America’s founders understood that public education was essential for a free people and a free society. As John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts constitution, “It shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the public schools.”
Many early philanthropists shared this view, and during the first Gilded Age, a number helped expand and champion public schools. Their roles took different forms and the results were mixed, but for better and worse, philanthropy helped accelerate the development of our modern public school system.
In this new Gilded Age, a different picture has emerged. Rather than cherishing public schools, a number of the nation’s richest individuals and foundations seem intent on undermining public education. This isn’t a new development; the privatization of the nation’s education system has been a decades-long project for many funders, particularly those on the right. But that project seems closer to becoming a reality today because those advocates and donors have many allies in the current administration — including the president himself.
Of course, many mainstream philanthropists remain deeply committed to public education, and support schools and students through a variety of programs. Just recently, 80-plus funders signed a letter posted by New Profit’s Shruti Sehra that called education, from K-12 through college, “a dream worth pursuing.” But the letter also pointed to a steady decline in education funding from philanthropy in recent years.
As IP reported last year, many of the country’s largest education philanthropists appear unsure of their goals and direction, and how best to channel their funds. Perhaps most importantly, progressive education funders haven’t joined forces and funds to strengthen and improve public education in a unified and powerful way, and counter the efforts and resources of those determined to destroy it.
We reached out to a variety of education leaders, historians and experts to gain a better understanding of these trends and what they mean for education in a new Gilded Age.
Ultra-rich donors: building schools then, privatizing schools now
In the early days of the U.S., education was considered a private responsibility that parents with means paid for; most others did without. Historian Johann Neem traces this history in his book, “Democracy’s Schools,” and describes how, over time, as awareness of the value of education grew, families and whole communities began pushing for public education.
Later, during the first Gilded Age, education became a top cause for many leading philanthropists. John D. Rockefeller, who created Standard Oil, provided generous funding for the General Education Board, an organization that sought to improve education all over the country, with a particular focus on the South. Rockefeller’s total donations to the GEB “marked, at the time, the largest gift to a philanthropic organization in the history of the United States,” according to the Rockefeller Archive Center. Rockefeller also contributed to Spelman College, an HBCU for women; Spelman was named in honor of Rockefeller’s wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, and her abolitionist parents.
Another big name is Andrew Carnegie, who made his tremendous fortune in railroads and steel and supported a number of colleges and education institutions alongside the famed 2,800-plus libraries.
Other philanthropists contributed to schools for immigrants and other low-income students in other parts of the country. As IP’s Dawn Wolfe reported, many of the Gilded Age’s richest women channeled their wealth to support education — higher education in particular — for women and girls.
Julius Rosenwald, though, is the Gilded Age philanthropist who likely made the largest contribution to education in the U.S. Rosenwald was a German-Jewish immigrant and the long-time president of Sears, Roebuck & Co.; he was also the financial engine behind the Rosenwald Schools.
Early in the last century, educator Booker T. Washington sought out Rosenwald for help educating Black students in the Jim Crow South, only a fraction of whom had access to education. The schools received funding from the Rosenwald Fund and other philanthropists, as well as state governments and local community members. Close to 5,000 Rosenwald Schools were built throughout 15 states in the South, serving more than 700,000 students over four decades, among them John Lewis, Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou. When someone asked Rosenwald why he gave so much of his wealth to benefit Black students, he said, “I do not see how America can go ahead if part of its people are left behind,” as Darren Walker reported in an Atlantic article titled “Finding Philanthropy’s Forgotten Founder.”
But Gilded Age philanthropists rarely sent their own children to the schools they funded, opting for private schools or tutors instead. The inadequacies of these early schools helped boost parents’ appetite for universal public education, as Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, observed. “One of the motivations for the development of early public schools was actually to get kids out of what were then called ‘pauper schools,’” said Schneider, who is the author, with journalist Jennifer Berkshire, of “The Education Wars.”
Berkshire and Schneider write that the pauper schools “provided a barebones schooling to needy kids, but they also sent a message to children and their families about the inherent unfairness of society, This is what you get.”
