Billionaires Who Aim to “Disrupt” Education May Get a Chance Even If Trump Loses

If reelected U.S. president, Donald Trump, echoing other Republicans, has said he would shut down the Department of Education. All signs point toward a second Trump term expanding school privatization efforts and discriminatory policies carried out during the first Trump term under hard right billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

But even if Trump loses, the longtime wealthy backers of corporate education reform stand to have sway within a Harris administration.

Megabillionaires have donated and fundraised enormous sums toward Vice President Kamala Harris’s election. Many of these big donors have been key drivers of corporate education reform efforts over the past two decades, from funding charter schools to throwing millions into local school board elections.

Some also come from Silicon Valley and have vested interests in the new frontier of corporate penetration of public education, which has taken the form of educational technology — or ed tech — products and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI).

“The neoliberal project to make education a profit center has really shifted,” education author and activist Lois Weiner told Truthout, with earlier efforts focused on charter schools and standardized testing. “Now we have another wave,” she said, “and that’s ed tech.”

One of Harris’s biggest donors and closest confidants is billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, for whom education “disruption” is a core cause. Powell Jobs oversees the Emerson Collective, a private LLC aimed at reshaping U.S. education, including through a venture capital arm with ed tech investments. News reports suggest that Powell Jobs could stand to influence Harris’s education policies, which the vice president has said very little about.

Silicon Valley and Corporate Education “Reform”

Corporate education reform — or what author Diane Ravitch has called “corporate disruption” — is a decadeslong, bipartisan political effort, led by billionaire donors and government officials, to restructure schools to function more like businesses and, often, privatize public education.

“It’s the neoliberal idea that everything should be thought of as markets, including education,” University of Illinois Chicago education scholar Kenneth Saltman told Truthout. “Students are clients, parents are consumers, schools are businesses and school districts, sometimes metaphorized as a stock portfolio, are a competitive industry,” said Saltman.

Corporate school reform efforts intensified in the early 2000s with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and its high-stakes testing regime, and persisted under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which continued the focus on raising test scores while promoting charter schools and pushing states to compete for federal funds.

Many of the biggest backers of corporate education reform are billionaires from the tech world, including Powell Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings and John Doerr. Collectively, they have poured billions of dollars into a range of political, philanthropic and business efforts to restructure or “transform” education.

For example, a host of billionaires that included Powell Jobs, Hastings, Bloomberg, as well as Eli Broad, Jim and Alice Walton, John Arnold, and many others, donated millions to charter school efforts and pro-charter school board candidates in California in the 2010s.

Billionaires have also put hundreds of millions into their own nonprofit or private initiatives. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have bankrolled charter schools from California to New Jersey, often to little effect, critics say.

Some billionaire donors, like Zuckerberg with his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative , have turned toward “philanthrocapitalist” vehicles to pursue their agenda: private firms that give off a philanthropic veneer but operate as opaque LLCs rather than more transparent nonprofits, seeking to influence education policy while often also having business interests tied to education markets.

These billionaire-driven “reform” efforts ultimately work to “redistribute control over decision making away from the public and concentrate it with tech corporations and superrich individuals atop these supposed philanthropic institutions,” said Saltman.

Silicon Valley, Laurene Powell Jobs and Kamala Harris

While some Silicon Valley billionaires are supporting Trump, tech elites, including longtime backers of education “disruption” efforts, are among Harris’s top donors.

These include Gates and Bloomberg, who have each donated $50 million to support Harris’s election, and Hastings, Doerr, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Sheryl Sandberg, and others who together have donated tens of millions in their attempt to get the vice president elected.

But more than any other Silicon Valley billionaire, Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, stands to have significant influence in shaping a Harris administration.

Powell Jobs is worth over $15 billion and is one of the wealthiest and most influential people in Silicon Valley. She has backed Harris for over two decades and has contributed millions toward her presidential run. Over the years, Powell Jobs has fundraised and donated millions more toward Democratic candidates more broadly.

Powell Jobs is “one of Ms. Harris’s most essential confidantes” and “has emerged as a powerful player behind the scenes” of her campaign, says The New York Times. The two have attended each other’s intimate family events — Powell Jobs was “one of about 60 people” to attend Harris’s 2014 wedding to Doug Emhoff — and “they have gone on personal trips together, with Ms. Harris at times flying on Ms. Powell Jobs’s private plane.”

Because of all this, writes The New York Times, Powell Jobs “is positioned to have extraordinary influence, or at least access, in a potential Harris administration.” And no cause may be dearer to Powell Jobs than education reform.

Corporate education reform advocate Marc Porter Magee told The New York Times that if Harris wins, “[Powell Jobs] and her staff could emerge as important players in an administration that has yet to define its K-12 agenda.” “Some have wondered whether, if Ms. Harris wins the election,” wrote the Times, “Ms. Powell Jobs might want a formal role in the administration, such as secretary of education, one of her top issues.”

The Emerson Collective

Powell Jobs carries out much of her agenda through the Emerson Collective, a private company she founded in 2004.

Emerson supports the XQ Institute, a nonprofit chaired by Powell Jobs that calls itself the “nation’s leading organization dedicated to rethinking high school.” Russlynn Ali, an Emerson managing director and XQ’s CEO, previously worked for pro-charter groups like the Broad Foundation, as well as working under Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan from 2009 to 2012.

