The Perils of Plutocratic Actors in Public Education

• In Event: Wealth, Markets, and Plutocracy

Abstract

Wealthy private actors increasingly shape public education policies, classroom practices, and the broader purpose of education. These actors—philanthropists and corporations, in particular—exert undemocratic influence and power over decision-making, yet remain unaccountable to the public. To reveal the stakes of this increasing entanglement between private actors and public education as an urgent issue of political theory, I ask: what political tensions are produced by the involvement of plutocratic actors in public education? I argue that where their wealth permits them to interact with, influence, and manage the provisioning of public goods including education, philanthropists and corporations should be recognized as plutocratic, and I offer some political consequences for this designation. Through philanthropic action, these actors subvert egalitarian relations, introduce unjust relationships of domination, and threaten democratic institutions and their distribution of public benefits (Cordelli 2020; Lechterman 2022; Pettit 1997).

Over the past two decades, scholars and the public have increasingly turned a critical eye toward the role of powerful, wealthy actors in education and U.S. politics more broadly. Political theorists have examined and critiqued the existence and persistence of philanthropy as a means for addressing sustained economic inequality within liberal democracies (e.g., Cordelli 2020; Reich 2018; Saunders-Hasting 2018), articulating concerns about the ways wealthy actors leverage their material capital and corresponding clout, enjoying outsized political influence as a result of their accumulated wealth (e.g., Green 2016; Saunders-Hasting 2022). This paper evaluates the risks and legitimacy of wealthy private actors as political participants where they maintain influence over institutional decision-making and power over institutional configurations (Cordelli 2020; Hacker, et al 2021). I argue that contemporary philanthropy operates as a policy-making tool with wealthy private actors acting as policy entrepreneurs. Philanthropic relations allow for increased privatization, which constitutes a type of elite capture, reimagining the state altogether by blurring the line between public and private. Indeed, the “state” is implicated and complicit in enhancing a role for private actors. In each setting, private actors nearly always coordinate with state actors through policy advocacy, formal public-private partnerships, or as the recipients and designees of responsibilities formerly belonging to state agencies.

I begin by defining and theorizing plutocracy in order to interpret the relationship between philanthropic private actors, public education, and public goods more broadly (Satz, 2010; Winters & Page 2009). Drawing on scholarship that examines the intersection of philanthropy and democracy, I show how existing social norms and institutional structures form a system of deference, one that incentivizes and protects the preferences of wealthy actors who choose to forgo personal consumption or profits in favor of philanthropic action (Saunders-Hastings 2022). I explore two, interrelated concerns regarding the role of plutocratic actors in public education that result from this deference. First, is a concern endemic to the problem of plutocracy in public institutions more broadly: that as a result of their wealth and ascribed political power, wealthy actors are able to undemocratically exert their vision and preferences over issues of common concern, which should be negotiated and decided by public and elected entities. In education, this coalesces into an increasingly narrow and instrumental vision of education that functions to both socialize students toward specific work norms and better align with the (perceived) needs of employers. However, this focus can come at the expense of other individual, civic, or democratic educational aims (Allen 2016; Brighouse 2006; Gutmann 1987). Second, private actors may structurally direct resources toward priorities and institutional configurations that allow them to disproportionately derive benefits in the short or long-term. Directly, plutocratic actors benefit where schools train future workers for the companies that wealthy actors themselves operate and are invested in; and longitudinally, they benefit by reproducing and reifying the economic structures and ideology that maintain their plutocratic power. I conclude by outlining shifts to existing social norms and regulatory structures that may better insulate public education from these risks.

Author

• Nora Reikosky, University of Houston