Private Power for the Public Good

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann’s Private Power for the Public Good (Wesleyan, 1986) is an excellent place to start to experience what Bernard Bailyn meant when he said that twentieth-century schooling troubled many high-minded people. Miss Lagemann is a high-minded woman, obviously troubled by what she discovered poking around one of the Carnegie endowments, and director of Harvard’s Graduate Education School.

This is not to deny that genuine altruistic interests aren’t also a part of philanthropy, but as Ellen Lagemann correctly reflects in her interesting history of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Private Power for the Public Good, "in advancing some interests, foundations inevitably have not advanced others. Hence, their actions must have political consequences, even when political purposes are not avowed or even intended. To avoid politics in dealing with foundation history is to miss a crucial part of the story."[p.234]