In June 2010 Bush gave the commencement speech to graduates of a huge, for-profit virtual school in Columbus, Ohio, called the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. Bush used the occasion to extol the virtues of online learning, but in fact the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was a particularly poor example. Mother Jones examined the school’s track record: “In 2010, barely half of its third graders scored proficient or better on state reading tests, and only 49 percent scored proficient in math, compared with state averages of 80 percent and 82 percent, respectively. ECOT’s graduation rate has never exceeded 40 percent.”

Joel Klein—first Bloomberg’s right-hand man, then Murdoch’s—also encountered problems. From the perspective of market-oriented school reformers, Bloomberg and Klein had been riding high for a few years. The state legislature had given Bloomberg almost total control of the New York City school system. He and Klein quickly imposed their vision of corporate-style governance, which included extensive testing, an intense commitment to charter schools, and, more than anywhere else, the adoption of Bill Gates’s notion that breaking up large high schools into smaller, often specialized schools was a key to improving education outcomes.

The Bloomberg-Klein reforms seemed promising at first, and kudos from around the nation and even around the world rolled in. Student achievement appeared to be rising significantly, and the black-white achievement gap seemed to be narrowing. But rigorous analyses showed that much of the progress had been illusory. The apparent gains in reading in 2009, for example, were the result of a test-score bubble. The tests had been dumbed down.

Worse was to come. It started with Klein’s announcement in November 2010 that he was quitting as chancellor to move into the much higher-paying precincts of the Murdoch operation. Bloomberg’s choice to replace him was bizarre. Cathleen Black—or Cathie, as she preferred to be called—was a longtime media executive. Her most recent positions had been president and then chairwoman of the Hearst magazine empire. Her social world was similar to Bloomberg’s—the glitzy, moneyed playgrounds of the corporate and media elite. Political observers, and even some of the mayor’s closest associates, scratched their heads. Even Black was surprised when Bloomberg offered her the job of running the nation’s largest school system, a behemoth of an operation with a multibillion-dollar budget, 135,000 employees and 1.1 million students.

Black had had no previous experiences with the public schools. She hadn’t attended them (as Joel Klein had). She hadn’t taught in them. She hadn’t sent her children to them. In one of her first public appearances after the appointment, she said, “What I ask for is your patience as I get up to speed.”

Black was hapless in the job. According to the New York Times, she came to be seen as a “feeble figure within the department,” sitting quietly, or silently, at high-level meetings and deferring to the people she was supposed to be supervising. She had trouble mastering the system’s maddeningly complex budget processes and was inept in her preparations for television interviews. Aides finally decided to just keep her off TV.

Black lasted in the job just 95 days. Bloomberg pulled the plug suddenly on a Thursday morning in April 2011. Black hadn’t seen that coming, either. Later, reflecting on her brief tenure, she expressed irritation at what she felt were unflattering photos of her that had appeared in the press. “The worst pictures!” she complained in an interview with Fortune magazine.

The Black debacle, Bill Gates’s small-schools initiative, and the Packard-Milken-Ellison virtual schools venture are just a few vivid examples of the dangers inherent in a school reform movement driven by millionaires and billionaires with no real knowledge or understanding of public education. I could go on—the Walton Family Foundation, for example, has pushed a privatization agenda that would siphon money from public schools by funneling tax dollars, in the form of vouchers and other initiatives, to families that want to send their children elsewhere. And the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has established training programs to groom non-traditional types—business executives, military officers, lawyers—for appointments as public school superintendents or to other high-level managerial positions, where they put the foundation’s free-market and privatization policies into practice. One Broad graduate, Jean-Claude Brizard, took over the Chicago school system under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, where he continued the reformist policies of his predecessors—firing teachers and shutting down schools—with no appreciable gains in academic performance.

The amount of money in play is breathtaking. And the fiascos it has wrought put a spotlight on America’s class divide and the damage that members of the elite, with their money and their power and their often misguided but unshakable belief in their talents and their virtue, are inflicting on the less financially fortunate.

Those who are genuinely interested in improving the quality of education for all American youngsters are faced with two fundamental questions: First, how long can school systems continue to pursue market-based reforms that have failed year after demoralizing year to improve the education of the nation’s most disadvantaged children? And second, why should a small group of America’s richest individuals, families, and foundations be allowed to exercise such overwhelming—and often such toxic—influence over the ways in which public school students are taught?