ABSTRACT
If the venture philanthropists are the sugar daddies of the Ownership Society, the conservative think tanks are its brain trust. ey have provided the intellectual muscle to power school privatization plans from vouchers to for-pro t management of public schools and are the leading strategists on the right ank of school reform. eir credibility in the small-schools and charter world is based on their ability to combine their free market and privatization lingo with a critique of bureaucracy and their capture of the language of choice. However, these think tanks were also the ones that made the case that reforming public education, especially large urban high schools, was too di cult an enterprise to pursue and that thousands of school closures and free market solutions were the only worthwhile reforms.
