By now, I’m sure everyone has had their own personal run-in with that guy who’s constantly bantering on about the threat to humanity that is the less-than-freshly-proposed, aggressively financed and structurally upgraded development that will be the new basketball arena. The goal, presumably, is to replace the aging, learned elder, our McArthur Court. There’s been some contention about how the arena is to be financed, what is and is not being told about it, and of course, the ubiquitous argument about how it best serves the ever-conquering interests of the Nike-backed Illuminati. That aside, one of the major issues with its construction has been the fact that the veritable fountain of Nike gold is likely to run dry if the public doesn’t help pony up: Some of the donations are contingent upon the contribution of public financing as well.
There’s no debate that the University should be beyond grateful for the compassionate foresight of private foundations and wealthy donors for their decision to invest in the higher-level education of the country’s future leaders. There’s also no question that private donors have the right to attach strings to their donations if they wish – that their donations be supplemented by funds from the state, that they be used to fund specific academic or athletic programs, or that they have a hand in certain elements of the donation’s use. It’s also perfectly reasonable that the buildings or endowments funded by their donation be named in their honor. All of this, again, is completely within reason. However, it is likely that the same pattern could be recognized in other once-public functions, be it health initiatives like vaccinations, the production of passports, even the operations of the military in Iraq.
Anyway, with more and more education funding coming from private rather than public sources, some important questions do arise. The goal of philanthropy, admittedly, is to make a difference for people through investing in the social and cultural services which they need. One of the most famous examples is the work the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing for years to make an impact in the quality of public schools. The foundation has invested over $350 million a year in the fostering of knowledge. Given the obvious interest in making sure your money isn’t wasted, many of these donations come with certain standards and requirements to demand that recipient districts actually use the money to make an impact in the quality of students’ educations.
Much of this non-public support doesn’t only come from private foundations, billionaires and corporations. In fact, we might not even think of the most substantial examples of non-public resources in education as “private.” Nonprofits like Teach for America have been a remarkable force in propping back up and turning around poor, failing school districts all over the country. But the organization, just like the philanthropic Gates Foundation, receives limited support from the government, and that which does come is often from the quasi-public AmeriCorps network. There is, again, certainly nothing wrong with Teach for America, but the proliferation of groups like this and the Gates Foundation make one fact glaringly obvious: Schools are in such dire need of investment that we’ve begun relying on foundations, individuals and nonprofits to close the gap.
When political forces against public investment in state and national infrastructure – namely, Bill Sizemore types here in Oregon and Ronald Reagan anti-taxers nationally – began a campaign to end or minimize the size of the payment we invest through the government each year, the reasoning was one of free-market capitalism. Assumed is that the free-market, when each person acts in their own self-interest, does a better job of meeting basic needs and rights – or, I mean, basic “economic demand” – of the public than does the government. By bleeding dry public institutions like schools, it seems the hope was that a marketplace of private schools would take its place and do a better job, as has worked so wonderfully in health care. The result, however, was a partial bleeding where the inevitable collapse of the public bureaucracy seems constantly on the horizon but forever pushed away by the injection of volunteer and philanthropist support.
We get a system where the vast majority of education funding still comes from public sources, taxes and levies, but individual schools are increasingly dependent on the support and direction of private entities. While so far this has been generally good, it is important to remember that many of the resulting directives which schools answer to may not always be those decided upon democratically by voters.
Because we’ve never fully suffered the consequences of running a totally cash-poor public school system, nor have we had it replaced by a private one where we would theoretically have “full control” over our children’s education, there could be a possibility that we’re perpetually paying for most of the system we’re receiving – and wielding only most of the control.
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