Gates Fdn

===

see also gates, Wm

GMO

Arabella is the mothership of over 200 NGOs.

Trump Calls For RICO Charges Against Soros; Gates Foundation Severs Ties (ZH)}:

The “dark money” network operated by Arabella Advisors has reportedly lost one of its top funding sources: a leftist billionaire’s foundation. Equally significant in the news cycle this morning, President Trump stated on Truth Social that George Soros and his radical leftist son, Alex Soros, “should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests.” A New York Times report indicates that the Gates Foundation has halted funding to nonprofit funds managed by Arabella, choosing instead to work directly with some partners rather than through intermediaries. In its internal announcement, dated June 24 and sent to some Gates employees who oversee grant programs, foundation officials did not mention politics. Instead, they cited a desire to engage more directly with grant recipients and cut back on the use of intermediaries like Arabella entities.

*> Trump: "George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America." pic.twitter.com/KBxuyAaisF

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 27, 2025

“Teams are increasingly working directly with programmatic partners — organizations that are deeply embedded in the communities we serve and closely aligned with our mission,” the note reads. “As we look ahead, this is a chance to build deeper, more durable relationships with those partners — and to reinforce the kind of legacy we want to leave behind.” -NYT” Tracing the Arabella network’s donors is tricky. But according to the NYT, the Gates Foundation has plowed $450 million into the network since 2008, which in turn funneled money into other nonprofit entities, ranging from radical leftist climate groups to abortion initiatives, and even supporting the permanent protest-industrial complex against President Trump.

https://twitter.com/seamusbruner/status/1933626755358863457?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1933626755358863457%7Ctwgr%5E1e0fde66960c2c75df873fe2087d2cf266f22afb%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fgates-foundation-cuts-ties-arabella-advisors-linked-funding-radical-leftist-causes}:

With President Trump back in the White House and investigations focusing on corruption across the Democratic Party’s funding and nonprofit infrastructure, as well as ActBlue investigations, the risks for Bill Gates’ progressive NGO empire have never been greater. The move to cut ties could have happened even sooner, according to two people, one close to the foundation and one with knowledge of Arabella’s internal operations. Over the last few years, Arabella has become a target of conservative watchdogs because of its work with groups that funnel money toward progressive causes. With President Trump back in the White House, the political risks have only mounted. -NYT Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner of the Government Accountability Institute recently revealed a report that detailed how the rogue anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ front group, waging a permanent protest against all things Trump, “bagged $114.8 million from the Arabella dark money network.”*

The Gates Foundation told NYT that the move to sever ties with Arabella was “a business decision that reflects our regular strategic assessments of partnerships and operating models.” NYT’s report on Arabella comes hours after NBC News confirmed Gates met with Trump at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. More details from the report: • Some nonprofits are distancing themselves from Arabella to keep Gates funding. • Several groups have started exiting Arabella’s New Venture Fund (NVF), which serves as a fiscal sponsor for 170+ projects and has funneled billions into progressive causes. • While Gates once accounted for a significant share of NVF funding, in 2023 its contribution was only 2%. Still, losing Gates threatens Arabella’s influence and revenue streams.

:{Read more …

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-administration-orders-halt-to-first-of-its-kind-covid-19-testing-at-home-project-backed-by-bill-gates/

The Trump administration has ordered an “innovative” and “first of its kind” at home coronavirus testing program that has the support of Bill Gates and other public health experts to cease, and it’s unclear why.

The program, as The New York Times and NPR affiliate KUOW report, is based in Seattle, Washington, and allowed residents to easily test for coronavirus. One of the program’s benefits is 43 percent of its more than 12,000 participants so far were asymptomatic. To date the program has identified dozens of previously-undetected COVID-19 cases.

The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN), operated by researchers from the Seattle Flu Study and Public Health – Seattle & King County, and had an “in-person technical adviser” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was authorized by the State of Washington.

“Please discontinue patient testing and return of diagnostic results to patients until proper authorization is obtained,” the FDA ordered, saying it had “concerns about safety and accuracy."

SCAN’s researchers say they had, The Times reports, “submitted data validating both the safety and reliability of the swabs in home-based collection.”

One researcher not affiliated with the program called halting it “bizarre.”

It’s unclear if Bill Gates’ association with the project has any negative impact. Some far right conspiracy theorists among Trump’s base, including those protesting state stay-at-home policies, falsely claim Gates is developing a vaccine that contains a microchip to track those who get injected.

