Republicans have reintroduced a federal voucher bill, the “Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) act, which would provide $10 billion in annual tax credits to fund private and religious K-12 schools.” If Congress passes this bill, the billionaire oligarchy will be closer to fulfilling their decades-long goal to privatize the K-12 education system. This act underscores the insidious relationship billionaires have with U.S. President Donald Trump regarding education as he implements Project 2025’s plan to “steer federal money to vouchers.”
For generations, the billionaires have been using their “philanthropic foundations” to change how public education is delivered and governed across the country. When school vouchers didn’t become a reality in the 1980’s, billionaires joined with neoliberals and conservatives in a bipartisan effort to fund the creation and expansion of charter schools and other privatization systems.
A 2022 report on private equity, “How Wall Street profits from a public good,” disclosed how investors were alerted for decades to get involved with public education as a means of making money. By far the largest beneficiary of these grants from “non-profit” billionaire-funded foundations has been the proliferation of charter schools.
Billionaires and their investors love charter schools. They use their resources as a slick mechanism to reduce their own tax burden and lower the overall tax rates for public education, which is one of the largest expenditures for local and state taxes in the country. Anthony Cody, one of the founders of the Network for Public Education, describes how the “philanthropy scheme” works for the billionaires and their investors in this video.
The billionaires use their foundations to pour significant amounts of money to school board candidates, politicians, charter schools, “astroturf” local organizations, think tanks, and community groups that are specifically designed to promote their agendas to restructure public education. Education “reformers” use state tests as hammers to create an illusion of meritocracy, to prove that public schools are failing, and to justify sending funds to charters and voucher systems.
Charles Siler was a lobbyist for two privatization organizations, where he learned that charter schools are part of the incremental march towards full privatization. Even though some pro-charter corporate reform groups expressed initial concerns with the Trump election, they came around quickly and supported the Trump agenda.
The support for charter schools has taken on a different emphasis among arch conservatives, since the voucher movement gained steam in red state legislatures, even though voters soundly rejected vouchers every time they were on the ballot. The Heritage Foundation expressed concerns that many charter schools have become “too woke,” in contrast to their Christian nationalist agenda. Republicans and their supporters may not need charter school advocates since some believe “the charter school industry is no longer necessary for helping them reach their ultimate goal of ending public education.”
The billionaires behind the school privatization movement
The roots of the privatization movement are grounded in the thinking of libertarian and far-right conservatives from as early as the 1950s. These groups believe that “publicly provided services are necessarily inefficient, and that all goods and services should be privatized and provided through competitive markets.” In education, this means creating legislative support for charter schools, vouchers, and other governing models that emphasize individual choice over public good.
Privatizers and their billionaire donors believe that the individual family should decide what is best for their child versus local elected leaders determining what is best for the collective good of all students. This privatization movement originally initiated by Milton Friedman and other conservative thinkers was especially attractive to the wealthy.
In his book, “The Privateers, How Billionaires Created A Culture War And Sold School Vouchers,” Josh Cowen explains how “the billionaire backers of school choice are also driving the culture war issues.” By following the money, “the school voucher movement is the parents’ rights movement, and the parents’ right movement is religious nationalism.”
In his book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” Christopher Leonard describes how the libertarian Koch brothers and their allies aim to destroy public education, using the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to help pass legislation in states by creating model legislation. The laws ALEC promotes negatively impact the ability of local school districts to provide equitable services and resources to all schools.
According to Bob Herbert, writing for Politico, “Corporate leaders, hedge fund managers, and foundations with fabulous sums of money at their disposal lined up in support of charter schools, and politicians were quick to follow. They argued that charters would boost test scores, close achievement gaps, and make headway on the vexing problem of racial isolation in schools. None of it was true. Charters never came close to living up to the hype.”
Education historian and former charter school supporter NPE President Diane Ravitch, describes how this project to turn “America’s public schools into privately managed charters with minimal regulation has been advanced with funding from the billionaire DeVos and Koch families, and also from billionaire charter school supporters like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, John Arnold, the Bradley Foundation, Eli Broad, the Walton family, Michael Bloomberg, and the Wall Street hedge fund managers who are part of a privatization group called Democrats for Education Reform. These individuals and groups contribute to state legislators and local school board candidates who favor school choice, as well as directly funding school choice organizations.”
Julian Vasquez-Heilig, Professor of Educational leadership at Western Michigan University, documents how billionaires used the “mantra of civil rights to co-opt minority groups” to support vouchers and other neoliberal reforms.
The world’s second richest man, Jeff Bezos, has supported charter school expansion, and his $2 billion investment in preschools is a preview of his long term goal to privatize all of public education. Bezos, along with Elon Musk and other billionaires, wants unions declared illegal.
