The Education Wars

Kenneth Saltman has a piece about the Broads and their attempt to destroy public education in the United States:

In the past decade educational policy and reform has come increasingly under the sway of a new form of philanthropy. Venture philanthropy is modeled on venture capital and the investments in the technology boom of the early 1990’s. VP not only pushes privatization and deregulation, the most significant policy dictates of neoliberalism1 by championing charter schools, voucher schemes, private scholarship tax credits, and corporate models of curriculum, administration, and teacher preparation and practice, but Venture Philanthropy is also consistent with the steady expansion of neoliberal language and rationales in public education, including the increasing centrality of business terms to describe educational reforms and policies: choice, competition, efficiency, accountability,
monopoly, turnaround, and failure. Venture philanthropy in education whose leading
proponents include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad
Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation departs radically from the age of
“scientific” industrial philanthropy characterized by Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford. These traditional philanthropies, despite pursuing a largely conservative role of undermining radical social movements, nonetheless framed their projects in terms of the public good and sought to provide individuals with public information through schools,libraries, and museums.

Venture philanthropy treats schooling as a private consumable service and promotes
business remedies, reforms, and assumptions with regard to public schooling. Some of
the most significant projects involve promoting charter schools to inject market
competition and “choice” into the public sector as well as using cash bonuses for teacher pay and to “incentivize” students. VP treats giving to public schooling as a “social investment” that like venture capital, must begin with a business plan, must involve quantitative measurement of efficacy, must be replicable to be “brought to scale”, and ideally will “leverage” public spending in ways compatible with the strategic donor. In the parlance of venture philanthropy grants are referred to as “investments”, donors are called “investors”, impact is renamed “social
return”, evaluation becomes “performance measurement”, grant reviewing turns into
“due diligence”, the grant list is renamed an “investment portfolio,” charter networks are referred to as “franchises” -- to name but some of the recasting of giving on investment.

Within the view of venture philanthropy, donors are framed as both entrepreneurs and
consumers while recipients are represented as investments. One of most significant
aspects of this transformation in educational philanthropy involves the ways that the
public and civic purposes of public schooling are redescribed by venture philanthropy in distinctly private ways. Such a view carries significant implications for a society theoretically dedicated to public democratic ideals. This is no small matter in terms of how the public and civic roles of public schooling have become nearly overtaken by the economistic neoliberal perspective that views public schooling as principally a matter of producing workers and consumers for the economy and for global economic competition.

It's absolutely bad shit, and most people don't even know their public schools are under attack.