The Philanthropic Hypocrisy of Eli Broad, Billionaire and Leading Education Reformer

[eridani]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18830/eli-broad-los-angeles-philanthropy

The man who wants to transform public education by bringing market discipline to schools has no problem gorging at the public trough to beef up his namesake museum.

In 2011, Broad syphoned off $52 million of public tax dollars meant for Los Angeles’ poor communities to subsidize his museum’s parking garage—more than all of South LA’s 800,000 mostly low-income residents received from the same public fund that year.

For Broad, it’s all about the gestures. While South LA’s schoolchildren fight for a roof over their head, at least they’ll have a nice place to park when they come to see Broad’s personal art collection.

Eli Broad, who is estimated to be worth $7.4 billion, styles himself an advocate for poor black and brown children. Urban education is his pet project. Decrying the underperformance of poor children of color, Broad points the finger at unionized public school teachers and bureaucracy, claiming educators simply aren’t working hard enough to improve academic outcomes. To save the children, Broad wants to reform education along a corporate model—privatizing schools, busting teachers’ unions and imposing punitive accountability systems. Broad is calling for—and helping fund—a complete transformation of the American education system. And he wants it done in his name.

He trains school leaders to apply business practices to schools through the Broad Residency at the Broad Academy, and rewards compliant school districts with the Broad Prize, of $250,000. Broad’s latest headline-grabbing proposal is to pull 50 percent of Los Angeles’ schoolchildren (what one report refers to as “market share”) into privately managed, non-union charter schools over the next eight years.