Over time, as Neem pointed out, communities increasingly recognized education as a resource that benefited everyone. “It was really a process of local, community-by-community buy-in that convinced people that I should pay taxes for someone else’s child to go to school,” he said. “Because not only do I benefit in some abstract sense that an educated public is good for society and democracy, but I benefit in a very direct way because public school provides a shared space and shared resources for everyone.”
Today, in a new Gilded Age, many conservative funders seem intent on pushing back the clock. Instead of trying to improve public education and strengthening it as a resource that benefits everyone, many of the country’s wealthiest people and their philanthropies are working to erode public education by essentially turning it over to private actors.
Philanthropic support for the semi-privatization of K-12 education reached an earlier peak with the charter school movement, which draws in backing not only from right-leaning donors, but from a wide variety of ultra-rich supporters criss-crossing the political spectrum.
Currently, though, the preferred tool of the right-wing billionaires who want to privatize education outright is education vouchers. Today, a number of variations on the voucher model have emerged, including Education Savings Accounts (ESA) and Voucher Tax Credits. All of these programs, which fall under the umbrella term “choice,” allow families to use public funds for private school tuition or for homeschooling.
The new Gilded Age donors backing education vouchers
Vouchers were first developed in reaction to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated public school desegregation. According to Brookings, “These early voucher programs had an explicit purpose: to preserve racial segregation. Terms like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘school vouchers,’ rooted in the work of Milton Friedman, were used to legitimize policies that excluded Black families.”
Despite this unfortunate history, the voucher concept never really went away. In 1990, it was introduced in Milwaukee, and since then, it has been reintroduced — and in a number of cases adopted — in states across the country. Right-wing philanthropy has played a key role in the development and growth of the voucher movement.
In his book, “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” Josh Cowen traces the evolution of vouchers from a fringe idea to a central tenet of conservative ed policy. He describes how “a small band of interconnected and insular groups of conservative advocates, tightly networked to some of the wealthiest and most influential players in right-wing politics, invented a rationale for school privatization largely from nothing and out of nowhere.”
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation was an early and fervent voucher backer, as the Philanthropy Roundtable has detailed, and continues to support the model. Philanthropic outlets channeling other conservative fortunes joined Bradley in the push for vouchers, including the Olin Foundation, the network of organizations funded by Charles Koch, and Betsy DeVos and her family. The Walton Family Foundation, which has long been one of the philanthrosphere’s top charter school backers, was also an early voucher supporter, and, according to its grants database, continues to support pro-voucher organizations like EdChoice as well as the State Policy Network, a 501c3 hub for state-based conservative think tanks and policy groups.
Other major conservative billionaires have gotten behind vouchers, including Richard Uihlein, who founded Uline, the giant shipping supply company. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, maintain a low profile, but Politico called them “the most powerful donor couple in the GOP, if not all of politics”; a ProPublica report also linked the Uihleins to election denial efforts. Richard Uihlien has contributed to the School Freedom Fund, a PAC that runs ads targeting state lawmakers who oppose vouchers in states including Tennessee and Texas.
Jeff Yass, who founded the trading firm Susquehanna International Group, is another School Freedom Fund backer. The richest man in Pennsylvania and one of the richest in the world, Yass has focused on school vouchers as his cause of choice, according to a recent report by the Washington Post. Both Yass and Uihlien spent millions in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s voucher push in that state, for example. (Yass, a major investor in TikTok’s parent company, was among the donors who pitched in on Trump’s ballroom project, as well.)
Some right-wing funders have worked to promote school vouchers at the state level. For example, Rex Sinquefield, who cofounded Dimensional Fund Advisors, and his wife Jeanne, are major Republican donors and have supported education vouchers in their home state of Missouri. Sinquefield cofounded the Show Me Institute, which calls itself “the only think tank in Missouri dedicated to promoting free markets and individual liberty,” and promotes charter schools and education vouchers, among other causes.
Conservative donor-advised funds, including DonorsTrust and the National Christian Foundation, also back the voucher movement, alongside conservative think tanks and advocacy organizations (many of which are backed by the funders mentioned above). One is the Heritage Foundation, which made vouchers a centerpiece of its Project 2025 education policy plans. Other pro-voucher organizations include America First Policy Institute, American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Council for National Policy, EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice), the Independent Women’s Forum, Moms for Liberty and the State Policy Network.
