‘Philanthropizing’ consent: how a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil

Rebecca Tarlau; Kathryn Moeller

This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations’ use of material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to garner the consent of multiple social and institutional actors to support a public policy. In other words, these foundations do not impose policies on governments; rather, they ‘render technical’ high-stakes political debates on pressing issues of educational equity and then influence state officials’ consensus about which policies to adopt. We argue that this philanthropic influence is not simply a neoliberal, profit-maximizing scheme; rather, it is an attempt by foundation and corporate leaders to garner power and influence on different scales, and re-make public education in their own image. Although this educational policy game is in many ways participatory and widely accepted, foundations are only able to play this role due to their tremendous economic power, a direct product of the unequal global political economy, and the systematic defunding of the public sphere.

Journal of Education Policy ISSN: 0268-0939 (Print) 1464-5106 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tedp20 ‘Philanthropizing’ consent: how a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil Rebecca Tarlau & Kathryn Moeller To cite this article: Rebecca Tarlau & Kathryn Moeller (2019): ‘Philanthropizing’ consent: how a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil, Journal of Education Policy, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2018.1560504 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1560504 Published online: 08 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=tedp20 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1560504 ‘Philanthropizing’ consent: how a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil Rebecca Tarlaua,b and Kathryn Moellera,b a College of Education and School of Labor and Employment Relations, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA; bDepartment of Education Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations’ use of material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to garner the consent of multiple social and institutional actors to support a public policy. In other words, these foundations do not impose policies on governments; rather, they ‘render technical’ high-stakes political debates on pressing issues of educational equity and then inﬂuence state oﬃcials’ consensus about which policies to adopt. We argue that this philanthropic inﬂuence is not simply a neoliberal, proﬁt-maximizing scheme; rather, it is an attempt by foundation and corporate leaders to garner power and inﬂuence on diﬀerent scales, and re-make public education in their own image. Although this educational policy game is in many ways participatory and widely accepted, foundations are only able to play this role due to their tremendous economic power, a direct product of the unequal global political economy, and the systematic defunding of the public sphere. Received 6 March 2018 Accepted 14 December 2018 KEYWORDS Philanthropy; education foundations; common core; national learning standards; privatization; educational governance; Brazil Introduction On 20 December 2017, a ceremony in Brasília marked the passage of the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC),1 the new Brazilian ‘common core’ curriculum, more commonly referred to as national learning standards. Brazilian President Michel Temer, along with his Minister of Education Mendonça Filho and Executive Secretary of Education Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro, gathered for the event with a bipartisan group of politicians, educational oﬃcials, and representatives of the private sector. The passage of the BNCC was heralded as ‘an important advance for the equity and quality of Brazilian education.’2 In her introductory remarks, Executive Secretary Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro outlined the complex participatory process that occurred between September 2015 and CONTACT Rebecca Tarlau Park, PA 16802, USA rzt70@psu.edu The Pennsylvania State University, 504C Keller Building, University © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER December 2017, leading to the passage of the BNCC. It included meetings, debates, and online public forums that enabled teachers, professors, educational experts, politicians, and other citizens to weigh in on the content of the curriculum. While Castro praised the participation of these diverse actors, along with the contributions of government institutions, her remarks did not mention the role of private and corporate foundations in the passage of the BNCC. This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular entered the policy debate in Brazil and quickly became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education at this time. What is unusual about this policy reform is the speed with which it gained acceptance among a diverse array of educational actors in Brazil, especially given the fact that the BNCC was not a prominent part of the national policy debate prior to 2014. Even more surprising is the fact that the BNCC continued to be promoted after the political upheaval of 2016, when Workers’ Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseﬀ was impeached – referred to by many Brazilian citizens as a coup d’etat. While the new President Michel Temer reversed dozens of the previous government’s policies and stalled countless other program initiatives, the BNCC advanced without missing a beat. Through our analysis, we argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: whereby foundations use material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to garner the consent of multiple social and institutional actors to support a particular public policy despite signiﬁcant tensions, thus transforming this policy into a widelyaccepted initiative. This concept draws on Gramsci’s (1971) theories of civil society-state relations to show how philanthropic foundations have become important contemporary actors in establishing new hegemonic blocs3 in education in diﬀerent geographies. While we began this research examining a range of private and corporate actors operating in Brazilian education, our analysis ultimately focuses on the inﬂuence of the powerful Brazilian Lemann Foundation (LF). This singular attention on the LF was an outcome of our observations that this foundation played a critical role garnering the approval of multiple political and educational actors for this reform and directly partaking in policy discussions at the national and subnational levels. At the end of 2015, Moeller4 began to research corporate and private philanthropic investment, often referred to in the Brazilian context as social private investment (investimento social privado), in public education in Brazil with a focus on companies and foundations such as Instituto Unibanco, Fundação Vale, Itaú Social, and Grupo ABC, among others.5 Education is the principle area of social private investment in the country (GIFE 2014). As Moeller’s research advanced, it began immediately clear that the BNCC was the principle initiative in public education that corporations and private foundations were circling around. As noted by O Grupo de Institutos, Fundações e Empresas (GIFE) (The Group of Institutions, Foundations, and Businesses), during 2015 there was ‘signiﬁcant growth in actions, aligned with public governance initiatives, that sought to involve society in the implementation of public policies,’ such as ‘the process of deﬁning and promoting the Base Nacional Comum Curricular,’ in which 12% of GIFE members participated between 2015–2016 (Degenszajn, Rolnik, and Santiago 2015, 32). During this period, Tarlau was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Lemann Center for JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 3 Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil, an independent academic research center funded by the Lemann Foundation. Tarlau was interested in this project due to her previous research on participatory democracy in Brazil and the role of civil society organizations in co-producing Brazilian public policies and co-governing public services such as education (Tarlau 2013, Tarlau 2015). The BNCC seemed to be yet another impressive example of wide-spread civil society participation and debate, with thousands of people oﬀering feedback on the ﬁrst version of the document through an online participatory forum.6 Initially, our research on the BNCC focused on Todos pela Educação (TPE) (All for Education), a representative network of Brazilian companies and foundations (Martins and Krawczyk 2016). Yet, after observations and several interviews in 2015, we realized that the political force behind the BNCC did not come from TPE as we had assumed, but rather, the Lemann Foundation. The LF was a ﬁnancial supporter of TPE, however, it also operated as the most powerful single force in structuring consent amongst a diverse set of actors through the Movimento pelo Base Nacional Comum (Movement for the National Learning Standards), as our analysis will demonstrate. Nonetheless, while we focus on the Lemann Foundation, this is not a story of just one foundation. Rather, it is a story of the ways in which private and corporate actors negotiate political openings and alliances that enable new assertions of power and inﬂuence, often through racialized, gendered, and classed discourses on quality education for all (Moeller 2018). In this way, we demonstrate how corporate and private philanthropic inﬂuence in public education is not simply a neoliberal, proﬁtmaximizing scheme; rather, it is an attempt by foundation and corporate leaders to garner power and inﬂuence on diﬀerent scales, and to re-make public education in their own image. This is also a story of how policy knowledge in education travels across national borders, albeit unevenly through particular networks and nodes of capital, knowledge and power (Ball 2012; Moeller 2018), and how foundations in the Global South learn from foundations and policy processes in the Global North to eﬀectively inﬂuence educational trajectories based on particular visions of society and schooling. Philanthropy and education Corporate and private foundations are a rising inﬂuence in education across the world due to their promises of direct investments in schools and educational ventures, the magnitude of their ﬁnancial portfolios, the strength of their networks and organizational capacities, and the reach and power of their brands (Moeller 2018; Moeller, Velazquez & Hook 2018). While corporate and private actors have been involved in improving schooling in the U.S. since the 19th century (Arnove 1980; Lagemann 1992; Molnar 1996; Shipps 2006; Watkins 2001), they have become increasingly involved over the past four decades in the U.S. and globally (Ball and Youdell 2008; Fabricant and Fine 2015; Saltman 2005; Mundy et al. 2016). The expanded reach of corporate and private actors has occurred in the context of, as well as a consequence of, the rollback of state investment in public education and ideological attacks on public education in diﬀerent global contexts. As a result, education has become a site for expanding market logics and enlarging corporate proﬁts. The proliferation of this phenomenon around the world has been described as the global 4 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER education reform movement, known as GERM (Sahlberg 2012, 2016). The literature