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Bill Gates and other venture philanthropists
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Bill Gates was recently called “The real Secretary of Education.” The rising influence of the new breed of philanthropists on educational policy deserves our attention, because these people are powerful, effective, and unelected. I recommend an excellent paper by a young and talented researcher Janelle Scott, University of California, Berkeley. Unfortunately, the paper’s full text is not available on-line. (As an aside – this is an irritating aspect of academic publishing industry: the author did not make any money writing it, and her editors and reviewers all do it for free, and yet the journals are able to charge readers money for providing essentially nothing to the whole enterprise!).
But back to the paper: Dr. Scott is basically making a point that the new venture philanthropists seem to believe that their approaches to business are also effective in school reform. They invest virtually nothing in education research – these people know all the answers! – but poor millions of dollars in supporting charter schools and initiatives like Teach for America. While philanthropy is definitely commendable, let’s not forget that the philanthropists may be quite naïve, very rich and unaccountable to the public. It’s not like they can make things much worse, but they are adding a whole new layer of influence to the education reform matters. Most reforms are done without ever considering the feasibility question. Most reforms n education fail. The adventurous bunch of the new philanthropists will just do more of the same.
