The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy (review)

In The Gift of Education, Kenneth Saltman offers an insightful analysis of the current impact of private funding on public schools. Saltman explains the dramatic neoliberal transformation of public education through corporate donations. He argues that practices of private giving, which he calls "venture philanthropy," are social and economic investments, so attention needs to be paid to who is donating money to our public institutions, and for what purposes. Venture philanthropists do not give for the betterment of public education, but to incorporate the ideology of privatization into the public system. Saltman makes a major contribution to the discussion of the protection of public education through historical, cultural, and economic analysis of: 1) how private philanthropy has changed over time, and 2) how the new ideologically driven model of "venture philanthropy" is actually serving to undermine our curricular and institutional spaces.

Saltman contends that philanthropy was formerly connected to a "general economy" that promoted civic participation and self-determination. This approach, which Saltman claims flourished during the progressive era and into the early part of the 20^th century, posited fellow citizens as fundamentally engaged and socially interconnected. The assumption that citizens belonged to a general economy drove even the most rigid capitalistic organizations to believe that their companies were situated among larger social processes that demanded civic responsibility. In contrast, according to Saltman, the current era of educational philanthropy promotes a "restricted economy," one in which students are viewed merely as consumers of the business of schools, with teachers seen as deliverers of services of predetermined standards. In this restricted economy, knowledge is transformed into discreet product-like units that can be 'cashed in' at a future point for a job. And once a school has received private funds from venture philanthropists, accompanying business plans are stipulated that require measurements for "classroom success." Ostensibly, this has been to streamline inefficiencies in curricular and pedagogical practices. However, Saltman argues, "classroom success" is actually a euphemism encouraging the privatization of educational environments.

Venture philanthropists give with the intention of gaining a specific return. But this should not come as a surprise, Saltman notes, because many major educational philanthropists have run their own businesses in the same manner. For example, Bill Gates gained his fortune by imposing intellectual property laws to control and license products of immaterial labor, so the basis of his conception of knowledge is based in restriction and commodification. When school reforms are necessary, Gates, and others who share his business model, have stepped in to contend that problems are merely administrative in context; and therefore, their style of management can fix problems as long as they are granted authority to implement top-down reforms.

According to Saltman, once private interests are invited to participate in educational policymaking and curricular strategies, a "circuit of privatization" begins. Business organizations offer grants and donations while demanding "accountability" based on standardization and testing models, which follow corporate strategies for further private/public partnerships. The 'need for better test results' becomes a battle cry to criticize all public schools, leading to business offers to help improve efficiency, test scores, and other institutional elements. After schools in the inner city underperform on the standardized tests that have been created by private organizations (and that are enforced as a sole measurement for school achievement) they are branded as failures. They are then delegated to private consultants, who are informed by research produced from venture philanthropy funds.

Saltman shows that teachers also get caught up in the circuit of privatization. Teachers whose students do not perform well on standardized tests are blamed for poor pedagogy, leading to a broad rhetoric of reform, which, in turn, promotes the firing of tenured teachers, the smashing of their unions, and the hiring of business teams to fix the so-called failing schools. In this manner, public funds are then redirected back to the private institutions that so magnanimously give to failing public schools. But by the time public funds revert back to the public school systems (if...