President Donald Trump has been very concerned with the actual numbers attached to coronavirus cases and has made clear he wanted to keep the numbers low to help his re-election campaign.

He has said, “we don’t want everybody taking this test,” referring to coronavirus testing. “It’s totally unnecessary. This will pass through and we’re going to be even stronger for it.”

On Thursday Trump said testing for coronavirus is “overrated,” and complained that the more tests are conducted, the more cases there are.

“When you test, you have a case,” Trump said in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”

yikes ~ liberal arts?

https://theconversation.com/gates-launches-lobbying-arm-higher-education-on-agenda-119077

no lnx

Bill and Melinda Gates have launched a lobbying group in part to drive their agenda on education.

The move comes as Congress is negotiating a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the main federal law concerning student financial aid.

The Gates Foundation has also recently started up a commission to determine the value of a college degree or certificate. If Gates lobbyists convince legislators to embrace the agenda of the Gates commission, then Congress may make it harder for students in certain majors to secure loans or grants.

In this way, I believe the Gateses could transform universities and colleges that presently offer a wide array of courses into vocational training centers that focus on immediately marketable skills.

I’m a political theorist who researches education policy. In my book on the Common Core, I describe how Bill and Melinda Gates funded and coordinated the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I argue that the Gateses helped build an educational system that emphasizes a narrow set of reading, writing and math skills that can be tested on computers.

The stated purpose of the Gateses’ lobbying effort is to focus on educational outcomes for black, Latino and rural students and move people from poverty to employment.

The Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Value Commission gives some insight into what the Gateses mean by educational outcomes. The commission aims to create a way to measure the value of certain degrees or certificates. If legislators adopt this measurement tool, then they might only fund things that lead to an immediate economic payoff.

Though elite institutions of higher education will likely still provide students a liberal arts education, regional state schools could be under increasing pressure to cut majors such as history, French, geography, philosophy and political science.

Why lobby now

The Gates Foundation has been indirectly shaping K-12 education public policy for years. The group has given millions of dollars in grants to education groups, think tanks, parent-teacher organizations, teacher unions, state departments of education and a governors association to write, advocate for and implement the Common Core. Despite a revision and rebranding effort in many states, the standards still shape how most students in America learn reading, writing and math.

Now that the Gates Foundation has pivoted to lobbying, it signals to me they want to play a more aggressive role in the writing of legislation.

According to the IRS, charities – the kinds of organizations eligible for tax-deductible donations – can do some, but not too much, lobbying. In general, those groups can speak about issues for educational purposes but cannot advocate for the passage of particular laws or on behalf of political candidates. By launching a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, also known as a social welfare group, the Gateses can now talk directly with legislators about laws.

The Gateses chose Rob Nabors, previously the Obama White House’s chief lobbyist, to lead the new lobbying shop. According to Nabors, the new group will not give money to political candidates. However by educating policymakers it does have the “potential to accelerate outcomes.”

The Gateses’ plan for higher education

Bill and Melinda Gates, I contend, are throwing a one-two punch with the launching of the Postsecondary Value Commission and the Gates Policy Initiative. The former seeks to identify whether certain majors are worth federal financial aid; the latter may turn this framework into law.

“If we can provide that clear definition about college value, we definitely are hoping that it will affect the higher ed reauthorization act,” Millie García, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and co-chair of the Gates commission, stated recently.

Through the Higher Education Act, the federal government distributed approximately US$29 billion in Pell Grants to roughly 7.2 million undergraduates in 2017.

If Congress adopts the Gates Foundation’s tool to measure the value of a college degree or certificate, then Congress could decide that low earnings, or low loan repayment rates, disqualify students in certain programs from receiving federal financial aid. I contacted a spokesperson for the Gates Policy Initiative and was told “we don’t have anything further to say at this point.”

One member of the Gates commission, Anthony P. Carnevale, has explained how a focus on program-level outcomes will streamline public university systems as they eliminate less lucrative majors – such as early childhood education, performing arts and theology.

“Sad to say,” Carnevale explains, this disruption “could be brutally efficient for higher education. Industry change is almost always about what’s next, not what’s best for the workers and institutions directly affected. Just ask an auto worker.”

Many colleges and universities are economic anchors, cultural centers and sources of community pride. I believe the “brutally efficient” disruption of those institutions could spark more public backlash than the Gateses expect.

Editor’s note: The Gates Foundation is a funder of The Conversation Media Group.

