If there's one complaint that I have of the Obama Presidency it's his handling of education reform; which he has allowed to become the pet project for one political ideology after another, all in the service of private industry and metropolitan economics.  Venture philanthropy, so called because it invests heavily in non-profits that follow models of venture-capitalism, is one of the largest educational policy drivers in the country. The problem is when the policy doesn't use good research, and the the drivers are motivated by political ideologies regarding unregulated markets that have no bearing on quality education.

     There are three major philanthropic foundations involved in the school reform game; The Broad Foundation (pronounced like "road"), The Walton Foundation (of Wal-Mart fame), and the Gates Foundation (as in Bill and Melinda), the latter of which has become larger than the other two combined after a gift of $30 billion from Warren Buffet. These three foundations, all "venture philanthropists" have insinuated themselves into the policy-making machinery of our government at every level; from the schools all the way to our federal government. They do this through the careful application of personnel placement, leverage, and nearly $4 billion a year.

     The Broad Foundation, the smallest of the three, is getting its largest return from a training program called the Broad Academy, whose mission is to transition professionals from the corporate, military, and government world into jobs as superintendents and high-ranking administrators in low-performing school districts. Joanne Barkan, of Project Muse, reports that as of 2009, 43% of all large urban superintendent openings were filled by Broad graduates. In addition their Broad Residency Program places Master's level business professionals in managerial positions in districts, charter-school management organizations, and state and federal educational agencies. barkan refers to these not as programs, but as "pipelines"; conduits by which a foundation may strategically place individuals within an organization to leverage decisionmaking without directing addressing public policy. Once Broad alumni enter a school system, they seek to bring in more "Broadlings". The LA Unified School District, the 2nd largest in the nation, is now effectively controlled by Broad Foundation alumni as they have taken nearly every senior administrative position form superintendent down.

     The Gates Foundation, most known for their championing of charter school interventions, has actually been in the "school turnaround" game for several years. They initially attempted a "small schools challenge" in which large metropolitan schools were broken up into smaller schools through multi-million dollars grants; the rationale being that smaller class-sizes get better results. However, there was never any research that this particular approach would be effective and, in fact, it was not. Teachers quit, students dropped out, graduation rates plummeted, and the schools were a failure. In 2008, the Gates' invited 100 prominent people in education to their home to discuss their new plan; performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school "turnaround" interventions for low-performing schools (which includes firing principals and staff, closing schools, and charter schools). This was essentially the foundations attempt to apply a venture capitalist business model to our schools.

     They immediately started pimping it to Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, who referred to it as "the Bible of turnaround", and has incorporated it heavily into federal policy. There are several reasons this happened, not the least of which is the fact that the U.S. Department of Education is a "who's who" of former "big three" foundation directors, including Duncan himself. Duncan even appointed a Director of Philanthropic Engagement, by his own account, "signalling to the world that the Depatment is 'open for business'."

     The problem with all of these multi-billion dollar funders and their million dollar grants are that they are driven by ideologies that have no statistical or researched basis. Charter schools, the Gates Foundation's self-described "magic bullet" for school reform, were found in a comprehensive Stanford study conducted in 2009 to be only 17% effective. A staggering 83% of charter schools are as effective or less effective than the public school they shut down to create it. Yet the Gates pushed on, even funding a propaganda documentary called Waiting for Superman and funded research to support and promote their blind adherence to an education system based on a business-model.

     The latest blow to public schools was in Obama's "Race to the Top" (RTTT) in 2010; a competetive federal grant program in which states competed for federal dollars by adopting these Draconian turnaround interventions state-wide. Some states rewrote laws, implemented hasty school policies, and created major disruptions in their state education systems. The Gates Foundation attempted to further meddle in public policy by looking through the various state's applications and offering $250,000 grants to those states whose proposals they liked the best, causing a huge blow-back from other states calling the Foundation unfair and manipulative. Regardless, almost every one of the Gates Foundation's hand-picked states received RTTT money.

     I think our country's philanthropic organizations are one our strongest assets; and by writing this I don't intend to disparage those people that willfully invest in our schools, but it's fairly easy to tell the difference between philanthropic investment and an attempt to guide public policy. Dana Goldstein, self-professed "lady wonk", points out on her blog the difference in charitable giving to education between three "old" foundations (Ford, Annenberg, and Carnegie) at around $100 million in 2005, and three "new" foundations (Walton, Gates, and Broad) at $500 million in 2005. While the former foundations have increased their funding only marginally, the three new foundations are firmly in the billion-and-up range. With this kind of investment, the billionaires running these foundations feel they are entitled to not only dictating how the money is spent, but in determining what direction policy and practice will take in something as broad-reaching as out national public school system. It seems that venture philanthropy is just as prone to unethical manipulations and perversions of the democratic process as venture capitalism has been. It certainly isn't surprising when the same people are in charge of both.