While its ambitions are lofty, XQ has been criticized for spending lavish amounts on public relations gimmicks and competitions while falling short of its promise to reinvent schools.

“The most discomfiting aspect of XQ is its super-staged self, the distance between what it is, in reality — which is to say another school-reform effort by a big-name philanthropist — and what it rather grandiosely claims to be,” noted a 2019 New York Magazine profile of Powell Jobs.

Other key players in Emerson’s top leadership also come from the corporate education reform movement and elite Democratic Party circles.

Among them are former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a managing director at Emerson; and Emerson’s senior director of campaigns and deputy chief of staff, Robin Reck, who consulted for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Laura & John Arnold Foundation and Walmart — all backers of corporate school reform.

Another Emerson managing director and top aide to Powell Jobs is David Simas, a former Obama staffer and Obama Foundation CEO.

“Privatizing Schools From the Inside Out”

Emerson Collective also has a venture capital arm that invests in a range of educational ed tech start-ups and businesses such as Amplify, which provides “next-generation curriculum and assessment”; Outschool, which offers “interactive online classes kids’ love of learning”; and others.

Critics of corporate education reform have warned that the corporate-driven infiltration of ed tech products into schools threatens student learning, teacher autonomy and democratic control over public education.

Investors have poured billions into ed tech, including a record high of $20.8 billion in 2021. While ed tech start-ups have struggled more in recent years, Morgan Stanley still projects global ed tech spending to reach $620 billion by 2030.

Through their steady infiltration into schools, ed tech interests are “privatizing schools from the inside out with heavy contracting,” said Saltman.

Companies like Microsoft and Google, and apps like ClassDojo and Khanmigo, are among the many tech players and products penetrating K-12 education, sometimes making their product free to use, critics say, with the longer-term aim of creating consumer dependencies that will translate into profits and market dominance.

“The race is on between the tech giants right now to lock themselves into school processes to such a degree that it becomes impossible to root them out,” Alex Molnar, director of the National Education Policy Center, told Truthout.

Molnar says that data collection is a key interest driving ed tech, with the promise of “personalized” digital education increasing surveillance of students and teachers while allowing companies to gather loads of data to turn into future profits.

“Data is of commercial value, whether or not it has immediate commercial value now, so there is an incentive for companies to turn kids into data production engines,” adds Saltman.

Saltman also says a major problem with corporate ed tech and its techno-utopian promise to redefine education is that it degrades learning by, he writes, presenting “knowledge as delinked from the social world” and “the subject as an atomic consumer of decontextualized fact.”

“All of these technologies make it virtually impossible to teach in ways that are contextual and deal with the relationship between student subjectivity, knowledge and the broader social context,” Saltman told Truthout.

Defenders of democratic public education say a newer concern is the expanding infiltration of corporate-driven AI applications into schools through everything from personalized “tutorbots” to AI lesson-planning “assistants.” Top ed tech investors like GSV Ventures are now hosting major conferences, sponsored by longtime school privatization backers like the Walton Family Foundation, on “the intersection of all things AI in Education.”

A March 2024 report from the National Policy Education Center found that “the adoption of largely unregulated AI systems and applications” would “force students and teachers to become involuntary test subjects in a giant experiment in automated instruction and administration that is sure to be rife with unintended consequences and potentially negative effects.”

Saltman has written that AI applications are also means for expanding surveillance of students and teachers. “It’s not clear to me that there are AI-based forms of pedagogy that are advantageous over in-person teaching and learning,” said Saltman. “There are lots of ways these approaches are worse,” he added, including that “they erode teacher autonomy.”

Molnar sees a “substantive danger” in AI’s race into schools, which he called an “opaque, unaccountable mechanism that has been developed and is controlled by corporate interests for their own purposes.”

“We’re going to have a very high cost socially because of Silicon Valley,” says Molnar. “As these systems become enmeshed in schools, you essentially are giving monopoly control over a democratic institution to these corporations, which is very dangerous.”

Toward Democratic Education Technology

The concerns over ed tech aren’t inherently about the increased use of technology in education. Saltman says if education technology were separated from corporate profiteering and “attentive to social context and the relationship between student experience and the broader social world students inhabit,” it could potentially be beneficial in schools.

“Unfortunately, I think that technology in education has largely been used to replicate and worsen some of the worst tendencies of the prior era,” he said, referring to earlier iterations of corporate school reform.

“It’s bad because it’s not democratic,” adds Weiner. “It’s a continuation of the neoliberal project’s attack on democratic schooling.”

The Democratic Party platform supports things like increased funding of public schools and free and universal preschool, and opposes the use of private school vouchers. Running against Trump, Harris has been endorsed by major teachers unions, and groups supporting public education have praised her past record on a range of topics, including supporting improving teacher pay and increased fundings for schools. Harris’s campaign website itself says little about K-12 education or what her education department would look like.

With so much fundraising and donations flowing toward Harris from billionaire education disruptors like her close friend Powell Jobs, critics of corporate education reform worry about the implications for the education policies of a potential Harris administration.

“What’s concerning is the possibility of people, with tremendous financial interests in getting their products into public schools, having the capacity to influence educational policy,” said Saltman.