Education

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Lobbying

US education

Bill Gates

US higher education

Nonprofits

social welfare groups

501c4

Philanthropy and nonprofits

UC system announced plans this week to invest more than a $1 billion in Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Coalition over the next five years. UC has pledged $250 million toward the best early-stage ideas.

The coalition also includes billionaire investors.

The Microsoft founder believes energy solutions can make money. Gates wants the fund to help take the solutions beyond the academic lab.

Some of the lab work may be done on University of California campuses.

The dean of the Bren School of environmental science and management at UC Santa Barbara would welcome that. Steve Gaines said it will spur innovation.

Gaines believes the work that will follow will also change the minds of climate change naysayers.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/11/30/3726419/bill-gates-breakthrough-energy/

ed byBill Gates, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberghave announced a new multibillion-dollar “Breakthrough Energy Coalition” at the start of a Paris climate talks. In parallel, 20 countries — including China, India, U.S., Indonesia, and Brazil — are joining “Mission Innovation,” which commits them to double their clean energy research and development funding by 2020.

The question is, however, whether the Breakthrough Energy Coalition be tweaked into something truly useful, given that:

The world needs about 100 times as much money for deployment of carbon-free energy as it does for R&D right now;
Key developing countries like India are making decisions about building coal vs. carbon-free power right now that could lock in carbon pollution for decades; and
Genuine technology breakthroughs are exceedingly rare in the energy arena and generally take decades and vast resources to deploy once they do make it to market.

I continue to be, of course, one of the biggest advocates for clean energy research and development — and demonstration and deployment (RDD&D). In the mid-1990s, I helped run what was then the largest program in the world for low carbon RDD&D — the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — $1 billion in funding aimed at developing and commercializing low carbon technologies like solar photovoltaics, wind power, advanced batteries, and a broad spectrum of super-efficient technologies including LED lighting. And in recent years, I’ve continued to advocate for ramping up RDD&D funding in books and on this website.

But the thing is, the clean energy R&D push succeeded beyond most people’s wildest dreams — a more than 99 percent drop in solar PV costs since 1999 and a 95 percent drop since the late 1990s

http://www.alternet.org/environment/bill-gates-gives-exxon-cover-gates-foundation-deadly-wrong-climate-change-fossil-fuels

guardian.../world/2014/nov/07/alliance-green-revolution-africa-helping-build-better-life-all-africans

monsanto fdn GMO USAID

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Robert_B._Horsch

snip

Incredibly, the Cornell Alliance strenuously asserts its impartiality, calling it a “radical collaboration” of proponents and opponents of GMOs dedicated to “promot[ing] equitable access to safe, nutritious, and sustainably produced food.” Though that quote sounds an awful lot like Food & Water Watch’s mission statement, it isn’t, and we won’t be joining the alliance’s “radical collaboration.”

The role of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in this effort should also be mentioned. Gates has awarded $5.6 million toward the Cornell Alliance, a mere drop in the ocean of the group’s pro-GMO “philanthropy”. The Foundation has tapped big names from the biotechnology industry to run its multi-billion-dollar agricultural development program, and, as Food & Water Watch showed in our report Biotech Ambassadors, Gates partners with biotech companies to develop GMOs for Africa — that African countries clearly do not want or need. The Gates Foundation has also invested tens of millions of dollars of its money into corporate agribusiness and biotech companies like Monsanto and Cargill.

Cornell University is embarking on a campaign to “depolarize the charged debate” around GMO – supported by a $5.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationand with the GMO industry as its partners.

Pro-GM campaigner Mark Lynas is a fellow of Cornell.

http://www.marklynas.org/about/

Cornell has given him a platform to promote his pro-GMO views.

http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/bills-test/14961

Is Cornell the go-to university for industry science?
New Cornell Alliance for Science gets $5.6 million grant

1. Is Cornell the go-to university for industry science?

By Tim Schwab

Food & Water Watch, 28 Aug 2014

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/blogs/is-cornell-the-go-to-university-for-industry-science/

Cornell University announced last week that it is embarking on a multi-million dollar campaign to “depolarize the charged debate” around GMOs. Can you guess who’s behind this effort? The biotech industry and its supporters.

The website for this project, the Cornell Alliance for Science, is pretty sparse, but it does note its pro-GMO partners, including the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), which is funded by Monsanto, CropLife, and Bayer.

This use of surrogates is par for the course with the biotech industry. Sometimes called the soft lobby, corporations routinely engage neutral-appearing scientists and impartial-sounding front groups to help advance their political and economic agendas. Food & Water Watch detailed the enormous amount of industry research coming out of our public land-grant universities in our 2012 report, Public Research, Private Gain.