Another billionaire antagonist of public schools: Donald Trump
As some of the nation’s richest line up to promote a model that essentially amounts to a vote of zero confidence in the public education project, they’re joined by one of their peers: the president. During Donald Trump’s first term, he named conservative billionaire and voucher advocate Betsy DeVos secretary of education. By the early 2020s, voucher programs (including ESAs and tax credits) were gaining ground in states across the country. Meanwhile, culture war skirmishes over rights for LGBTQ+ students, critical race theory, school library book bans, and how history should be taught — often fanned by school privatization advocates — helped boost parents’ distrust of traditional public schools.
Since taking office, Trump’s administration has followed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint closely — including in the area of education. He has already enacted many of Project 2025’s education proposals, dismantling the Department of Education, and slashing Head Start. The 900-plus page document also calls for “universal private school choice” — that is, voucher and voucher-like programs.
In the first few weeks of his second term, Trump called for an expansion of school choice, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon — herself a billionaire — has closely followed the president’s education priorities. The Department of Education has even encouraged states to use Title I funds, which are intended to support students experiencing poverty — to expand private school voucher programs, as a Center for American Progress analysis points out.
At the same time, McMahon has populated the Education Department with political appointees “from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups eager to de-emphasize public schools,” as ProPublica outlined in a detailed report. Prominent among them is Lindsey Burke, a Heritage Foundation policy director who wrote the education section of Project 2025. In a speech last year, Burke, who now serves as a top advisor to McMahon, spelled out her vision: “I’m optimistic that, you know, five years from now, a majority of kids are going to be in a private school choice program.”
If that’s the goal, it seems natural to ask: Do vouchers actually work? In fact, as Josh Cowen lays out in his book, voucher programs have shown dismal results in a number of in-depth studies.
Earlier in his career, Cowen worked on several major studies evaluating voucher programs, and he has followed subsequent voucher research closely, so he is familiar with the findings. As he writes in “Privateers,” the evidence against vouchers is overwhelming: “In the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the largest academic declines ever apparent in the education research record, on any topic, have been attributable to school vouchers. And yet the drumbeat to devote more and more resources to these voucher systems after years of failure according to any standard used to evaluate public schools, remains louder than ever.”
Voucher opponents point to additional flaws in the model. Most obviously, vouchers deplete resources that would otherwise go to public schools, disadvantaging under-resourced rural districts in particular. In addition, voucher schools lack accountability for how they operate and what students learn.
There is also abundant evidence that voucher programs tend to benefit middle- and upper-class students who already have the resources to attend private schools. Finally, private schools can more easily exclude students with disabilities or those with gender identities administrators may disapprove of.
For voucher champions, ideology appears to trump the evidence. Voucher advocates and funders comprise a Venn diagram of diverse but often overlapping interests. Some are libertarian, and their dislike of public education is driven by free market principles and a deep mistrust of government (some of these advocates refer derisively to traditional public schools as “government schools.”) Others want to see more of a role for religion in education, and seek more federal support for religious schools. (As Cowen reports, Betsy DeVos has suggested that school choice could “advance God’s Kingdom.”)
At the same time, many voucher advocates, and the conservative funders who support them, are militantly anti-union and consider public schools hotbeds of union activity. The fact that teachers’ unions are among the nation’s most powerful and have consistently backed the Democratic Party, of course, doesn’t endear them to many on the right.
A new Gilded Age debate: education as private versus public good
The debate between voucher advocates and voucher opponents points to an underlying question that education philanthropy will have to reckon with as the growing push for privatization goes hand in hand with the rapid expansion of private wealth at the very top. That is, what’s the purpose of education? Are schools there just to educate and advance my child, or is the purpose to support and create opportunities for my child and all children — and society as a whole?
Schneider and Berkshire lay out the case for civil sector support for public schools in “The Education Wars”: “Schools are not just places where we advance our own agendas. They are places where we come together to become a public.”
