The author discusses philanthropy and educational reform from the Great Depression to the present, contrasting the views of that time to "Making It Count" (Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Kelly Amis, 2001.) Although Finn and Amis presented their suggestions as advancing democracy, they thought that educational reform took place best when elite groups engineered the changes. A different and more traditional view of democratic change is that public deliberations should direct educational reforms. The evolution of the philosophy of educational reform is traced between the viewpoints.