Funded often by Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, and the Waltons, Democrats for Education Reform has been pouring millions into state and local races to elect officials who will support charter school expansion. Billionaires Betsy Devos and Jeff Yass teamed up to dismantle public education by “spending tens of millions on state elections to pass charter and private school voucher bills.”
The Walton Family Foundation, with nearly $6 billion in resources from the Walmart store chain, was one of “the first philanthropies to support the expansion of high-quality public charter schools.” The Gleason Family Foundation and the billionaire Koch family spend millions each year to promote School Choice Week in January, “touting a misleading notion of equal access to education,” which “pulls money away from universal public schools.”
Billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold created City Fund, which spent over $225 million to promote charter schools, often resulting in “catastrophic fiscal damage for public school districts when money is sucked out by a growing charter school sector.” Hastings has been a vocal critic of democratically elected school boards, asserting they must be replaced by privately held corporations.
Billionaires Harry and Lynde Bradley “put school choice on the map,” funding vouchers and charter schools since the 1990s, and they are one of the six billionaire fortunes bankrolling the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Billionaires ignore the severe impacts of poverty
The billionaires and their supporters want to keep state and local school funding low so they can fully privatize the education system. They use their influence with legislatures to keep taxes low in many states.
As a result, many state and local decision-makers do not provide the necessary fiscal commitment to the education that students need and deserve. After the 2009 recession, students lost over $600 billion in funding for education, instead of receiving the additional resources needed especially for schools with high numbers of students in poverty
Derek Black, legal scholar at the University of South Carolina, states that “increasingly sophisticated studies show that if we increase the investment in education by 20%, we can begin to address the impact of poverty on student learning, especially in the urban centers across the country.”
Writing in 2020, Black warned that the “declining commitment to properly fund education and the well-financed political agenda to expand vouchers and charter schools present a major assault on the democratic norms that public education represents.” Since Black’s warning, legislators in over twenty states have enacted voucher legislation, and the charter school populations have grown from 2% twenty years ago to 8% of the total school population.
Voucher researcher Josh Cowen documents that vouchers represent a “right-wing political operation for the start,” supported by the Bradley Foundation among others. Instead of helping students in poverty, Cowen’s extensive research found that vouchers benefit the wealthy families.
A recent study by the Educational Opportunity project at Stanford University indicated that the primary factor for learning loss from the pandemic was clearly related to levels of poverty in each school district. Forbes columnist Peter Greene explains that poverty hinders students from achieving on the “BS test scores.”
The US has the highest overall poverty rate among 26 developed nations, and it is totally unconscionable that corporate reformers insist that higher test scores will somehow erase the poverty so many families experience. David Hirsch documents in his research that “the attack on public schools as failures serves, in part, as a purposeful distraction from the real crises in the US: racism and sexism, massive economic and racial inequality, and inadequate housing and health care.”
Privatizing education creates inequities and narrows the goals of education
The billionaire privatizing agenda causes significant harm to students, families, and communities across the country. The competitive focus on having high test scores results in a student population that loses the opportunity to think critically, problem solve, develop resilience, and to engage in creative and collaborative experiences.
Leading education researcher Michael Fullan documented that the intense pressure to score well on tests has also contributed to alarming increases in student “anxiety, stress and suicide rate” among students from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
Charter schools are a major competing factor for students, limiting the ability of many districts to offer adequate programs for the students in their traditional public schools. In effect, “outsourcing school management to nonprofit charter operators…generates the atomization of school districts, meaning the diminishment of neighborhood schools and the civic involvement such neighborhood affiliation involves.”
Segregation has increased in every large school district where charter schools have expanded. Noliwe Rooks, former director of African American studies at Princeton, describes the impact this privatization movement has had on segregation in her book, “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.” She writes, “since the 1980’s various wealth management organizations, philanthropies, and corporations have shown an increased interest in schools that educate poor children who are not white.”
Beginning with “the Edison schools, TFA, and then the KIPP chains,” Rooks traces the financing of segregated education in America from reconstruction through Brown vs. Board of Education to the current focus on school choice to the wholesale privatization of our public schools. Profits are made by billionaires and their investors who espouse they are “making a difference for others.”
Conclusions
Taxpayers are no longer in full control over their schools, due to the influence of billionaire funding, unelected charter school boards, and the lack of accountability for voucher systems. Students become isolated from groups different than them, and education becomes a personal rather than a social good. Teacher professionalism suffers, and unlicensed teachers are allowed to work in charter schools, and micro-schools. Neighborhoods are split apart when schools are closed, and families are displaced. School boards and state legislatures do not guarantee fiscal transparency and oversight of all the programs managed by charter schools.
The billionaires created the groundwork for the Trump administration to expand charter schools and promote federal vouchers. Those who benefit from this privatization scheme are not the students, the families, or the taxpayers who support their local, traditional neighborhood public schools.
Unless the public pushes against these policies, K-12 education will morph into a fully privatized system, absent the essential focus of education as a collective good for society.
