how are we supposed to know if the politicians that we vote into office will turn around and serve the interests of big business instead those that voted them into office? Obama, for example, offered us hope and then he turned around and protected big business as millions of people lost their homes and livelihoods. How were we to know? The problem is all the dark money that is so darn enticing. It feels almost hopeless every single election cycle.
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Yes, the people voted for Obama because he promised hope and change. Then they voted for Trump because he promised hope and change. As George Bush the Lesser said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjmjqlOPd6A
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We’e seen a lot of popular films lately about a dystopian near future in which a small group of the ultra-wealthy live in a pristine bubble and suck the remaining value from a sickened populous and a ravaged world–The Hunger Games, The Island, and so on. It’s probably not an exaggeration is that this is the basic premise of most sci-fi action films these days. These films get a lot of things right: a) the rich and sort-of-rich increasingly live in almost total isolation from the poor, who are exploited but keep conveniently out of sight and out of mind, b) we’ve entered a new robber baron era of vast concentration of income and wealth and power, c) the Earth is being ravaged (the average wild vertebrate species has declined in population by 60 percent in only forty years, and insect species have declined by an astonishing 80 percent), and d) the response of the leaders of the New Feudal Order has been to ramp up command and control technologies, including surveillance tech and firepower and blurring of lines between military and police functions. So here we are. A single guy like Gates can basically take over K-12 education in the US, and he’s just getting started. Vast, concentrated power.
What is the way forward? Well, we have the model of the Social Democracies of Europe. We can pull back from this. And our young people seem to know what’s going on, and that’s a very good thing. Perhaps they will save us. May you live in interesting time says the old curse. Well, here we are.
My favorite of all those dystopian works, after 1984, btw, is H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In that one, the workers have evolved into a subterranean species that feeds upon the delicate Eloi–the descendants of the ownership class. It doesn’t have to come to that. LOL.
The future being created by the wealthy isn’t pretty for us, for the planet, OR FOR THEM, but there are very few examples, historically, of people voluntarily relinquishing power and control. This could get ugly, and I pray that it won’t.
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Yikes!!! Correction:
April 28, 2019 at 5:03 pm
WE’VE seen a lot of popular films lately about a dystopian near future in which a small group of the ultra-wealthy live in a pristine bubble and suck the remaining value from a sickened POPULACE and a ravaged world
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The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants…..Thomas Jefferson. I think it needs to get ugly so that we can survive on this planet….and I think it needs to happen very quickly. The marches, walk outs and signs aren’t doing an adequate job of getting the message across to those in control of this mess.
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All praise to those brave teachers, recently, who have taken to the streets. But I hold out hope for solutions at the ballot box–the adoption of universal, single-payer health insurance; relief for the next generation from their crushing college debt burden; awakening of education officials and policy makers to the power of bottom-up continuous improvement; a steeply progressive tax system; more worker ownership via stock ownership plans–the kind of stuff that doesn’t sound sexy but that could make things bearable by ordinary people. I haven’t exactly liked what I’ve seen of what has followed revolutions, historically. The terror. The purges. The dictatorial state to restore order.
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We can either lead in this, or we can continue down that dark road. Feel the Bern.
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Thank you, Bob. I have to say I distrust posters like LisaM when they post about blood and “needs to get ugly”.
Maybe marches and walk outs don’t help, but VOTING does, and also not trying to suppress just enough Democratic votes — as we saw in 2016 — to allow a true tyrant to take over.
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Here’s a guy who agrees with Lisa’ sentiment: https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcsaoffblock&p=derek+jensen+star+wars+youtube#id=3&vid=e7df34af6b6eddb698f41fae620f0203&action=click
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Oops. here’s the right link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSjwMr3SU4U
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Let me add, emphatically, that I think Jensen wrong. Funny, but wrong. The right-wing in the US has magnified such tiny splinter groups as Antifa all out of proportion because they want a bogeyman to justify all-out police state-style repression. Same thing they did with the supposed Geroge-Soros-funded caravans. Gandhi or Lenin? I’ll take Gandhi every time.
