> So they can have a seriously deleterious effect on really very large numbers of children as a result of the power they wield.
I have a hard time seeing how anything they decide to do to change schooling is going to make it worse than it is.
Our current education system is largely still in a factory style, where students are all taught the same material, run on the same idiotic schedule, are taught aimed at tests, and generally have any genuine interest in learn crushed out of them by the second grade.
Classes teach generic material and completely fail to demonstrate useful applications. Useful things like critical thought, philosophy, personal finance, cooking, computing systems/programming - not taught. Students learn to focus on rote memorization and local application of principles - see the articles the problems of getting students to solve conceptual physics problems vs. mathematical ones - and then proceed to forget most of the material as soon as there's no test on the horizon.
And we've known how to do better for a long time. Montessori's analysis of children and how they learn, her experimentation with the classroom and materials - this sort of thing is a hundred years old at this point, but we don't apply it widely. Instead we largely have the same old ineffective crap that we pass for "teaching". There's a reason Khan Academy became a thing.
We already know that schools do a bad job of preparing students for the current economic landscape. There's no reason to look at this and say "but some of these things might not work! Think of the children!" The children will be fine (or at a minimum, no worse off). We've already seen this where school districts have blown millions of dollars on new tech, to no useful effect. Zuckerberg threw a hundred million at some school district on the east coast, to zero benefit. But stuff like that isn't going to make things any worse. And on the flip side, they won't get better without action like this and without experimentation.
Better education is, imo, the best way to put this country on a strong footing for the coming decades. The government isn't going to do it. The private market isn't going to do it at scale. The average PTA isn't going to do it, and really, what the hell do most parents know about education, other than what they experienced? Committees and groups are the kind of thing that get bogged down in details, have no clear direction, and take forever to decide anything. At least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all of their ideas pan out.
One last thing - I feel these days schools are much less important than in the past, in so far as learning. The internet provides tremendous access to information; sites like Khan and other education material has improved over traditional textbooks by leaps and bounds; Stack Overflow and similar provide places to ask questions and find answers/explanations to specific problems or concepts; and so on. Fifty years ago, if a billionaire decided to bulldoze some schools and leave a bunch of children with no place to learn, that would have been a dire problem. Today, it's much less of an issue.