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The following is the second post in a two-part series by Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). For more about Robin and her first post, click here . Before I jump into policy experiments, I want to reflect on the enthusiastic response that I received from last week’s Part One of Billionaire Education Policy . If I could summarize the response with one word, it would be relief. A lot of people who work in education, philanthropy, and government are wary of the rise in billionaire policymaking, but are reticent in voicing their concerns. Perhaps this is fear of retaliation -- what Edward Skloot calls the “ Brass-Knuckles philanthropy ”of the Gates Foundation. But I see another, more heartening piece to this puzzle. People in the philanthropic and advocacy communities don’t want to harm the mission of philanthropy. We fear that revealing the pitfalls of billionaire philanthropy might have some u...

The following is a guest posting by my colleague and friend Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of “Why Philanthro-policymaking Matters” in The Politics of Philanthrocapitali sm, Society 2011, The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation (Stanford University Press, 2004) and numerous articles on politics and social policy. Rogers served as a Congressional Fellow on Women and Public Policy during welfare reform, as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University, was a visiting fellow at Princeton University. She is writing a book on philanthro-policymaking, Billionaire Philanthropy . This is the first of two posts in a mini-series on the Education Optimists. The word “policy” makes us think of politicians and bureaucrats. But what happens when powerful policy-makers aren’t elected or appointed? Today, billionaires are shaping education policy in t...