Diane Ravitch recently praised Joanne Barkan’s “How to Criticize ‘Big Philanthropy’ Effectively.” Barkan’s excellent analysis was first presented at the March 2014 Network for Public Education (NEP) Conference in Austin, Texas. It is now published in Dissent Magazine.

Barkan began with the oft-repeated question, “You’re going after Bill Gates?” She frequently hears the argument, “Leave him alone. He’s doing great work in Africa.” The Gates’ Foundation’s approach to worldwide health and poverty has also been criticized, but the point is that educators take a risk when challenging a powerful figure whose other work is widely admired.

Barkan then proposed three approaches to criticizing edu-philanthropy. The first is to focus on “the failure of specific policies pushed by the foundations and the harm they do to teaching and learning.” As an example of this approach, Barkan used value-added teacher evaluations— a policy that opens the Gates Foundation and others to well-deserved criticism. It is a “nonsensical use of faulty formulas to measure growth in learning,” and thus provides fertile grounds for resistance.

The second approach identified by Barkan is to examine how edu-philanthropy’s reforms undermine the democratic control of public education. The negative effects produced by foundations have come from interventions ranging from financing scores of ed reform nonprofits to “making grants to education departments dependent on specific politicians remaining in office.” Foundations have even paid the salaries of high-level personnel within the government.

The third approach argues that large private foundations as institutions undermine democratic governance because “they intervene in public life but aren’t accountable to the public; they are privately governed but publicly subsidized by being tax exempt; and in a country where money translates into political power, they reinforce the problem of plutocracy—the exercise of power derived from wealth.”

Especially when the second two approaches are adopted, critics of edu-philanthropy are charged with impugning the motives of donors, and exaggerating their influence. Foundations also have been praised as adding another voice to the debate.

Barkan replies that edu-philanthropies have disproportionate power in education policy because they influence discretionary spending. This, not spending on ordinary operating costs, “is where policy is shaped and changed.” Moreover, in this era of big wealth, “money translates too easily into political power.” That is one reason why the United States is becoming increasingly “plutocratic.” So, when foundations exert too much influence in education, this undermines democracy.

I wrestle with all three of Barkan’s ways of challenging edu-philanthropy, but with her second and third points, I do so differently. While I believe that she made an excellent case for her diagnosis, I wonder why anyone would be interested in my opinion about the areas outside of education policy. For me to write much about her second and third criticisms would be like me pontificating on NAFTA; I can grapple with the issues but I don’t have enough expertise to contribute to the discussion.

So, I’ll quickly issue an opinion under the category of “whatever its worth,” and then move on to what I believe I should do in terms of test-driven policies. Education reform, like all coalitions, is diverse. Some reformers have overt profit motives, while others don’t, and many are somewhere in between. I have no reason to believe that contemporary school reformers are more or less self-interested, or are even more or less influenced by ego or other subjective factors than previous generations of political actors.

Even though the use of words like “corporate reform” seems to enrage reformers, the most interesting issues seem to trace back to the less emotional issue of the style of governance. I wouldn’t be surprised if historians eventually emphasize the imposition of market-model governance, with its faith in incentives and disincentives, as a key theme of our era in education and in other fields.

That being said, I will continue to read and contemplate the entire work of Barkan and others, but I will largely limit myself to her first challenge. In particular, I will continue to focus on what I know – high-poverty secondary schools. For reasons of intellectual soundness and political pragmatism, I will continue to concentrate on edu-philanthropy’s destructive advocacy for high stakes testing.

Here is how this plays out in my own mind. I have concerns about charters and I’m impressed by critiques of charter governance by Diane Ravitch and others. I will continue to follow discussions about the role of choice in education. I will remain unlikely to weigh in on the controversy except when it is choice combined with the competition that has damaged traditional public schools. If parents and/or students prefer to exercise choice and/or choose a culture of competition, that is their business. But when charters play into the market-driven reform game and help impose a culture of competition, with tests results used to keep score, and mandate their bubble-in testing culture for students and teachers who do not choose it, that is different.

And, that brings me back to the reason why I concentrate on the role of high stakes testing where edu-philanthropists and others push testing on those who do not ask for it. We will always have arguments over policy. We will never agree completely on issues ranging from progressive pedagogy to standards-based reforms. If standardized tests weren’t being used to keep score, however, those conflicts would produce little harm. For example, test scores became the bullets fired from increasingly destructive weapons for the mass closure of schools said to be failing.

Similarly, competition between charters and neighborhood schools would have always had the potential for some harm, but the real damage was made possible by using test scores as ammunition in a fight to the death against traditional public schools. Ironically, these same test scores harmed many children whose families willingly chose charters because those schools sought easily understood metrics for claiming that they outscored their opposition. As charters felt the need to produce higher and higher scores, more miraculous increases, traditional public schools felt obliged to respond in kind. Testing undermined the values of teaching and learning in both choice and neighborhood schools.

This is a tragic tale that I have seen with my own eyes. My experience informs my reading of education research and policy. While I’m impressed with the whole of Joanne Barkan’s scholarship, I’m likely to limit my own writing about edu-philanthropy to her first criticisms and to opposing test-driven reforms. Limiting myself in that way does not reflect upon the soundness of her critiques of foundations and their effects on democracy and civil society. I will not be surprised if historians of the early 21st century determine that Barkan has put forward a remarkably prescient first draft of history.

I have already gone on too much about my approach in a piece about Barkan’s great work, but I must add an update. Rightly or wrongly, I held this and two other posts for several weeks. I have been involved with another conversation with the Gates Foundation, and I wanted to see what worked and didn’t work in presenting our case. I still believe that there is a role for some of us to make narrower arguments based on what we know, while scholars like Barkan make comprehensive and brilliant indictments of the broader corporate reform movement.