Cornell is no stranger to this science-for-sale approach. Earlier this year, Cornell economist William Lesser took money from a biotech front group to produce a questionable analysis showing that GMO labeling will be very costly for consumers.While he noted that the study reflected hispersonal opinions, not those of Cornell, GMO supporters began publicizing the findings of “the Cornell study”in their campaign to defeat state-labeling initiatives around the country. Independent studies, meanwhile, show that GMO labeling will not increase costs significantly — and perhaps not at all.

Cornell’s newest foray into the GMO debate, the “Alliance for Science,” will add to the confusion and distortion in the public discourse around GMOs. Rather than trying to promote a civil, honest, impartial dialogue about GMOs — as you would expect from a university like Cornell — the school has chosen to partner with some of the biotechnology industry’s most prominent supporters and defenders.

The role of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in this effort should also be mentioned. Gates has awarded $5.6 million toward the Cornell Alliance, a mere drop in the ocean of the group’s pro-GMO “philanthropy”. The Foundation has tapped big names from the biotechnology industry to run its multi-billion-dollar agricultural development program, and, as Food & Water Watch showed in our report Biotech Ambassadors, Gates partners with biotech companies to develop GMOs for Africa — that African countries clearly do not want or need. The Gates Foundation has also invested tens of millions of dollars of its money into corporate agribusiness and biotech companies like Monsanto and Cargill.

At a time when the United States is clearly ready for a frank conversation about GMOs, evident in the state-level labeling ballot initiatives underway across the country, it is unfortunate that our most prominent philanthropists and universities would partner with industry to distort the public discourse. There is a vibrant scientific and public debate about the safety and necessity of GMOs in our food system that deserves a bigger public platform — sort of like what Gates and Cornell are trying to do, but without the obvious bias.

New Cornell Alliance for Science gets $5.6 million grant

By Stacey Shackford

Cornell Chronicle, 21 Aug 2014

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/08/new-cornell-alliance-science-gets-56-million-grant

A new international effort led by Cornell will seek to add a stronger voice for science and depolarize the charged debate around agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Supported by a $5.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Cornell Alliance for Science will help inform decision-makers and consumers through an online information portal and training programs to help researchers and stakeholders effectively communicate the potential impacts of agricultural technology and how such technology works.

The project will involve developing multimedia resources, including videos of farmers from around the world documenting their struggles to deal with pests, diseases, crop failure and the limited resources available in the face of poverty and climate change.

“Proponents and opponents alike speculate whether biotech crops are of benefit to farmers, but rarely are those farmers engaged in the biotech discourse or their voices heard,” said Sarah Evanega, senior associate director of International Programs in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), who will lead the project.

“Our goal is to depolarize the GMO debate and engage with potential partners who may share common values around poverty reduction and sustainable agriculture, but may not be well informed about the potential biotechnology has for solving major agricultural challenges,” Evanega said. “For instance, pro-biotech activists share a lot of the same anti-pesticide, low-input, sustainable-agriculture vision as the organic movement.”

Evanega and her team hope to help engage such potential partners and foster more constructive policies about biotechnology as a useful tool to address major agricultural challenges.

The grant will allow the Cornell Alliance for Science to host annual conferences, short courses and semester-long CALS certificate programs in biotechnology leadership, among other activities.

Evanega said the initial concept was informed by a February 2014 gathering at Cornell of 34 representatives from public sector and not-for-profit organizations in 12 countries that discussed a new vision for biotechnology communications.

“Like elsewhere in the world, African scientists still find it challenging to effectively inform the public about their work and its relevance to society,” said Barbara M. Zawedde, coordinator of the Uganda Biosciences Information Center at the National Agricultural Research Organization. “Our effective communication will enable African farmers and citizens to exercise their sovereign right of informed decisions on whether to adopt certain crops and technologies depending on their needs and priorities.”

In part because of its land-grant heritage, CALS regularly hosts forums and media events about various agricultural technologies and the role they could play in providing sustainable solutions to major global challenges.

“Biotechnology is a potential game-changer for farmers in less developed countries and an important tool in the toolbox for addressing global challenges, such as persistent poverty, a changing and erratic climate, and the challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050,” said Kathryn J. Boor, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of CALS. “Improving agricultural biotechnology communications is a challenge that must be met if innovations developed in public sector institutions like Cornell are ever to reach farmers in their fields.”

