Giving Compass' Take:

• Danielle Holly outlines arguments against billionaire philanthropy focusing on public education: undue influence and ill-gotten money. 

• How can philanthropists work to undo the systems that have allowed them to accumulate extreme wealth? 

• Learn more about the need for democracy, rather than philanthropy. 

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and currently the richest man in the world, has joined fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Sam Walton in investing deeply in the US education system.

Elite investment in education is not new. Andrew Carnegie invested heavily in privately built, publicly run libraries in the early 1900s. Sam Walton of the Walmart conglomerate has focused on charter schools, and the Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) have followed with significant investments in market-based, data-driven solutions.

Two philosophical challenges have arisen with the nature of these investments. The first, which NPQ has discussed at length, is that it limits democratic control over the nation’s public education system.

The second challenge, behind which Anand Giridharadas’s 2018 book Winner Takes All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World has ignited new fervor, is that the country’s wealthiest donors and most charitable companies have made their money by perpetuating the broken system they purport to fix.

Read the full article about billionaires' focus on education by Danielle Holly at Nonprofit Quarterly.