Friday, July 13, 2012

The Gates Foundation's Education Philanthropy: Are Profit Seeking and Market Domination a Public Service? - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

The Gates Foundation's Education Philanthropy: Are Profit Seeking and Market Domination a Public Service? - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:


The Gates Foundation's Education Philanthropy: Are Profit Seeking and Market Domination a Public Service?

Guest post by Chemtchr. 
Part Two of Two. See Part One here.
The Gates Foundation favors a charitable model known as a public-private partnership, which appears at first to be an enlightened model for corporate engagement. For-profit ventures are "partnered" with the government for funding, to drive positive social change.
The problem is that apparent charities are actually spending public funds, often without our knowledge or consent, and public private partnerships in education have shown themselves to be vulnerable to outright fraud as well as wasteful insider dealing. There's no open or democratic mechanism to determine public benefit, or regulation to protect public education funding from financial pillage for services it doesn't want or need.

Some for-profit corporations directly set up their own non-profit intermediary to divert government funding. For