Bill and Melinda Gates

But it’s not just rightwing demagogues who have [21] “drank all the Tea Party they could drink and sniffed all the Koch they could sniff” using charity to further their political agenda. Bill and Melinda Gates’ own liberal-leaning, $36.4 billion [37] charitable foundation, by far the world’s largest, has long been scrutinized for attempting to fix with one hand the problems it creates with another. In 2007, the Los Angeles Times [38] uncovered “hundreds of Gates Foundation investments — totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets… in companies that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.”

These included endowment holdings in top polluters like ConocoPhillips and Dow Chemical Co., oil refineries and paper mills that sicken the children whose parents the foundation treats for AIDS, and “pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat.”

The Gates Foundation’s dealings with lifesaving drugs in particular showcase the contradictions of today’s philanthrocapitalism. [39]

Although leading global health campaigners [40] want an end to Big Pharma’s monopoly drug patents to increase affordability in poorer countries, the Gates Foundation opposes any changes to existing intellectual property law. Advocates for loosening IP regulations point out that doing so would both lower prices by encouraging generic competition and enable innovation outside of patent-hoarding companies. This proposal, however, threatens multinational pharmaceutical corporations, well-represented [40] among foundation leadership, as well as monopolistic firms like Microsoft, which as late as 2007 was lobbying the G8 to tighten global intellectual property protection — a move Oxfam has consistently warned [41] spells disaster for the health crisis in the Global South.

The Timesreport traces the effects of this position on the ground, quoting an intellectual property expert [38] who claims the foundation’s stance makes “medicines available only to a narrow spectrum of a rich elite in a developing country” in a form of “pharmaceutical apartheid.” As millions of impoverished AIDS and HIV patients are priced out of the market, lucrative patents allow the world’s top 10 drug companies to collect some $80 billion in profit annually. And Gates sure won’t stop them.

===

Gates has spent close to a billion dollars buying "grass-roots" advocacy

“We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes, The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.” -- Gates Foundation spokesman Allan C. Golston

According to a story by Sam Dillon in today's NYT, The Gates Foundation is using a big chunk of its multi-billion fund to pay teachers to testify at hearings in opposition to their own unions and in favor of more test-based accountability. Writes Dillon:

*For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.*

When Billionaires Become Educational Experts

“Venture philanthropists” push for the privatization of public education.

By Kevin K. Kumashiro

For years, critics have pointed to the decreasing ability of health-care professionals to make decisions and provide services because of the demands of insurance companies and health-management organizations to sustain profits. Health-care decisions are increasingly being made by the wrong people and for the wrong reasons.

So, too, with public education. Current reforms are allowing certain individuals with neither scholarly nor practical expertise in education to exert significant influence over educational policy for communities and children other than their own. They, the millionaires and billionaires from the philanthropic and corporate sectors, are experimenting in urban school districts with educational reform initiatives that are not grounded in sound research and often fail to produce results. And yet, with funding for public education shrinking, the influence of these wealthy reformers is growing.

There is also much profit to be earned from public education. The American educational system today is a $500–600 billion enterprise, funded overwhelmingly by public dollars, with billions of dollars in services and products being outsourced, and with political lobbying groups like the Democrats for Education Reform, financed by hedge-fund millionaires, leading the push to further outsource. The public educational system has always had ties to the business sector, including business leaders themselves and the philanthropies funded by business fortunes. But that influence has not always looked the same. Despite the fact that philanthropic giving has never constituted more than 1 percent of total educational funding, in recent years a handful of millionaires and billionaires have come to exert influence over educational policy and practice like at no other time in American history. What has happened? The roles of business and philanthropy have shifted, reconfigured, and converged over the past century, and therefore seeing the bigger picture of public education requires understanding the interrelated histories of philanthropic and corporate influence.

Early Corporate Influence

Philanthropies have a long history of giving to public education, a history that includes early efforts by white businessmen to shape the education of communities of color. Following the US Civil War, for example, philanthropies helped to establish primary and vocational schools for African Americans in the South, as well as normal schools that eventually became black colleges and universities, which expanded access even as they reinforced segregated and differentiated learning. In the first half of the twentieth century, philanthropies supported and expanded the use of intelligence testing that justified a racialized understanding of what different groups of students could learn and do, making commonsensical the notion of academic tracking. Clearly, the early philanthropies were varied in their goals and impact, funding initiatives that both reinforced and challenged inequities in education. But these philanthropies, perhaps the best known of which were the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, increasingly tried to raise the visibility of educational inequities and thus were widely perceived as liberal and altruistic for much of the twentieth century.¹(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note1)