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That comment by Jefferson was made in a letter in which he was responding to Shay’s Rebellion. The colonists had gone heavily into debt to pay for the Revolutionary War, and they imposed taxes, and ordinary farmers in Massachusetts returned home after the privations of the war and their heroic struggle to find that the new government that they had won with their valor had imposed tax liens on their properties. They weren’t particularly happy about this. The difficulty that the new government had in dealing with the insurrection was one of the impetuses for canning the Articles and Confederation and adopting a new Constitution that would provide for a standing army. So, this issue of the power of the centralized state versus the power in the hands of ordinary people was present from the beginning.
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Matt Tompkins, a Democratic fundraiser, filed papers creating a PAC to advance Biden’s campaign. Biden says he doesn’t want their help. But, reportedly, the PAC will begin running ads.
If we find out the donors to Tompkins’ PAC, we will know who wants Biden.
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And the PAC, ironically, is called for “For the People.”
If HRC Superdelegate Randi Weingarten pulls the same stunt and issues a preemptive AFT endorsement of Joe Biden (as she did by steamrolling Hillary Clinton’s endorsement through), I am done paying union dues.
She sat by and let Obama/Duncan escalate the war on public schools and public school teachers.
And as far as labor issues go, Obama/Dems didn’t even get card check through. Perhaps if they had done that, workers in the private sector would have felt more empowered as they negotiated better wages and working conditions, thus reducing the attack on public-sector workers. But no, Wall Street and the Banksters wouldn’t have any of that. Must have the working classes at each other’s throats to keep them distracted from the grifting at the top.
Obama listened to them very well, and he and Michelle were gifted with a $64 million book advance.
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Sadly true- also true, the worst Democrat is better than the best Republican.
What Obama did to the people of Flint was unconscionable. Trump’s blasphemous legacy to America won’t be undone without upheaval or generations of voters demanding a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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“The uptick in billionaire-funded charitable ventures is the result of vastly increased inequality, not the solution to the problems.”
What’s happening in philanthropy always reminds me of the scene in “Network” where the honchos sit Beale down & explain that foreign oil interests have to be allowed to buy up US assets: the money flowed out & now will flow back in, like gravity.
The problem does not lie with billionaires & what they choose to do w/their excess funds, nor with capitalism itself. It lies in how we are governing capitalism. There’s a good series in The Week by Ryan Cooper; the 2nd of 4 installments traces how we got to where we are now: https://theweek.com/articles/725483/return-trustbusters What we see going on in education mirrors every aspect of US society today.
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At the state level, you can contact your state employees of SETDA, an organization governed by state employees while funded by Gates.
They advance the goals of private sector tech companies i.e. public-private partnerships and digital learning which is aligned with Gates’ goals.
Their names are listed, by state, at the site.
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It seems to me that we can teach all of the problems above to over population. No thickly populated place has ever been governed for very long without some degree of restrictions on some of the basic freedoms described in the enlightenment upon which we base our government. Social democracy restricted partially the business interests of the countries, but they never restricted the private interests who canibalized Africa. Europe, thickly populated for years, found freedom of speech in the suppression of the world.
So far, the only control on population has been tyranny (as was the case in China) or wealth (which has been the case in developed nations). Capitalism depends on expanding markets for its success. Can capitalism continue to exist if it succeeds in making the whole world rich? Only, it seems to me, if we see each person adding to the processing of raw materials, a finite entity. Can Enligtenment values exist within a framework of controlled economy? Some think not.
We are required by a sense of fairness to offer an opportunity for our citizens to attain the level of participation in society that gives them a feeling of worth, indeed to offer the same chance to people around the world. We are also required to consider the practicality of a world in which we do not do this. Whatever solution we find for our problems, we must admit that those who feel shut out will ultimately respond violently. Since most of us respond through some leadership figure, this means responding through increasingly violent people, legitimizing the latest Robespierre, Lennin, or Hitler. Whatever our solution, we must make people feel legitimately that they have had someone listen to them. The easiest way to do this is to listen to them.
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First line: the word teach should read attribute. How does auto correct get such a name?
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