on the political economy of education has examined how this occurs through the promotion of marketized systems in public education, such as school vouchers, charter schools, and educational tax credits (Bartlett et al. 2002; DeBray-Pelot, Lubienski, and Scott 2007; Lubienski 2005; Scott 2009); the corporate and private management of public and for-proﬁt schools (Ball and Youdell 2008); the private provision of information technology (Bhanji 2012, 2008); and the expansion of supplemental educational and testing services by companies such as Pearson and Edison Learning, Inc. (Burch 2009; Burch and Good 2014; Koyama 2010). These examples of privatized and corporatized forms of education illuminate how the education business often blurs the line between educational provision and proﬁt maximization (Moeller 2018; Moeller, Velazquez & Hook 2018). Strategic philanthropy and venture philanthropy have also increased the inﬂuence of corporate and private philanthropies, such as family foundations like Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation, on educational policy and practice in the US and globally (Moeller 2013, 2014, 2018; Scott 2009; Schwittay 2006; van Fleet 2011; Reckhow and Snyder 2014; Resnik 2011; Tompkins-Stange 2016). Strategic philanthropy enables corporations or private individuals to focus their philanthropic activities on speciﬁc issues that will beneﬁt their business, while venture philanthropy applies the principles of private investing to transforming traditionally non-proﬁt sectors such as education. These two strategies often go hand in hand. They involve both direct ﬁnancial contributions to schools, districts, governments, and NGOs and lobbying for particular educational policy reforms (Ball 2012; Moeller, Velazquez & Hook 2018). In the US, for example, the literature has examined how private foundations (Lipman 2011; Scott 2009) are inﬂuencing public policies and educational practices – including school voucher policies, small schools, Common Core curriculum, and teacher evaluations based on standardized testing – on multiple scales across the country. Their involvement often includes minimal deliberation, public accountability, or transparency, and a signiﬁcant emphasis on rates of returns and achieving scale. As scholars have illuminated, the involvement of corporations and foundations in education globally has been encouraged in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), and, more recently, the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (Srivastava and Baur 2016). Srivastava and Baur (2016) argue that this is a result of two articulated crises: ﬁrst around funding, with six out of ten bilateral donors cutting their educational giving, and second, around educational quality, with 250 million children cited as being unable to read and write despite attending school for four or more years (Srivastava and Baur 2016). In this context, multilateral institutions, including the United Nations (UN) organizations and the World Bank, have pushed for increased philanthropic participation in global education (Mundy and Menashy 2014; Robertson et al. 2012; Bhanji 2016). The creation of transnational institutional structures, such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and UN Global Compact, which developed a platform for corporate engagement around the MDGs, have enabled and legitimized the movement of corporations, corporate foundations, and private philanthropies into the ﬁeld of development and education, linking the discourses of corporate social responsibility and education for all. The annual circuit of global forums, including the Clinton Global JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 5 Initiative,7 Global Philanthropy Forum, and the World Economic Forum, have also facilitated the creation and circulation of knowledge on educational policies (Ball 2012; Moeller 2018). In Brazil, GIFE began in 1989 as an informal group, and was formalized in 1995, creating a national forum that draws on and is inﬂuenced by broader global actors, conversations, and networks. The Lemann Foundation is active in promoting Brazilian educational reform through GIFE, in coordination with other private and corporate actors, such as Instituto Unibanco and Itaú Social, among others. Through these diverse mechanisms and forums, corporations and private philanthropies have rapidly positioned themselves at the forefront of national and global education agendas in the new millennium. Thus, while the speciﬁc story we tell is of the movement to remake Brazilian public education, it is also a larger story of the rising power of private and corporate inﬂuence in education globally. Theorizing the case of Brazil’s National Learning Standards (BNCC) Drawing on critical policy studies and social theory, our analysis builds on studies that consider how a combination of actors, ideologies, and institutions promote public policies in education for a wide-range of reasons that often have little to do with eﬀective schooling (Henig et al. 2001; Lipman 2011; Apple 2006). We argue that the primary reason the BNCC became a national policy in Brazil is due to the inﬂuence of the Lemann Foundation, a prominent private foundation created in 2002 by Jorge Paulo Lemann, a Brazilian billionaire. Tompkin-Stange’s (2016) research on foundations in the United States oﬀers a framework for analyzing the Lemann Foundation’s policy interventions in Brazil.8 As Tompkins-Stange (2016, 114) writes, ‘This close coupling of foundations with government is the result of a deliberate strategy by outcome-oriented foundations to pursue a coordinated suite of education reforms in partnership with government in order to produce the most concentrated impact.’ Rather than provide grants to smaller NGOs or civil society groups, the Lemann Foundation strategically invested its resources to make the most large-scale policy impact possible. The Lemann Foundation’s project of promoting national learning standards became a means through which the foundation could embed itself within the state, wield inﬂuence, and gain prestige. In this way, policy solutions like Common Core and BNCC emerge to address the problems of educational inequity and quality. They are framed by experts in the interest of the well-being of the population as opposed to the interests of a certain political group or class. As anthropologist Li (2007) explains, deeply political questions are often rendered technical and, thus, nonpolitical. The problems become the domain of experts working to ﬁnd a technical solution to the problem. Li (2007, 7) writes: The bounding and characterization of an ‘intelligible ﬁeld’ appropriate for intervention anticipates the kinds of intervention that experts have to oﬀer. The identiﬁcation of a problem is intimately linked to the availability of a solution. They co-merge within a governmental assemblage in which certain sorts of diagnoses, prescriptions, and techniques are available to the expert who is properly trained. 6 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER As observed in the case of BNCC, foundation leaders helped state oﬃcials come to a consensus about which policies to adopt to address the deﬁned problems by funding research studies and hosting educational seminars. They also oﬀered economic and organizational support for the implementation of these policies. This case study of one powerful foundation in Brazil illustrates how many foundations in Brazil and beyond are becoming increasingly ‘Gramscian’ in their approach to inﬂuencing policy, attempting to ‘articulate’ (Hall 1986) dispersed actors with diﬀerent interests into a single bloc of support. This strategy is similar to what Gramsci referred to as the ‘war of position,’ a slow process of garnering consent among multiple civil society and state actors. We call this philanthropizing consent in order to highlight how foundations are using their material and non-material resources, including money, knowledge, networks, media contacts, and convening power, to build a consensus around particular public policy initiatives, rather than develop more traditional publicprivate partnership or directly fund private projects. Methods Our data collection involved ‘network ethnography’ (Ball 2016), or tracking the trajectory of a policy by interviewing people who were involved in key institutions at important moments, participating in relevant policy discussions, and analyzing documents that outline moments of policy change. We consider the introduction of the BNCC into the Brazilian policy debate and its rapid passage into legislation as an explicitly political process, involving the constant interaction of institutions and individual actors with particular interests. Therefore, we also draw on the lessons of political ethnography, which ‘look[s] microscopically at the foundations of political institutions and their attendant sets of practices . . . [and] explain[s] why political actors behave the way they do to identify the causes, processes, and outcomes that are part and parcel of political life’ (Auyero and Joseph, p. 1). In other words, we trace the daily processes of political strategizing and coalition building and jockeying for power through interviews, observations, and document analysis. In total, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 29 people who were either government actors promoting the BNCC or other people connected to the BNCC policy debates. These included 13 interviews with government oﬃcials (5 from the state Secretaries of Education,9 4 high-level policy actors in the Ministry of Education, 2 representatives from the National Council of Secretaries of Education, and 1 from the National Union of Municipal Education Managers); 6 university professors that were involved in the BNCC debate; 2 executive members of the Leman Foundation-inspired Movimento Pela Base Nacional Comum (Movement for National Learning Standards, or Movimento Pela Base); 2 ex-employees of the Lemann Foundation; 3 representatives of other foundations; 1 employee of GIFE (Group of Institutes, Foundations, and Companies); and ﬁnally, 2 teacher union leaders. All names in this article are pseudonyms, except in the cases of two top-level educational oﬃcials, with their permission. In addition to these interviews, we participated in 2 two-day state seminars, which brought together hundreds of teachers to oﬀer feedback on the second version of the BNCC. Finally, this research also draws on dozens of documents related to the BNCC, including the ﬁrst, second, and third publicly available versions of the BNCC and state and civil society documents both critiquing and supporting it. All of this data was JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 7 uploaded into MAXQDA and coded for both particular historical moments (e.g., the 2013 Yale University Seminar or multiple State BNCC Seminars) and thematic ideas (e.g., university critiques of the BNCC or foundation-state relations). We made sure to triangulate (Mathison 1988) all of our data, only using ﬁndings that were veriﬁed by multiple sources or observations. Based on this data analysis, we reconstruct the story of how the BNCC became the most important policy initiative in Brazil between 2015 and 2017. The Lemann Foundation: philanthropy that shifted the Brazilian education policy landscape ‘The myth of Lemann, the myth of pure meritocracy, can be dangerous: a wishful justiﬁcation for an unequal status quo.’ (Cuadros 2016, 208) Jorge Paulo Lemann is currently the richest man in Brazil and the 22nd richest in the world, with a net worth of $29.1 billion in 2017. He made his fortune primarily from the beer industry and became famous internationally for his take-overs of other companies, cost-cutting strategies, and his ‘meritocracy.’ As journalist Cuadros (2016, 195) writes, Lemann meritocracy is a system in which ‘seniority carried little weight, and for top performers to win a larger share of the bonus pool, the laggards got crowded out. Some called the system Darwinian.’ Jorge Paulo10 created the Lemann Foundation in 2002, however, until 2012 there were very few Brazilian educational oﬃcials who had heard of the foundation. Nonetheless, by 2015, the LF was the most powerful foundation in Brazil, overseeing countless educational initiatives and advising hundreds of municipal, state, and federal government representatives across the country. We spoke with Lucas, a former high-level employee in the Lemann Foundation, at length about this transformation.11 Lucas said that Jorge Paulo created the foundation in 2002 because he had recently completed several mergers and his net worth increased signiﬁcantly. ‘He became a businessman on an international level. It is impossible to be that rich, in the international context, and not have a foundation. It is something socially unacceptable.’ According to this account, one of the reasons Jorge Paulo chose to create the Lemann Foundation in 2002 was the norm of this practice globally. The founding purpose of the Lemann Foundation was to improve management and evaluation in education. As the 2002 Lemann Report states, the foundation was created to focus on the ‘improvement of management methodology in the area of education, and the introduction of a results-oriented culture.’12 The report goes on to justify this focus as the logical extension of good business practices into the public educational sphere: ‘Coming from the business world, and knowing the importance of measuring results, we believe that a similar objective adapted to the needs of education is a necessity.’ Thus, in the Lemann Foundation’s own self-reporting, its goal was to improve management systems and create a culture of assessments and audits (Au 2011; Shore and Wright 2000; Strathern 2000; Trujillo 2014). These policies aligned with the increasingly global shift towards high-stakes testing, exempliﬁed by No Child Left Behind in the United States. 8 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER Coincidently, 2002 was also the moment that the left-leaning Workers Party (PT) candidate Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva won the presidency in Brazil. Brought to power by a coalition of unions, social movements, and progressive intellectuals, the Lula administration reversed many of the previous government’s educational policies, including cancelling several World Bank-sponsored educational programs. One of the ﬁrst actions that Jorge Paulo took post-election was to ask Paulo Renato, the previous Minister of Education under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to be an advisor of the new foundation, a position Renato agreed to take on in 2003. Consequently, the Lemann Foundation ended up funding many of the previous federal administration’s educational programs, including many private-public partnerships, which no longer had federal government support. As Renato himself wrote in the 2003 Lemann Foundation Annual report, ‘As Minister of Education, I had the opportunity to propose new ways for the private sector to cooperate in education. Having left the Ministry, the Lemann Foundation now represents a new working sphere. A space to continue this new form of public private partnership’ (2003 LF Annual Report). Interestingly, this meant that initially the LF largely served to maintain the previous, more accountability and test-focused policies of the former right-leaning administration during a left-leaning federal government. However, even so, according to interviews, the Lemann Foundation did not have an explicit agenda of how to transform Brazilian education. Lucas claimed that, ‘Anyone could ask Jorge [Paulo Lemann] to fund a project, and he often said yes, even if the projects were bad.’13 An analysis of the Lemann Foundation’s annual reports between 2002 and 2009 conﬁrms that the majority of the projects were regional initiatives, or grants given to other organizations, with a range of diﬀerent program foci. The most important Lemann Foundation project was its ‘Institute for Education Management’ (Instituto Gestão Educacional), which between 2003 and 2006 trained more than 586 school principals across three states in a program called ‘Management for School Success’ (2007 LF Annual Report). It was between 2010 and 2013 that the character of the Lemann Foundation began to transform, with new foundation staﬀ developing a much more cohesive and large-scale policy agenda. In 2010, Jorge Paulo’s net worth had a huge increase once again, due to a series of mergers, more than doubling from $5.3 to $11.5 billion.14 Signiﬁcantly, in 2010 Jorge Paulo also hired Denis Mizne, a charismatic leader who had previously founded and headed Instituto Sou da Paz (I am for Peace Institute), a non-proﬁt organization in São Paulo focused on public policies in the area of public security. When Mizne became the CEO, he brought with him a strong belief that the ‘third sector’ (how Brazilians commonly identify the non-proﬁt sector) needed to ‘dialogue with public policies in order to make a diﬀerence,’ as he explained in an interview in 2014.15 Jorge Paulo also began investing much more money in the foundation, transforming it from a small foundation of no more than a dozen employees to an organization of more than 60 employees and multiple strategic teams. In the words of ex-employee Lucas, ‘He cut the wings oﬀ of the previous foundation staﬀ and then dumped a truck of money on the new team.’16 As Figure 1 shows, this transformation of the Lemann Foundation occurred simultaneously with the doubling of Jorge Paulo Lemann’s net worth between 2009 and 2010, and continued to progress as Jorge Paulo’s wealth increased steadily thereafter. JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 9 Figure 1. Jorge Paulo Lemann net worth (2008 to 2017). Source: Forbes < https://www.forbes.com/proﬁle/jorge-paulo-lemann/> Accessed Sept. 2017 In the 2011 Lemann Foundation Report, Mizne’s opening letter emphasizes these changes and outlines the foundations’ four new strategic areas: technology and innovations, programs for school administration and teacher eﬀectiveness, research, and investing in talented youth. The ambitious strategic plan approved through this process had a clear objective: to help each and every student to eﬀectively learn. The following year, in 2012, the Lemann Foundation Annual Report renamed its strategic area of ‘research’ to ‘educational policies,’ with the stated goal of ‘stimulating an educational decision-making environment based on evidence.’ This 2012 report was a clear indication of the Foundation’s intention to begin inﬂuencing educational policy-making in Brazil, rather than simply fund a series of independent projects. With increased economic power, and the agenda of transforming Brazilian public education, the Lemann Foundation began to seek out a new ‘evidence-based’ policy initiative that could have a far-reaching and national impact. The Base Nacional Curricular Common (National Learning Standards) soon became the LF’s most important philanthropic project. Looking abroad: the Lemann Foundation learns from the U.S. common core By 2013, LF had begun to organize and fund a new national ‘movement’ in Brazil, known as the Movimento pela Base Nacional Comum (Movement for National Learning Standards), which became an extremely inﬂuential network of government and non-government representatives supporting the BNCC. The history of this ‘movement’ traces back to April 2013, when the Lemann Foundation organized a seminar at Yale University, called ‘Leading Educational Reforms: Empowering Brazil for the 21st Century.’ The invitation letter to seminar participants read: This is a unique program focused on discussing priority topics in the development of educational policies in primary education. Participants will include leading Brazilian government oﬃcials, educators, and non-proﬁt representatives from the ﬁeld of education. Distinguished Yale faculty members and eminent practitioners with deep experience in their ﬁelds will lead sessions.17 10 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER Some of the presentations included Stefan Pryor, the Education Commissioner in Connecticut, on ‘Eﬀective Public Policies in Education’; Susan Pimentel, one of the main writers of the U.S. Common Core State Guidelines for English Language, on ‘Developing a Common Curricular Core: The experience of the Common Core’; and Alissa Peltzman from the nonproﬁt education reform organization Achieve,18 on ‘The Transformation of Goals into Actions: Creating Eﬀective Public Policy for a Common Curricular Core.’ These latter two speakers were particularly telling, as Susan Pimentel had been the posterchild for the writing of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), while Achieve, Inc. has been credited for ﬁrst introducing this initiative and becoming the most important actor convincing states to agree to the CCSS – with the help of Gates Foundation funding (Schneider 2015).19 Invited Brazilian participants included both prominent government oﬃcials, such as previous and then current Secretaries of Education and Ministry of Education oﬃcials, as well as representatives from other foundations, non-governmental organizations, and universities. The LF paid everyone’s expenses to attend the seminar. Multiple people we spoke with emphasized how important this seminar was for pushing forward the discussion about the BNCC in Brazil. For example, one of the participants at this meeting was Eduardo Deschamps, then Secretary of Education of Santa Catarina and Vice President of the National Council of Secretaries of Education (CONSED). CONSED is an important private association in Brazil created in 1986, which gathers the 27 Secretaries of Education to promote integration and coordination. In 2015, Deschamps became the President of CONSED, and in 2016 he became the President of the National Education Advisory Council (CNE). Between 2014 and 2016, CONSED played a critical role promoting the BNCC, under the leadership of Deschamps. When we spoke to Deschamps, he said, ‘The Lemann Foundation was organizing this process, and I confess, I do not know why they decided to invite me. I speculate a bit that it was related to the work I had been doing in Santa Catarina with the QEDU [an organization that promotes the use of educational data to improve the quality of schooling20], which Lemann supported.’21 Deschamps also admitted that the seminar was the ﬁrst time he had ever heard of the BNCC. He said, ‘It was when I went to the United States and I had contact with the Common Core. Truthfully, until that point, [national learning standards] was not on my radar. We talked about curriculum, but not a national curriculum.’ The fact that Deschamps had not thought about national learning standards before the seminar is signiﬁcant, as he became one of the most important government leaders promoting this initiative over the next three years. At the end of the seminar, the participants decided to create a new ‘movement’ to support this cause, what became known as the Movimento pela Base Nacional Comum (Movement for National Learning Standards, or Movimento pela Base).22 Foundations’ attempts to build ‘movements’ behind their policy initiatives is not a new development. As Tompkins-Stange (2016, 3) writes in reference to the Gates Foundation, ‘By funding this diverse group of grantees, the foundation sought to catalyze what one staﬀ member called “a social movement towards a massive policy reform” – a social movement of the foundation’s own design.’ However, the choice of the language ‘movement’ is telling, as it invokes the idea of a social movement, generally understood as a grassroots group with little oﬃcial power making demands on the government through non-institutional means, or protest (McAdam 1999; Tarrow 1994). The Movimento pela Base, to the JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 11 contrary, was a powerful coalition of both government and non-government actors, with the ﬁnancial backing of the richest man in Brazil. As João, a state government oﬃcial who became an executive board member of the Movimento pela Base, told us: “It is the Lemann Foundation who pushed forward this initiative, who, as we say, demanded the movement. . . In my case, I have a contract with the Foundation, they pay me.’23 The conjunctural moment in Brazil To understand how the LF was able to shift the policy terrain during the historical moment in Brazil between 2014 and 2017, we employ Gramsci’s notion of the ‘terrain of the conjunctural’ as an analytical tool.24 A conjuncture is a moment deﬁned by the coming together of ‘diﬀerent currents and circumstances,’25 which together create the conditions for particular events or developments that any one cause would not have created. By focusing on the conjunctural moment in Brazil, rather than simply describing the ‘background’ or ‘context,’ we seek to illustrate how multiple political and economic forces converged in Brazil between 2013 and 2014, which produced a ‘new political terrain’26 that allowed for a strategic actor such as the Lemann Foundation to push forward it policy goals. As the LF sought to solidify the idea of the BNCC as an oﬃcial Brazilian legislative goal, there was an immediate opportunity to do this following the April 2013 seminar, as the Brazilian government was ﬁnishing its new National Plan for Education (PNE), scheduled to be approved the following year. The PNE is a plan approved every ten years, outlining Brazil’s educational goals. The discussions about this new PNE had been taking place since 2011, among a diverse group of civil society organizations, government agencies, and at-large community members. During the second-half of 2013, the Lemann Foundation helped to organize a series of events with the former seminar participants to promote the idea of the BNCC among a bi-partisan group of politicians and government oﬃcials. However, rather than the Lemann Foundation leading these eﬀorts, the protagonists were now a wide range of people who selfidentiﬁed as part of the Movimento pela Base who worked to form the consensus necessary to create the National Learning Standards.27 The participants in the Movimento pela Base succeeded in passing an amendment to the 2014 National Education Plan that introduced a timeline for the creation of National Learning Standards. Fabiana, a member of Todos Pelo Educação, reﬂected on this accomplishment: ‘So now, we had to do it!’28 Similarly Gabriela, an executive member of the Movimento pela Base, said that once the goal of creating a BNCC entered the 2014 PNE, it ‘gave a very large boost to the movement,’ since the creation of a BNCC now had a deadline to be written by June 2016. Interestingly, in July 2014 the Secretary of Basic Education in the Ministry of Education, then headed by Professor Beatriz Luce from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, actually published a ﬁrst draft of National Learning Standards (MEC 2014). This 2014 version of the BNCC was a world apart from the BNCC that would be written the following year. Rather than outline the speciﬁc academic content to be studied each school year, the document outlined students’ rights, such as the right to local cultural practices, diverse knowledge, human development, political action, and historical understandings, and discussed the broad goals and philosophical considerations of each discipline. According to João, an executive member of the Movimento 12 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER pela Base and LF consultant, when Luce presented the document in São Paulo the members of the Movimento pela Base became very concerned: ‘It was far from our expectations . . . it was very theoretical . . . and we said listen, another document that is not clear, how is that going to help? The national educational guidelines already did this.’29 In other words, the Movimento pela Base wanted a ‘practical’ document with lists of the actual content educators would teach. According to João, the Movimento pela Base prevented the public launching of this document, using the reasoning that it was an election year and not a good time to pass new legislation. In 2014, Workers’ Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseﬀ won her re-election in a close race against the more conservative Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) candidate. President Rousseﬀ appointed Cid Gomes, a member of the Republican Party of Social Order (PROS) allied with the PT, as the new Minister of Education. Gomes appointed Manuel Palacios as the Secretary of Basic Education, replacing Luce. Palacios was wellknown among state oﬃcials across Brazil due to his academic center at the Federal University of Juiz da Fora, CaED (Center for Educational Public Policy and Evaluation), a center that helps states develop standardized exams. Palacios was not a member of the PT, but due to his work in CaED, he had been in and out of the Ministry of Education since 2003, consulting for a range of policy teams. This new combination of government actors in the Ministry of Education in 2015 allowed for the increased inﬂuence of the Lemann Foundation and the broader Movimento pela Base. Under the leadership of Palácios, the Ministry of Education wrote an entirely new version of the BNCC that was in line with the Lemann Foundation’s vision. As Palácios told us in an interview, ‘We started everything from scratch.’ Even though a left-leaning PT administration was still in power, with constituencies critical of the inﬂuence of private actors in education, the oﬃcials in the Ministry of Education were technocrats, not PT party activists. Gabriela, an executive member of the Movimento pela Base, emphasized this shift: ‘There was, in fact, a huge change with the entrance of Manuel Palacios in the SEB [Secretary of Basic Education]. Starting in 2015, the issue of [the BNCC] was at the center of the federal government’s agenda.’30 Although the Movimento pela Base had already convinced dozens of state and municipal oﬃcials to support the BNCC, persuading the PT federal administration of the importance of this policy initiative was a more recent victory. When we asked Palacio during an interview why the BNCC became a major initiative during President Rousseﬀ’s second term, he could not quite remember the origins of the idea. He said, I think it was already a theme . . . the previous secretary Beatriz had already ﬁnished some work on this topic, and there was a group discussing national learning standards . . . I did not need to invent this issue; the idea was already there. In one of the ﬁrst meetings we had with the Minister, the Lemann people were already there participating. I think that the idea [of national standards] might have even been provoked by Lemann.31 Veronica, a member of Ministry’s BNCC curricular team, conﬁrmed this statement. Referring to the same meeting she said, ‘that was the ﬁrst meeting I participated in. It had been a meeting that the Lemann people demanded. They were already actively supporting national standards.’32 Veronica said that before this she had never heard of the Lemann Foundation. JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 13 In the years to follow, there were a series of upheavals in the Ministry of Education; yet, Palácios survived multiple transitions in the Ministry’s leadership, which could have derailed the writing process. The continuity that resulted under Palácios’ leadership allowed the process of writing the BNCC to move forward over the next year. By September 2015 the Ministry of Education, with the help of teams of more than 100 curriculum content specialists from across the country, published the ﬁrst version of the BNCC, a 300-page document. Analytical ﬁndings: ‘philanthropizing’ consent through money, knowledge, media, & networks ‘The importance of the movement is to be there poking (cutucando) people, pressuring them.’ -João, Executive Member of the Movimento pela Base During our interviews, we asked both MEC oﬃcials and university specialists about the role of the Lemann Foundation in the process of writing and promoting the BNCC. Everyone mentioned the foundation as having a large role. As our data analysis will show, the inﬂuence of the Lemann Foundation fell into four categories we identiﬁed through our coding: material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks. First, in terms of economic resources, the Lemann Foundation supported government oﬃcials by paying for the lunch served at meetings or buying plane tickets so that oﬃcials could attend national events. For example, one of the professors who helped to write the BNCC, Tiago, said that the Movimento pela Base and the Lemann Foundation ‘ﬁnanced lots of meetings and trips.33 Manuel Palacios remembered, in particular, the importance of this ﬁnancial support for groups like CONSED (the National Council of Secretaries of Education). He recounted, ‘CONSED faces huge ﬁnancial diﬃculties, because the states are not able to collect enough resources to even support the operation of their headquarters. So, CONSED works a lot with foundations. In the case of the BNCC, the Lemann Foundation always puts itself at the disposition of CONSED.’34 Thus, the LF was always at the table because they literally paid for the lunch. Second, the Lemann Foundation also used economic resources to engage in knowledge production, or in other words, provide government oﬃcials with relevant information through hosting seminars, translating international documents into Portuguese, funding research reports, and inviting international experts to talk about their experiences writing the national learning standards. As Sebastião, a professor at a large, prominent Catholic University, who was asked to be a specialist on the BNCC writing team in early 2015, explained, the LF ‘incentivized the production of research that was in the interest of writing the standards. Diagnostic and prospective research. This only a rich foundation is able to ﬁnance.’ Sebastião emphasized that the LF’s economic power allowed it to fund research projects that, for example, Brazilian public universities would be unable to ﬁnance. Ricardo, a professor on the writing team from the same university, also said that, ‘Lemann was present in almost all of our meetings. The foundation brought international references in order to improve, help, and richen the process . . . always respecting the MEC’s [Ministry of Education’s] political choices.’35 14 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER According to Ricardo, the Foundation representatives were always present at the meetings of the curriculum specialist teams hired by the Ministry of Education and contributed by providing the specialists with international reports and informational seminars; however, he claimed, they never overstepped their bounds and attempted to lead the process. Sebastião emphasized that this support from the Lemann Foundation, in the form of making proposals, bringing people from abroad, suggesting appropriate formats for the writing goals, were all ‘technical suggestions.’36 The specialists could take into consideration this advice, or not. Thus, this process represented what Li (2007) refers to as ‘rendering technical’: representing political situations as problems with technical solutions. One of the heads of the curriculum teams in the Ministry of Education, Veronica, drew a helpful diagram about this process during an interview, showing how the Movimento pela Base (which she said was the ‘same thing as the Leman Foundation’) was constantly providing inputs of information to the diﬀerent groups involved in writing the BNCC. In her diagram, these groups included the National Council of Secretaries of Education (CONSED), the National Union of Municipal Education Managers (UNDIME), the Department of Curriculum and Integral Education (DICEI), the 29 teams of specialists, and 15 professors leading these teams.37 As Figure 2 illustrates, the Movimento pela Base inﬂuenced the policy process through direct contact will all of the groups involved at every level of the BNCC writing process. Although Veronica seemed to appreciate this support, Olivia, an arts professor at a large public university who was a writing specialist criticized the Lemann Foundation’s role, claiming it stiﬂed the discussion. She emphasized that when she arrived 6 specialists had already written the introductory texts, in dialogue with a handful of researchers from the Lemann Foundation. ‘Here we are, a country with 32 federal public universities, all with research programs, and at least 20 with programs Figure 2. Inﬂuence of the Movimento pela Base in the BNCC policy-making process. *Source: Reproduced in English based on a drawing by one of the top members of the curriculum specialist teams JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 15 in the area of curriculum and education . . . I think that all of the professors were oﬀended that not a single person in the area of curriculum was asked their opinion. Just four researchers from the Lemann Foundation.’38 According to this account, the Foundation did not simply oﬀer informational inputs, but rather, deﬁned the starting point and the basic criteria for the entire writing process. Third, the Lemann Foundation also inﬂuenced the process of writing the BNCC and garnering support for the policy through an elaborate media strategy, in which foundation representatives trained dozens of journalists to cover educational issues, including the BNCC, and to paint this policy in a positive light. The foundation held high proﬁle events that received extensive media coverage. Marco, another professor who provided reviews of the ﬁrst and second versions of the BNCC, explained, ‘I think they know how to use the media . . . there was an aura of inevitability that they created . . . this snowballing media exposure created consensus.’39 The foundation worked behind the scenes to orchestrate consent for the BNCC, but in a way that looked as though it was naturally occurring and inevitable. Manuel Palacios, the top leader in the Ministry of Education at this time, conﬁrmed this explicit media strategy: ‘Lemann was important, especially in relation to the media . . . Especially when we were facing political diﬃculties, troubled political moments.’ When asked for an example, Palacios said, ‘They knew how to dialogue with the São Paulo press. . . they played a huge role building a positive reception to our proposals.’ Palacios insisted that the group that played this role was the foundation, not the Movimento Pela Base. ‘Lemann was central, not the movement. It was the foundation. They went to the ﬁeld and they told the press: the BNCC has problems, but it is going to get better, you can trust us. This played a central role.’ When there were outcries across political party lines about the ﬁrst version of the BNCC, the Lemann Foundation helped frame the debate: maybe these standards are not the best, but we need national learning standards. Fourth and ﬁnally, the most important strategy to inﬂuence policy makers was simply building a network of prominent politicians and respected educational experts who supported the BNCC. For example, João, an executive member of the Movimento pela Base, explained: My job was with the Secretaries [of Education], it was to make sure this debate arrived at the source. I went around to lots of municipal Secretaries of Education, meetings of UNDIME [National Union of Municipal Education Managers], meetings of CONSED [National Council of Secretaries of Education], in order to bring this discussion [of the BNCC] to these groups. For example, we convinced the MEC [Ministry of Education] to construct a group inside of CONSED of state representatives that were involved in curriculum debates, so they could bring these discussions [about the BNCC] back to their states. We [ﬁnancially] supported these meeting . . .We were annoying [o chato], always reminding people [of the BNCC].40 This process of visiting government oﬃcials around the country and pushing forward the discussion of the BNCC paid oﬀ. By 2016, the Movimento pela Base had 65 members, all powerful inﬂuencers in the educational realm. This network included 30 foundation leaders, 19 educational oﬃcials, 8 university researchers, and 7 politicians. The fact that there were people in this network from both major political parties (the Workers Party, PT, and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, PSDB) enabled the BNCC to become a bi-partisan policy initiative. Members of the Movimento pela 16 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER Base emphasized this ‘non-partisan’ characteristic of the BNCC as especially important during tense moments in the policy process. For example, when political polarization in Brazil was at a peak, in March 2016 (see explanation below), three members of the movement wrote a bi-partisan editorial, ‘The Students Cannot Wait,’ for a major São Paulo newspaper, declaring the need to move beyond political diﬀerences and support the BNCC for the sake of the ‘nation’s children.’ The editorial reads, ‘In the middle of yet another period of political and economic instability, it is important to remember the urgency of the challenges that face these millions of children . . . one of the fundamental ways to improve the quality of education is the construction of National Learning Standards.’41 Three people from the movement wrote the editorial, and 39 others signed it in support, showing the extent of the political force behind the editorial. Although all of the people we spoke with mentioned the Lemann Foundation’s inﬂuence in the process of writing and garnering support for the BNCC, most government actors did not think of this as a negative development. For example, Manuel Palacios defended the Lemann Foundation’s role: I have always thought of Lemann as having a more modern perspective, because it tries to defend its policies with people from diﬀerent groups. The Movimento pela Base included people religiously tied to the PT and traditional left politics, as well as people linked to the PSDB, from the São Paulo administration. The idea was to bring together people from diﬀerent orientations to inﬂuence public opinion in favor of a particular policy . . . Lemann was an innovator in this. 42 Palacios described the Movimento pela Base as an innovative new form of inﬂuencing public opinion, which brings people together across partisan divides. Similarly, Ricardo, one of the professors involved in the writing of the BNCC, openly described the role of the Lemann Foundation as part of a ‘larger movement of a Brazilian business elite, inspired in the American model, to invest resources in the improvement of the public debate about education.’ Ricardo emphasized that this movement is especially interested in ‘ending the monopoly’ that universities and social movements have had over this public debate. ‘Which, it seems to me, is completely legitimate . . . Lemann is bringing in a liberal conception, which is going to dispute, rival, these others’ [conceptions].’ In other words, Ricardo saw the Lemann Foundation as one of many legitimate actors participating in a necessarily plural debate. However, Ricardo did caution that, ‘Lemann has to be careful about not taking on a role that is not legitimate. The Foundation is not the spokesperson for anyone.’43 Finally, Eduardo Deschamps from the National Council of Secretaries of Education (CONSED) and later president of the CNE (National Educational Council), was also supportive of the Lemann Foundation’s strategy. However, he admitted that the LF’s decision to create a ‘movement’ was most likely related to the caution the foundation had to take as a private actor attempting to inﬂuence public education: My interpretation is that the Lemann Foundation understood that alone they could not hold up the banner of the National Learning Standards . . . There is too much prejudice against them, because the founder of the Lemann Foundation is a business man, you know? His business is producing beer, hamburgers, ketchup, these types of things . . . they needed the initiative to be supported by other organizations.44 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 17 Deschamps described in detail how CONSED became a big advocate of the BNCC, and its role as a protagonist in this policy process. What is interesting about these reﬂections from government oﬃcials and university specialists is the fact that they see themselves as leading the policy-making process, and the Lemann Foundation and the Movimento pela Base as supporting their eﬀorts. We propose that this is the pinnacle of ‘philanthropizing’ consent: convincing enough public oﬃcials to lead a policy initiative on their own by mobilizing their material resources, knowledge production, media power, and formal and informal networks. In this way, the Lemann Foundation catalyzed, funded, and supported a process that enabled diverse institutional actors to take up and work towards implementing a policy idea. Support for the BNCC quickly became educational ‘common sense’ in Brazil, supported by a wide range of actors, for diverse reasons, and thus transforming any dissent to the BNCC as irrational, illogical, and at best, ideological. As we present in the discussion below of the events leading to the passage of the BNCC into federal law, these four elements inevitably enabled the legislation to be pushed through during a moment of intense political turmoil and polarization in Brazil. Discussion of ﬁndings In the section that follows, we discuss the eﬀects of philanthropizing consent for marginalizing critique, navigating political turmoil, and performing public participation. Notably, the Lemann Foundation eﬀectively employed these techniques during one of the most polemic moments in Brazilian contemporary history, during and after a presidential impeachment and in the context of an increasingly polarized civil and political society. Marginalizing critique One of the principle results of the Lemann Foundation’s deployment of its material resources, knowledge production, media power, and networks was the marginalization of critique. After the publication of the ﬁrst version of the BNCC in September 2015, both conservative and progressive groups began to critique the document. Right-wing groups critiqued the BNCC for being too radical, according to Ricardo, ‘as if the history standards were some indisputable manifestation of Lula-PTism.’ Ricardo thought that part of this critique was due to the increasing polarization across Brazil and the outcries against the PT government, which tried ‘to turn the National Learning Standards into an ideological position.’45 In particular, an organization known as ‘Schools without Parties’ (Escola Sem Partido) that critiques the inﬂuence of left-leaning political parties in the public school system, led the mobilizations against the BNCC. In addition, more progressive organizations, most signiﬁcantly the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPEd), the most important educational association of academics, also came out against the initiative. Joana, a professor of curriculum at a public university, was a member of the ANPEd’s Special Interest Group46 on Curriculum. She explained that the curriculum group was very critical of the BNCC, in part because the document ignored the whole history of discussion and debate about curriculum in the Brazilian academy. ‘We wanted to debate the ﬁrst 13 pages of the BNCC, which 18 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER introduced the document, and where we could discuss the politics of curriculum and standardization.’47 However, in meetings with MEC oﬃcials, the ANPED university professors were told that this part of the document was not going to be discussed. Joana explained, ‘We took the position that this was not real participation, there was no real discussion of the document, because the concept of curriculum was not discussed. We said that the creation of the BNCC was too quick and not democratic.’ Although the government initially reached out to this group for feedback on the BNCC in 2014 and early 2015, these opportunities became fewer and farther between as the actors involved in writing the BNCC succeed in framing the curriculum group as ideological, irrational, and impossible to work with. On 9 November 2015, the ANPED curriculum group denounced the entire process in an open letter to the National Educational Council (CNE).48 After the Ministry of Education published the ﬁrst version of the BNCC in September 2015, amidst these critiques from both the ‘right’ and the ‘left,’ it opened up an online call for feedback on the ﬁrst draft. There were 300,000 people who contributed feedback on the document, submitting a total of 12 million comments – an impressive amount of civil society participation. The reason the participatory process was so successful was because every state Secretary of Education had created ‘teams’ that participated in the BNCC policy-making process, periodically attending meetings in Brasília. These teams organized a ‘Day of the Learning Standards’ (Dia da Base) with events and panels in dozens of schools about the BNCC, in which teachers were asked to provide online feedback. As one government oﬃcial from Goiás, Alberto, remembered with enthusiasm, ‘We had a committee meeting about how to have this discussion with the teachers . . . First, we needed them to get to know the website, and the document, then we encouraged them to discuss it with their school. . . we led discussions in 40 regions.’49 Alberto’s statement shows that it was not necessary for the Lemann Foundation to convince teachers in each state to support the BNCC; once state and municipal governments embraced the idea, these oﬃcials did this on-the-ground work on their own, eﬀectively and with more legitimacy. These seemingly participatory initiatives succeeded in pushing forward the BNCC, even as educational professors in universities across the country critiqued the process. A group of professors from the University of Brasília analyzed all of this feedback and produced a private report about the contributions. Two of the university specialists assigned to write the BNCC, Ricardo and Sebastião, were enthusiastic about the opportunity to incorporate this feedback into the second version of the BNCC, claiming that it was an important part of a legitimate, democratic process, with an enormous amount of people involved. However, university specialist Olivia was critical of this participatory process, saying that one of the reasons she quit was the ‘insinuation’ that this was a democratic process. We were told that we were only writing a draft, and that the document would change when we received the suggestions from the public feedback. My question, which was never answered, was how do we know these online suggestions will be respected? Who is factchecking (ﬁscalizando) this research? . . . What is the transparency of the research process? It was as if you put something on the internet, and suddenly it is democratic because it is on the internet. This is not suﬃcient for democratizing the document.50 Olivia was doubtful that the online comments were fully incorporated into the document, and suggested that it was part of a rhetorical strategy to claim that the document JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 19 was democratic. Olivia’s opinion within her specialist team became increasingly marginalized until she ﬁnally quit. Interestingly, members of the Movimento pela Base also expressed some doubts about the importance of this participatory process. For example, Gabriela said that, It is that type of thing . . . I think in the United States you had a process of writing the common core in which you betted on the fact that the best form of legitimacy was the quality of the document. And to have this quality it is not necessary to have 116 people writing to the document . . . [In Brazil] to have political legitimacy, maybe 116 people is better . . . but the choice to involve more people from the classroom, the teachers . . . made our process more diﬃcult than in the U.S.51 As Gabriela’s comments highlight, members of the Movimento pela Base did not necessarily believe that this process of participation improved the quality of the document. However, they certainly believed that this process was necessary to ensure political legitimacy. These participatory moments succeeded in marginalizing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ critiques of the BNCC, as advocates emphasized that more important than these ‘ideological perspectives’ was the fact that hundreds of thousands of people had the opportunity to participate in the writing of their own National Learning Standards. Navigating political turmoil – ‘bi-partisanship’ in partisan times While the Ministry of Education oﬃcials were busy writing the ﬁrst and second version of the BNCC in 2015 and 2016, Brazil was facing its most serious political crises in decades. An economic downturn and a wide-spread corruption scandal had opened up an opportunity for conservative factions to mobilize massive protests against the Workers’ Party (PT) government. In 2015, there were multiple large protests with hundreds of thousands of people participating, calling for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseﬀ. In May 2016 President Rousseﬀ had to step down from oﬃce and the interim President Michel Temer immediately ﬁred her entire cabinet and appointed an all-white, male cabinet with a much more right-leaning political orientation. Thus, when the second version of the BNCC came out in May 2016, the unstable political situation in Brazil was at a climax. The Movimento pela Base, including top oﬃcials in the Lemann Foundation, were unclear how these huge political shifts would aﬀect the process of writing and approving the BNCC. Yet, the movement had the foresight to act before Rousseﬀ left oﬃce. As soon as the Ministry of Education published the second version of the BNCC, the Minister of Education Aloízio Mercadante and Secretary of Basic Education Manuel Palacios ‘delivered’ the document to the National Education Advisory Council (CNE). The point was to take the BNCC out of the governance of the Ministry of Education, and instead, transfer control over the process of writing the BNCC to the National Council of Secretaries of Education (CONSED) and the National Union of Municipal Education Managers (UNDIME). These councils would then be in charge of hosting seminars in each Brazilian state, which would allow hundreds of teachers to meet for two days and oﬀer feedback on the second version of the 20 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER BNCC. These 27 seminars took place between June and August 2016, without any delays, despite some of the biggest political changes in Brazil’s history. In other words, the Lemann Foundation’s strategy of bringing together people with disperse interests, a result of its ﬁnancial resources, networks, and convening power, and promoting broad civil society participation was paying oﬀ. The BNCC was perhaps the only public policy that maintained bipartisan support amidst this increasing political polarization. Performing participatory governance under a new regime We had the opportunity to participate in two of these state seminars in the summer of 2016 in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Goías. In both seminars, there were hundreds of teachers who participated, independently of their union or other organizational aﬃliations. They came as individual teachers who had applied to participate through an open call that had been sent to their schools. The state seminars involved a very speciﬁc type of participation – aﬃrming or rejecting components of a document that was already written – rather than any larger discussion on the purpose of the BNCC or what other models or organization of standards could exist. In Rio de Janeiro, the group of history teachers revolted against this process and refused to participate. They claimed that they were being treated as ‘technicians’ and instead of oﬀering feedback through the oﬃcial survey they wrote a letter denouncing the seminar. Although this participatory policymaking process had seemed smooth at a birds-eye level, these seminars illustrated the contestation that existed on the ground concerning the national learning standards. These critiques and moments of resistance took place throughout the two-day seminars; however, unsurprisingly, the ﬁnal summary of the teachers’ contributions washed over these conﬂicts.52 This, once again, illustrates how the process of writing the BNCC, particularly the role of teachers, had been ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007). During the second seminar we attended, there was no outright rejection of the BNCC. However, several groups were critical of the form that the seminar took. For example, the well-organized infant education group decided to edit the entire section on infant education, rather than answer the survey. In Goiás a member of the state’s teacher union, Leila, was part of the 22-person team that organized the BNCC seminar. At one point, she also made a strong intervention, reminding everyone that improving teachers’ working conditions would be necessary to implement the BNCC. Nonetheless, the union leadership in Goiás was largely supportive of the initiative; the Goiás teachers’ union was aligned with the PT, and since the proposal for the BNCC originated under a PT administration, this created more sympathy for the proposal. In April 2017, almost a year after the state seminars, the Ministry of Education published the third version of the National Learning Standards. The new assemblage of government actors in the Ministry of Education had publicly committed to continuing the work of the previous administration, by building on the previous document and taking into consideration the results of these state seminars. However, rather than using the previous curriculum teams to write the ﬁnal version of the BNCC, a small group of specialists appointed by the Ministry of Education executive secretary, Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro, wrote the document. This version of the BNCC was diﬀerent than the ﬁrst version, much more similar to the curricular initiatives of the PSDB government in the 1990s than the previous versions of the document developed by the PT JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 21 administration. Tiago, a professor at a large and prestigious public university who the LF hired to do an analysis of this third version, explained some of these diﬀerences: ‘To the extent that you have political substitutions, you have changes in theoretical orientation. For example, when we wrote the ﬁrst BNCC the word “competence,” which was very important in the national parameters [broad curricular standards written by the PSDB in the 1990s], was practically vetoed. It was not prohibited, but we did not talk about competencies, due to an ideological understanding that competency was for job preparation and not human formation.’53 Now, in this third version, ‘competencies’ was an important part of the document, as well as terms such as ‘abilities.’ In addition, Tiago explained, in the second version of the document there was a group very focused on the question of gender and ethnicity. In particular, in the introductory section of the second BNCC there was a long discussion about diversity, stipulating the right of some populations (such as indigenous communities, quilombolas or maroon communities, and rural people) to have a curriculum based on their local realties. But, as Tiago told us, and as we conﬁrmed through document analysis, ‘in the third version this discussion of diversity is much more diluted.’ Nonetheless, the fact that the third version was seen as a continuation of a two-year long, non-partisan and participatory process, which had begun under Dilma Rousseﬀ, facilitated its acceptance among diverse civil society actors. Although the Lemann Foundation and Movimento pela Base had less direct participation in the ﬁnal revision process, they continued to meet with Ministry of Education oﬃcials. For example, the Lemann Foundation staﬀ received copies of the third version of the BNCC before it was published. Foundation staﬀ sent this third version to university specialists for their analysis – playing, once again, a ‘supportive role’ to the Ministry of Education. The ﬁnal step to approve the BNCC’s was to send the document to the National Educational Advisory Council (CNE) for its approval. Between June and September 2017, the CNE held ﬁve regional seminars to request feedback on this third draft, yet another moment of civil society engagement. The CNE sent the BNCC back to the Ministry of Education for the oﬃcial adoption of the policy in late December 2017. On 20 December 2017, President Michel Temer, Minister of Education Mendonça Filho, Executive Secretary Maria Helena Guimarães de Castro, and dozens of other politicians, educational oﬃcials, and of course, foundation representatives gathered for the ‘homologation’ (the oﬃcial approval) of the BNCC, which we described in the introduction. Implications: philanthropizing consent as a policy practice in Brazil and beyond One of the primary implications of this case in Brazil is that educational policy transfers across national borders are occurring through networks of private and corporate actors. Through our analysis, we demonstrate the ways in which the Lemann Foundation’s role supporting the BNCC in Brazil through their economic power and network of supportive government and non-government actors has paralleled the Gates Foundation’s role promoting the Common Core in the United States. This illustrates how foundations in the Global South are directly learning from foundations in the Global North about how to inﬂuence educational policy-making. 22 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER These policy interventions have long-term implications. As Tompkins-Stange (2016) writes, in the United States the passage of the Common Core represented ‘the beginning of Gate’s dominance in education policy debates at a national level.’ Similarly, the promotion of National Learning Standards in Brazil put the Lemann Foundation on the educational policy map, helping the foundation achieve previously unimaginable access to government actors while pushing through a controversial policy initiative. Not only did the Lemann Foundation mobilize material and non-material resources to construct a previously unimaginable consensus, the foundation created further openings for itself and for other companies. In late 2017, the Lemann Foundation announced a new partnership with Google to ‘create over six thousand digital lesson plans, videos and other materials to help teachers provide richer learning experiences for their students.’ According to LF website, this would be the ﬁrst set of ‘pedagogical resources aligned with the National Learning Standards’ and the materials would be ‘developed by teachers from all over the country and will include tips and guidance for their incorporation into the classroom, thus reducing the challenges of preparing high-quality classes.’54 Despite claims that the National Learning Standards would allow for diversity, the push towards standardization and ‘technical’ solutions to the country’s educational challenges continues. The consensus for the new Google-Lemann initiative is widespread and will undoubtedly facilitate increased private and corporate inﬂuence over public education in Brazil in the future. In this way, philanthropizing consent for policies in public education paves the way for further privatization on local, national, and global scales. This is the diﬀerence between ‘draconian’ and ‘Gramscian’ strategies in policymaking. In the former, policies are imposed on civil society, evoking anger and often resistance; in the latter, civil society is integrated into a united hegemonic bloc in support of new policy initiatives. In this latter process, dissent is minimized, and any resistance that does emerge is marginalized as irrational, illogical, and ideological. Conclusions ‘We have fulﬁlled the role of Executive Secretary of the Movimento pela Base . . . supporting the development of the National Learning Standards document which was delivered by the Ministry of Education to the National Education Council in 2017.’ -Lemann Foundation English-Version Website The adoption and writing of National Learning Standards in Brazil, which took place between 2014 and 2017, oﬀers an interesting contemporary case of the role of private and corporate foundations in educational policy-making in the Global South. None of the information in this article is a secret; as the above quote illustrates, the Lemann Foundation is quite open about its role leading the Movimento pela Base and helping to support the writing of the BNCC. The goal of this article is to highlight how the Lemann Foundation engaged in this process: through the strategic use of economic resources, knowledge production, media power, and formal and informal networks that rendered educational equity and quality as problems with solvable technical solutions, JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 23 thus garnering wide-spread support for this policy initiative – what we refer to as a process of ‘philanthropizing’ consent. The adoption of National Learning Standards during one of the Brazil’s most contentious and polarizing political crises, seemed impossible. Yet, is now a fait accompli. We show that although this educational policy game seems fair – indeed, in many ways participatory and widely accepted – private foundations are only able to play this role due to both their tremendous economic power, a direct product of the unequal global political economy, and the systematic defunding of the public sphere. These foundations do not impose policies on governments. Rather, they ‘render technical’ (Li 2007, 7) high-stakes political debates on pressing issues of educational equity and quality. Then, they support state oﬃcials as they come to a consensus about which policies to adopt, by organizing networks, funding research studies and hosting educational seminars (Kornhaber, Barkauskas, and Griﬃth 2016; Reckhow and Snyder 2014). They also oﬀer economic and organizational support for the implementation of these policies. We refer to this as ‘philanthropizing consent,’ drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of engaging in a ‘war of position in civil society,’ to illustrate that this is in fact not a technical process, but rather, an explicit strategy to set the nation on a particular path and garner political power – a strategy likely to become increasingly common among private and corporate foundations. In a sense, foundation leaders have become some of the most important ‘organic intellectuals’ of the 21st century educational sphere, helping to organize diverse actors into a common political project by actively participating in the policy process ‘as constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator’ (Gramsci 1971, 10). However, unlike the organic intellectuals of the working-class, foundation leaders wield their inﬂuence through economic power. Finally, the last point we want to emphasize is that this is not simply an attempt to privatize the public educational sphere and make a quick proﬁt. On the one hand, these initiatives are an attempt to wield power, a strategy for foundations to embed themselves within the public sphere. In one of the most skeptical interpretations that we heard of LF’s motives, one professor involved in the BNCC writing process said, ‘My theory is that the [Lemann] foundation, they want to be world class . . . They want to be with the big one. They want to be with Gates, with Bill Gates . . . not because they have ideas, just because they want to be as famous and powerful as they are.’55 In this perspective, the BNCC was a means to an end: becoming the most important educational actor in Brazil. On the other hand, the LF’s educational interventions are an attempt to remake the public sphere in a particular image. As Ricardo, one of the original writers of the BNCC, explained: I think that this was a movement, not random or spontaneous, of an elite that decided to bet on the process of improving education, in favor of public education. What I mean is that this was not a movement in the direction of the Chilean model, to create a private network of publicly subsidized schools. Up until this point, this movement has been in favor of improving public schools. This might change. I think that Lemann entered into a scenario that already existed, but Lemann entered with more force than Unibanco, than Itaú, than the previous groups. This was an attempt to become an author of the public debate.56 24 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER As Ricardo points out, the goal is not to turn Brazil into a Chilean private market57 – at least not yet. Rather, the goal is to transform and ‘modernize’ the public sphere. While the Lemann Foundation claims to be non-partisan, Jorge Paulo Lemann himself has a very particular ideological vision of how society should function based on the notion of meritocracy, which has won him renown in the world of business. As Cuadros (2016, 193) writes, Jorge Paulo ‘carried out a revolution in the way people think about business . . . he’s seen as the man who brought meritocracy to Brazil, proof the American Dream can ﬂourish in nepotistic soil.’ Jorge Paulo’s application of his vision of meritocracy to the beer and restaurant industry made him the 22nd richest man in the world, and moreover, respected globally for his ‘modern’ vision of management.58 Although we have not claimed in this article that the Lemann Foundation is attempting to implement a neoliberal educational paradigm, there are certainly implications in attempting to promote this corporate management style in the Brazilian public sphere. At the very least, it is not a neutral solution to the educational problems that Brazilian students face; it is a very speciﬁc, political vision of how schools and society should function. The degree to which the Lemann Foundation can maintain this bipartisan strategy into the future is currently uncertain. On 28 October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro, won the presidential election. Bolsonaro had been a fringe candidate, known for his endorsement of dictatorship, torture, and assassination; virulent misogyny, homophobia, and racism; and catastrophic environmental policies. Nonetheless, he swept the 2018 presidential election on an ambiguous policy platform that blamed the country’s problems on corruption as well as the Workers’ Party’s (PT) ‘socialist’ policies and the ‘red outlaws’ (referring to social movement and union leaders) that had gained too much policy inﬂuence. In the educational realm, Bolsonaro is an active supporter of Escola sem Partido (Schools without Political Parties), the conservative movement that had initially denounced the BNCC as ideological PT propaganda. The LF staﬀ we have spoken with are horriﬁed at this turn of events; yet, to maintain inﬂuence in the national educational debate LF staﬀ will have to either work with these new government oﬃcials, thus legitimizing Bolsonaro’s regime, or, take an overtly political stance against the president. Staying ‘em cima do muro’ (on the fence, or politically impartial) no longer seems possible. While foundation staﬀ and the actors in the Movimento pelo Base may have had Brazil’s best interests at heart, rather than engaging in a truly democratic process of policy debate, they attempted to remake Brazil in their own image – meritocratic, eﬃcient, innovative – through the mobilization of material resources, knowledge, and networks. Yet, the empirical reality of educational inequity in Brazil illustrates that meritocracy is not always fair. It ignores the structural forms of educational marginalization that individuals and communities face if they are poor, Black, mixed race, or indigenous. However, this vision of meritocracy has paved the way for right-wing groups to vilify policies and laws from the PT era, such as racial quotas in higher education, that are perceived to give unfair preference to Black and indigenous students in higher education. Moreover, other policy actors, such as unions, public universities, contentious social movements, were considered barriers to this transformation. Now, a conservative counter-movement is using the viliﬁcation of these very institutions and grassroots JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 25 movements to remake Brazil in a diﬀerent image, of a neoconservative military variety. Although the tremendous inﬂuence corporate and private foundations have over educational policy making in Brazil is a recent development, it is likely to continue deﬁning the public sphere in the near future as these groups promote assessment and audit cultures in education that seek to reshape educational institutions in the image of corporations. The consequences of these ‘technocratic’ policy inﬂuences are likely to be increasingly political. Notes 1. The direct translation of the Portuguese name is ‘National Common Core Curriculum.’ However, most educational actors in Brazil now translate this to ‘National Learning Standards’ due to recent debates about the diﬀerence between curriculum and standards. Following the dominant trend in Brazil, we also refer to the BNCC as ‘National Learning Standards’ throughout this article. Although, we argue that even this process of translation is a political process. 2. http://movimentopelabase.org.br/acontece/bncc-homologada/ [Accessed 6 February 2018]. 3. A hegemonic bloc refers to the ‘complex, contradictory, discordant ensemble’ of organizations, institutions, ideologies, and individual actors that support and reproduce the social relations of production during a particular historical moment. 4. Moeller’s research has previously examined how the Nike, Inc. and the Nike Foundation extended the corporation’s power, authority and reach in the ﬁeld of international development, becoming the foremost experts on adolescent girls in the world without any prior knowledge or experience in the area (Moeller 2018). 5. This project was funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program and the Wenner Gren Foundation 6. As a postdoctoral scholar at the Lemann Center from July 2015 to December 2017, Tarlau was often privy to discussions about the BNCC. However, all of the data used for this paper is based on interviews where participants received information about the study and signed written consent reforms, participant observation when Tarlau openly identiﬁed as a researcher, or observations at public events. Since writing this article, Moeller has become a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and an aﬃliate of the Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil. 7. CGI was founded in 2005 by former President Clinton ‘to inspire, connect, and empower a community of global leaders to forge solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.’ (Clinton Foundation n.d.). 8. For another case of philanthropic actors seeking to remake public education in their own vision, see Resnik (2011). 9. State Secretaries of Education are the equivalent of state Departments of Education in the United States. 10. Although we generally refer to people by their last names throughout the article, we refer to Jorge Paulo Lemann by his ﬁrst name, to distinguish him from his foundation. 11. Interview, former Lemann Foundation employee, 4 August 2016. Pseudonym. 12. All annual reports cited in this article can be found at:< https://www.fundacaolemann.org. br/materials/temas/relatorio-anual> [Accessed September 2017]. 13. Interview, former Lemann Foundation employee, 4 August 2016. Pseudonym. 14. https://www.forbes.com/proﬁle/jorge-paulo-lemann [Accessed September 2017]. 15. https://www.napratica.org.br/para-fazer-a-diferenca-no-3o-setor-e-preciso-dialogar-comas-politicas-publicas/ [Accessed 2 February 2018]. 16. Interview, former Lemann Foundation employee, 4 August 2016. Pseudonym. 17. Original invitation letter and email, given to us by a seminar participant. 26 R. TARLAU AND K. MOELLER 18. Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonproﬁt education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability. < https://www.achieve.org/who-weare> [Accessed 6 September 2017. 19. Schneider (2015, 148) writes: ‘CCSS was certainly no “teacher idea.” It was ﬁrst publicized by Achieve in its July 2008 Out of Many, One report – which the Gates Foundation paid $12.6 million to fund in February 2008, supposedly “to support Achieve’s American Diploma Project.” . . . teachers were left on the fringes of CCSS development. They were reviewers and advisors, at best.’ 20. The Lemann Foundation began to ﬁnancially support QEDU in 2012 to facilitate parents, teachers, and principals’ access to educational data and to support evidence-based policymaking (LF 2012 Annual Report) For more on QEDU see: < http://www.qedu.org.br/> . 21. Interview with Eduardo Deschamps, 30 November 2016. Name used with permission. 22. Interview, foundation representative, 10 March 2016. Pseudonym. 23. Interview, executive committee member of Movimento pela Base, 2 August 2016. Pseudonym. 24. (Gramsci 1971, 400). 25. (Hall 1988, 130). 26. (Hart 2003, 27). 27. Interview, executive committee member of Movimento pela Base, 28 July 2016. Pseudonym. 28. Interview, foundation representative, 10 March 2016. Pseudonym. 29. Interview, executive committee member of Movimento pela Base, 2 August 2016. Pseudonym. 30. Interview, executive committee member of Movimento pela Base, 28 July 2016. Pseudonym. 31. Interview with Manuel Palacios, 3 November 2016. Name used with permission. 32. Veronica said this during an interview that she was present at with Manuel Palacios. We also conducted a separate interview with Veronica that is cited in the article. 33. Interview, professor involved in the writing of the BNCC, 25 April 2017. Pseudonym. 34. Interview with Manuel Palacios, 3 November 2016. Name used with permission. 35. Joint interview, professors involved in the writing of the BNCC 29 July 2016. Pseudonyms. 36. Joint interview, professors involved in the writing of the BNCC 29 July 2016. Pseudonyms. 37. Interview, MEC government oﬃcial, 27 July 2016. Pseudonym. 38. Interview, MEC government oﬃcial, 27 July 2016. Pseudonym. 39. Interview, professor involved in evaluating the BNCC, 1 February 2017. Pseudonym. 40. Interview, executive committee member of Movimento pela Base, 2 August 2016. Pseudonym. 41. Folha de São Paulo, 5 March 2016, ‘Os estudantes não podem esperar.’ 42. Interview with Manuel Palacios, 3 November 2016. Name used with permission. 43. Joint interview, professors involved in the writing of the BNCC 29 July 2016. Pseudonyms. 44. Interview with Eduardo Deschamps, 30 November 2016. Name used with permission. 45. Interview with Eduardo Deschamps, 30 November 2016. Name used with permission. 46. In Brazil, this is known as a GT (Working Group) but the equivalent in the U.S. academy is a Special Interest Group. 47. Interview, professor and open critic of the BNCC, 1 August 2016. Pseudonym. 48. Oﬁcio 01/2015/GR ao Conselho Nacional de Educação, ‘Exposição de Motivos sobre a Base Nacional Comum Curricular’ (GT 12 Currículo/Anped e ABdC). 49. Interview, state government oﬃcial, 3 August 2016. Pseudonym. 50. Interview, professor involved in the writing of the BNCC, 21 November 2016. Pseudonym. 51. Interview, executive committee member of Movimento pela Base, 28 July 2016. Pseudonym. 52. ‘Seminários Estaduais da BNCC: Posicionamento conjunto Consed e Unidme sobre a segunda versão da Base Nacional Comum Curricular’ (2016). Public Access through JOURNAL OF EDUCATION POLICY 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 27 the Movimento Pela Base website < http://movimentopelabase.org.br/wp-content/uploads/ 2016/09/2016_09_14-Relato%CC%81rio-Semina%CC%81rios-Consed-e-Undime.pdf> [Accessed 11 February 2018] . Interview, professor involved in the writing of the BNCC, 25 April 2017. Pseudonym. http://www.fundacaolemann.org.br/lemann-foundation/ [Accessed 11 February 2018]. Interview, professor involved in evaluating the BNCC, 1 February 2017. Pseudonym. Joint interview, professors involved in the writing of the BNCC 29 July 2016. Pseudonyms. For a discussion of the privatization of Chilean public education, see Carnoy (1998) and McEwan and Carnoy (2000).(McEwan and Carnoy 2000; Carnoy 1998). Accessed 6 February 2018, https://www.forbes.com/proﬁle/jorge-paulo-lemann/. Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes on contributors Rebecca Tarlau is an Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University. She is aﬃliated with the Adult Education and Lifelong Learning program, the Comparative and International Eduation program, and the Center for Global Workers’ Rights. 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‘Philanthropizing’ consent: how a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil [Journal of Education Policy]

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