The business sector also has a long history of influencing public education, particularly in the period from 1890 to 1940, when public school districts were consolidating and becoming larger and larger. As immigration made cities increasingly diverse, and as members of the working class won more and more seats in city governments, the business elite made concerted efforts to take control of local school boards, not only by getting business leaders elected to school boards but also by structuring the boards to reflect the centralized control and bureaucracy that characterized the large industries that were emerging at this time. That is, the business elite influenced school governance both by constituting its governing bodies and by structuring its model of management. The business elite turned its attention to higher education as well, as in the 1950s when the US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate advocates began creating a network of organizations on university campuses that aimed to cultivate probusiness values in the next generation of leaders.²(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note2)

Philanthropy and Business Roundtables

As the United States entered the second half of the twentieth century, significant economic, legal, cul- tural, and ideological changes occurred that would prompt the formation of new structures in both the philanthropic and the corporate sectors. In the early 1970s, two national groups emerged that would have enormous influence on public policy generally, and educational policy in particular, in the decades to follow: the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Business Roundtable.

First, the Philanthropy Roundtable. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of numerous and significant legal and cultural challenges to inequities of race, class, and gender. The civil rights movement brought together a range of constituents to push for landmark legislation and policy changes across the nation. To opponents of the civil rights movement, such attempts at resource redistribution and governmental regulation departed from the American ideals of self-sufficiency and meritocracy and in the process threatened to weaken the American economic system of “free enterprise.” Opponents also took note of how such legal changes were led by a “liberal establishment” that was organized and strategic in ways that conservatives were not yet.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, who would soon after become an associate justice on the US Supreme Court, wrote an internal Chamber of Commerce memorandum known as the “Powell Manifesto.” This memorandum described a concerted liberal attack on the American free-enterprise system and on American democracy itself and called for organizing and action. In response to the Powell Manifesto, a group of conservatives, particularly philanthropists with family business fortunes, came together and formed a national roundtable that would strategize about how to use their personal wealth for conservative movement building.

At the helm were wealthy conservatives whose philanthropic work helped to seed what eventually grew into an interconnected web of organizations and initiatives. Their project was as much legislative as it was ideological, in that they aimed to influence legislation and policy as well as to shape “common sense” in society. In the decades to follow, the conservative philanthropies developed interconnected funding priorities and strategies to advance publicpolicy agendas that favored business and opposed social welfare and that would enable the American political and economic systems to continue to benefit those racial and social-class groups that were already privileged in society.

They sought to develop a cadre of students in higher education who embraced conservative ideologies, a generation of scholars who produced research that would make conservative ideologies accessible and who would then enter government service, a network of regional and state policy think tanks and advocacy organizations, and a protocol for using the media to reach the public effectively.³(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note3) Their strategies have been quite successful, as evidenced by the emergence of such public figures as Dinesh D’Souza, Chester Finn, Newt Gingrich, and Thomas Sowell, all of whom were once beneficiaries of fellowships and other forms of professional support from the philanthropies, as well as by the preponderance of messages in the media and legislation that were developed in related think tanks.

At the top of the chopping block was public education, considered by some to be a drain on the government and a crutch for society not only because it was the most expensive of domestic enterprises but also because it exemplified what they considered to be a socialist enterprise. Conservatives called for the entire school system to be privatized, made into a free enterprise, and the conservatives’ strategy of choice was school vouchers. Early on, Milton Friedman, one of the leading proponents of free-market reform, argued that “vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a free-market system.” Not surprisingly, the focus of many conservative foundations has been and continues to be school-choice and school-voucher initiatives.

Until recently, the four most influential conservative foundations nationally were the Bradley, Olin, Scaife, and Smith Richardson foundations, sometimes dubbed theFour Sisters. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin is the country’s largest conservative foundation and includes among its priorities the ending of affirmative action and of welfare. A former board member is William Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan. The Bradley Foundation is involved in various educational policy initiatives, including the support of school-voucher programs and privatization. The John M. Olin Foundation, which ceased operations in 2005, focused on developing research through think tanks as well as through higher education, with large gifts to Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and other universities, as well as to individual researchers. The Scaife Family Foundations, consisting of the Sarah Scaife, Allegheny, and Carthage Foundations and funded by the Mellon family fortune, gives to a range of think tanks and lobbying and publishing groups. The H. Smith Richardson Foundation in North Carolina supports, according to its website, the “next generation of public policy researchers and analysts” by funding think tanks and universities. All of the Four Sisters have contributed funding to the leading conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution.