Schneider elaborated in a recent interview. “Funding the privatization of education is about advancing a vision of the world in which individuals seek their own self interest in an unfettered market, and they are not hemmed in by concern about things like the public good,” he said. “‘If I want something for my kid, then I should be able to get that.’ But we are just going to see deepening inequality if we don’t understand the many ways we all benefit from every young person getting access to a fairly equal and mostly adequate education.”
One way we all benefit, Schneider suggests, is that public schools bring communities with diverse interests and ideas together, and that is essential for a healthy democracy. “We have seen so much fragmentation in American society over the past 50 years, and we’re living with the political implications of that right now,” he said. “We need to understand how important it is to have projects that bring us together as a public with shared interests.”
Adam Laats, a professor at SUNY Binghamton who has written widely on the history of education in the U.S., believes school privatization will create a deja vu education landscape. “I hope that school privatizers don’t get the chance to feel regret because their policies got enacted, because we know what’s going to happen,” he said. “There will be some excellent schools for people with resources who can attend them, and bad schools for everyone else. Education is like a road; you can’t just have it for you. A road is a public resource that needs everyone to agree that we need to invest in it, and it’s good for everyone when you invest in it.”
A better role for philanthropy?
Derek Black, author of “Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy,” has written, “Education, like democracy, has long been a work in progress. But that progress has come by remaining fixed on our fundamental ideas, not questioning them because of our own failures to reach them — and certainly not replacing them with something else.”
It is impossible to know if voucher advocates and the Trump administration will succeed in their effort to privatize what are certainly the most impactful and civically formative public spaces Americans still have access to. A recent poll by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found that satisfaction with the quality of K-12 education among American adults has dipped to a new low (just 35%). This dissatisfaction isn’t surprising given many parents’ dismay about school closures during COVID; voucher advocates have also decried the closures and other inflammatory issues — like critical race theory and so-called “woke” curriculum — to shake parents’ confidence in public schools. Still, many parents are happy with their own public school, according to the poll: “Parents of current K-12 students are nearly twice as satisfied with their own child’s education as they are with education in the U.S.”
In “The Privateers,” Josh Cowen points out that public schools don’t have the powerful backing that school vouchers do. A number of nonprofits, including EdTrust, the Network for Public Education, the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and state-level public school advocacy groups, fiercely champion public education. In terms of philanthropy, however, there just isn’t a powerful coalition of funders focused on advocating for the value of public education and strengthening public schools. At the same time, many education funders seem unsure of how to make a difference in the current education landscape.
To date, large ed funders have tended to make adjustments around education’s edges, versus joining together to support and strengthen public education overall. Meanwhile, the most prominent tech billionaires, who made their fortunes on innovations supported, at least in part, by public resources — including schools and universities — have not stepped up to support public schools or defend them from conservative attack. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, for example, whose Chan Zuckerberg Initiative initially included education in its ambitious equity agenda, has since slashed the organization’s education team and now focuses instead on ed tech tools. Zuckerberg and Chan also recently shuttered two Bay Area schools they’d established to support communities of color. Meanwhile, the pair have joined other tech billionaires in embracing Donald Trump — tacitly supporting his administration’s education agenda.
Some individual philanthropies have made improving and supporting public schools a major focus (the Raikes Foundation and many members of Grantmakers for Education come to mind) but the sector could be doing more. Public schools would benefit from the support of a strong coalition of funders with the economic and policy muscle — and the singlemindedness of purpose — that is fueling the voucher movement. Such a coalition would reaffirm the value of public education as a shared resource, while working to address our current system’s flaws to improve schools and boost education excellence and equity.
Like many education experts, Schneider is skeptical of flashy philanthropic efforts to overhaul education (like Mark Zuckerberg’s foray into Newark schools, for example) but thinks funders can play a positive role nevertheless.
“I think that’s how you strike the balance: investing in projects that help make the case for public education and that help stabilize public education as a project that benefits everybody,” he said. “I’d love to see investments in projects designed to make local school districts more democratic (small d) in their functioning, for example. Philanthropy could be doing a lot more to invest in the stability of public schools, essentially making the argument that this isn’t about left versus right or blue versus red, but rather a deeply inclusive and democratic (again, small d) and public vision of public education.”
This piece is part of our special series on billionaire giving in a new Gilded Age. Check out all the articles here.
