"The Nuisance of Democracy" and Bill Gates
Nonprofit Quarterly, a journal on "innovative thinking for the nonprofit sector" has always been a lately favorite of mine. They are generally very straightforward in their thinking. This particular article, Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State, and the Nuisance of Democracy, by Joanne Barken, is much more harsh than their usual writing but, on this topic, I don't mind. Joanne Barkan is a writer based in New York City and Truro, Massachusetts. For the past six years, her work has focused on the relationship between “big philanthropy” and democracy, and the intervention of private foundations in public-education policy. (Barkan also has another excellent article, They (Not We) Shall Overcome: Private Largesse and Public Education, that I hope to write about in context of what I see happening in Seattle around discourse on public education reform.)