Several other foundations gave more than $100 million to conservative causes between 1998 and 2004, including the Walton Family and DeVos foundations. Created by the heirs of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, the Walton Family Foundation in Arkansas has financed nearly every ballot initiative for vouchers since 1993. Walton funds such provoucher organizations as the Alliance for School Choice, as well as organizations that draw communities of color into the provoucher movement, such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options. The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation in Michigan, funded by the AmWay fortune, supports vouchers as well as organizations of the Christian Right, including Focus on the Family, which have vast media and communications resources. More recently, the Charles Koch Foundation has targeted higher education by funding faculty positions, think tanks, and educational initiatives in universities across the country. The websites of the Media Matters Action Network (http://mediamattersaction.org) and People for the American Way (http://www.pfaw.org) provide descriptions of these and numerous other such foundations.

Of course, conservative foundations are not the only ones funding education. Liberal philanthropies that identify with the goals and legacy of the civil rights movement also contribute to education, but they are far less visible and influential in changing federal or state-level policy. Perhaps the most notable strategic difference between conservative and liberal philanthropic organizations is the expectation of how organizations will use their funds. Whereas the liberal philanthropies tend to fund a large number of organizations for specific projects of limited term and scope, the conservative ones are more likely to fund the general operations of a smaller number of organizations over longer periods of time in order to build institutional infrastructure. The conservative foundations especially direct funding to organizations that aggressively lobby in state legislatures and Congress and that engage effectively in media campaigns, thus ensuring that their ideas are enacted into law with public support. Consequently, the conservative movement has emerged as an interconnected web of organizations with aligned missions and coordinated strategies, often facilitated by shared board members.⁴(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note4)

The history and function of the Business Roundtableparallel those of the Philanthropy Roundtable. The 1960s were marked by declining corporate profits resulting from such factors as deficit spending to fund the war in Vietnam, rising oil prices following the formation of OPEC, and an increasingly competitive market in a globalizing economy.⁵(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note5) The decade also saw increasing governmental regulation of the workplace and increasing influence of organized labor. In response, some business leaders felt the need to organize the corporate sector in order to influence public policy in ways that advanced corporate interests, particularly the interests of the business elite. In 1972, the Business Roundtable formed, consisting of the top three hundred CEOs in the nation.

The Business Roundtable had always addressed a range of public policies, but in the late 1980s it began focusing significant attention on public education. In 1989, it called for six “national education goals” and, soon after, nine “essential components of a successful education system.” This call put pressure on states to move toward an outcomes-based model of educational reform, using standardized tests to measure student and teacher performance, with sanctions and rewards for failure or success. Reinforcing the pressure put on states was a large network of influential foundations, centers, universities, and public media, assembled by the roundtable, that consisted of such entities as the Annenberg Center, the Broad Foundation, the Education Trust, Harvard Graduate School, and most newspaper editorial boards.

In so doing, the Business Roundtable effectively laid out a blueprint for standards-based reform, begun during the Reagan administration but culminating in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which has become so taken for granted as the way to think about educational quality and educational reform that even Democrats, from Clinton onward, have put forth proposals that were framed by these concepts.

Venture Philanthropy

As the United States neared the end of the twentieth century, the globalizing economy provided fertile ground for an unprecedented accumulation of wealth by the corporate elite. Taking this new wealth and the lessons learned about leveraging wealth for both increased profits and political influence, several millionaires and billionaires transformed the landscape of philanthropy, developing new organizations that operate much more like the conservative foundations than traditional philanthropies. These are the venture philanthropies.⁶(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note6)

Unlike traditional philanthropy, which sought, at least in principle, to “give back” to society, venture philanthropy parallels venture capitalism in its goal of investing capital in ways that earn more. In contrast to venture capitalism, one benefit of venture philanthropy is that it operates under different incorporation laws, providing tax shelters for what are really financial investments. Whereas the financial returns may not be as immediate as those of corporate transactions, the policy foci of today’s venture philanthropists indeed reveal the economic incentive of their investments. They overwhelmingly are pushing for the privatization of public education, creating new markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars, as well as for the prerogative to direct how public tax dollars get spent. They target the large urban school districts, experimenting with models they hope eventually to “scale up” nationally, as they have done in Chicago, where the Gates Foundation alone has spent millions on small-school initiatives, school turnarounds, youth organizing, and parent organizing.⁷(http://www.aaup.org/article/when-billionaires-become-educational-experts#note7)

Another departure from traditional philanthropy is the role that venture philanthropists play in their investments. Whereas traditional philanthropists view their giving as donations that support what others were doing, venture philanthropists view their giving as entryways into that work. That is, philanthropists themselves are now getting significantly involved in goal setting, decision making, and evaluating progress and outcomes to ensure that their priorities are met. This hands-on role allows venture capitalists to affect public policy more directly and substantially, particularly in a climate where their financial aid is so desperately needed.

