Joel Klein’s Lesson Plan - Joe Nocera - NYTimes.com: "Charter schools, explained Whitney Tilson, the founder of T2 Partners and one of their most ardent supporters, are the perfect philanthropy for results-oriented business executives. For one thing, they can change lives permanently, not just help people get by from day to day. For another, he said, “hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital.”
A wealthy hedge fund manager can spend more than $1 million financing a charter school start-up. But once it is up and running, it qualifies for state funding, just like a public school. Except that in most cases, charter schools save the taxpayers money because they are much more cost-conscious than the typical big city public school. “It is extremely leveraged philanthropy,” Mr. Tilson said."
- Bourdieu's description of the relative autonomy of the symbolic from the material - unless you buy into the metaphysical / magical functioning of "market forces," one might recognize that these hedge fund managers could not justify their support of such measures based on neither the certainty that charter school competition would work nor on the hope that there is a chance that they would be profitable. The certainty and the profitability is only in the realm of the symbolic - the ideological gains to be had in such investments.
"I believe in the transformative power of education" Klein.
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