Andrea Gabor is a professional journalist who has the skill to tell the story that readers of this blog know very well and bring it to a larger audience. The public needs to understand the squalid theft of our public goods that is being carried out in broad daylight by so-called philanthropists.

This article by Gabor was published by Harper’s, where it will reach a large public audience that does not read this blog.

Gabor begins:

Last May, the families of students at Cypress Academy, an independent charter school in New Orleans, received an email announcing that the school would close when classes ended the following week and that all its students would be transferred to another nearby charter for the upcoming year. Parents would have the option of entering their children in the city’s charter-enrollment lottery, but the lottery’s first round had already taken place, and the most desirable spots for the fall were filled.

Founded in 2015, a decade after New Orleans became the nation’s first city to begin replacing all its public schools with charters, Cypress was something of a rarity. Like about nine in ten of the city’s charter schools, it filled spaces by lottery rather than by selective admission. But while most of the nonselective schools in New Orleans had majority populations of low-income African-American students, Cypress mirrored the city’s demographics, drawing the children of professionals—African-American and white alike—as well as poorer students. Cypress reserved 20 percent of its seats for children with reading difficulties, and it offered a progressive education model, including “learning by doing,” rather than the strict conduct codes that dominated the city’s nonselective schools. In just three years, the school had outperformed many established charters—a particular feat given that one in four Cypress students had a disability, double the New Orleans average. Families flocked to Cypress, especially ones with children who had disabilities.

Faced with a sizable deficit, Cypress had to cut costs. The district did not offer help. Although it was academically successful, Cypress closed.

Big Philanthropy first embraced school privatization in the mid-Eighties, when Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation underwrote John Chubb and Terry Moe’s Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, which became the bible of the privatization movement. Founded in 1942 by brothers in factory automation, the Bradley Foundation had long supported right-wing causes, including dismantling unions, and its wide-ranging support of market-based education reform went hand in hand with this goal. Among other efforts, the foundation helped to finance Milwaukee’s 1990 school voucher law, the nation’s first—and to defend it against legal challenges. As far back as the 1950s, the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman had advocated for a system of government-funded school vouchers that would allow parents to use tax dollars to pay for private schools; however, vouchers had an ignominious history in the South, where they were used as a way to circumvent court-ordered desegregation.

When vouchers made no headway, the education privatizers took up charter schools as the best way  to eliminate public schools and bust the teachers’ unions. The charter cause was led by the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

In the past, big foundations funded the ideas presented to them by grantees. In the new era of philanthrocapitalism, the big foundations gave money to grantees who agreed to carry out their plans.

New Orleans gave the philanthrocapitalists a virtually clean slate on which to play with their ideas.

Gabor writes:

The system operated on a bottom-line approach known as the portfolio model, which seeks to manage schools like stocks in a Wall Street portfolio; the model rewards high performers (as measured primarily by test scores) with further investment and punishes poor performers by cutting off funding or by shuttering them. The promise of this model was that idealistic technocrats would run schools like businesses, emphasizing competition, financial incentives, and accountability. Freed from bureaucracy and union rules, schools would blossom and adapt to meet the needs of children. Families could vote with their feet; if they didn’t like a school, they could choose another anywhere in the city. Schools that did not meet the grade would be closed, but new and better schools would open in their places. To realize these benefits, the New Orleans reformers stripped the locally elected school board of much of its authority and ceded control to nonelected charter-management organizations and non-profit groups. For the next decade, democratic oversight of the vast majority of New Orleans schools effectively ceased to exist. Instead, education policy was largely dictated by the charter establishment and a handful of its wealthy donors.

Gabor goes on to describe how the chartering process was “designed to deny input by community groups.” National corporate charter chains were encouraged to open new charters.

Gabor details how philanthropists are invading district after district, pouring millions into front groups intended to usurp democratic control and replace it with corporate control.

This is the future imagined by major philanthropists. One in which public schools have been replaced by corporate chains, where unions have been abolished, where the voice of the community is minimized or ignored.