Indeed, the timing was fortuitous for venture philanthropy. Setting the stage was the 1983 report by the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk, which claimed not only that public schools were failing but also, more significantly, that their failure was a primary cause of the nation’s economic recession at that time. Such a crisis gave the business elite yet another reason to turn their attention to public education. And for their part, educational leaders needed the additional funding because fewer and fewer tax dollars were being earmarked for education. States have been disinvesting in education for decades: over the past twenty years in Illinois, for example, state contributions to public higher education dropped from almost 50 percent to less than 20 percent of university budgets. Cities and districts have also been disinvesting: from the 1980s through the 1990s, the federal government reduced its funding to cities, and, when combined with the global financial crisis of the past few years, this reduction in funding provided cities and districts new justification to slash education budgets further, resulting in the current furloughs of public school teachers and staff, shortened school years, reduced services and resources, and reduced educational quality. This was the result not only of less money, caused in large part by dramatically decreasing taxes paid by corporations and the wealthy, but also of lower priority being placed on education at a time when budgets for prisons and wars were steadily increasing.

Such cuts, of course, disproportionately affect students of color and working-class students, who disproportionately populate the public schools and public universities, which brings us full circle to the time of the early philanthropies when white businessmen were using their wealth to change the education of primarily poorer students of color, often with even greater disparities resulting. The change is not only in educational policy but also in public-policy decision making more broadly, signaling the transition from public deliberation by an elected government to decisions of self-appointed individuals with no accountability to the public.

The two leading venture philanthropies, the Gates Foundationand the Broad Foundation, do include among their grantees historically liberal organizations like the teacher unions. However, their funding priorities and strategic initiatives are so framed by neoliberalism, and their partnerships with conservative organizations and leaders so extensive, that their impact is indistinguishable from that of the conservative foundations. Overwhelmingly, by number of initiatives and amount of funding, the leading venture philanthropies are emphasizing the privatization and marketization of public education with such initiatives as outsourcing of school management, which can best be seen in school districts that are targeted for charter- school growth, where the majority of charter schools are managed by for-profit companies; incentive pay for teachers; alternative routes to certification for teachers and school leaders; and school-choice and charter- school initiatives. The leading venture philanthropies are investing in a web of organizations not unlike the web of foundations, think tanks, media organizations, and advocacy groups that characterizes the conservative network. The Gates Foundation, for example, funds think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute to issue reports, communications groups like Teach Plus to amplify the voices of teachers who specifically counter the voices of the teacher unions, and leadership groups like the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop policies around the common-core standards.

The top-giving venture philanthropies include a broad mix of foundations from family fortunes: the Broad Education Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Donald and Doris Fisher Fund, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. These megaphilanthropies are funding other education-related venture philanthropies, like the Charter School Growth Fund and the NewSchools Venture Fund. Venture philanthropies include not only the national foundations from individual family fortunes but also the local philanthropies that were founded by collectives of business leaders, as is the case in Chicago with the Chicago Public Education Fund and the Renaissance Schools Fund. The result is a philanthropic sector that is inseparable from the business sector, advancing school reforms that cannot help but to be framed by corporate profitability.

Kevin K. Kumashiro is professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was formerly chair of educational policy studies. He is president-elect of the National Association for Multicultural Education. His e-mail address is*kevink@uic.edu*.

Notes

William Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001).
Anuradha Mittal and Felicia Gustin, Turning the Tide: Challenging the Right on Campus (Oakland, CA: The Oakland Institute and the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture—Speak Out, 2006); David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
Kathleen deMarrais, “’The Haves and the Have Mores’: Fueling a Conservative Ideological War on Public Education (or Tracking the Money),” Educational Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 201–40.
Jeff Krehely, Meaghan House, and Emily Kernan, Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy (Washington, DC: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2004).
David Hursh, “Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies,” American Education Research Journal 44, no. 3 (2007): 493–518.
Kenneth Saltman, The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Janelle Scott, “The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy,” Educational Policy 23, no. 1 (2009): 106–36.
Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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