Bill and Melinda Gates told Nicholas Kristof that they have poured billions into education reform, but there’s been “no dramatic change.”
Although the Gates’ normally pay attention to results, in the case of education reform they are unfazed by failure.
As Inside Philanthropy reports:
This is significant for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that the Gateses still have not tapped the bulk of their personal fortune for philanthropy, as we’ve discussed in the past. While the Gates Foundation lists assets of $43 billion, Forbes pegs Bill Gates’ personal fortune at nearly $80 billion—most of which will likely go to philanthropy eventually.
This is actually a fatuous and unknowing article, as it praises the widespread adoption of the Common Core standards without mentioning how many states have dropped them or dropped the tests aligned with them or how they have become an issue in state and national campaigns. It also states that Gates spent “tens of millions” on the CCSS, when it was long ago reported by the Washington Post that Gates paid about $200 million to underwrite the effort, and some think it may have been ten times that amount. To discuss CCSS without referring to the controversy surrounding the standards is lazy (or star-struck) journalism.
The writer predicts that the Gates will shift their focus to early childhood programs, like the one run by Illinois Governor Rauner’s wife (Ounce of Prevention), and to teacher preparation programs. Again, no mention of the meager results from the Gates Foundation’s efforts to quantify teacher quality.
More testing on the way. If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t count. But don’t expect accountability; accountability is for the little people, as the super-wealthy Leona Helmsley once said about paying taxes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One of the problems I had with the Rick Hess article was that he characterized those driving the CCSS as “well-meaning.” I regard the intentions of people I don’t know as unknowable. Thus, when people in my neck of the woods (Seattle) characterize Bill Gates as well-intentioned, I respond with skepticism. When I worked at Microsoft from 1989 to 1994, Bill Gates struck me as motivated by self-aggrandizement. Has his motivations changed? I wouldn’t know. But I would expect serious journalists to bring a little more critical thinking to their assessment of Bill Gates’ activities than Nicholas Kristof has in this piece.
Did the interviewer reference the deal between Microsoft and Pearson to develop Common Core curriculum? Did he mention the for-profit, Bridge International Academies?
The Gates PR machine is without parallel.
“His heart is in the right place”
His heart is in the right place
Although he may seem cold
He has a little wallet space
And heart is in the fold
The Germans and other Europeans thought Hitler’s heart was in the right place as he murdered 7 million Jews.
How do you do it , dam poet? great and dylanese – economy of words…
I guess “outcomes” are for little people, too.
He is also a depopulation-ist,google vaccines and Gates, he is a monster. He thinks there should be something in the water or in vaccines to sterilize people. They have already put something in the vaccines given to women in Africa that has left them sterile or have miscarriages. without their knowledge. I kid you not look it up, you can listen to it on video.
Source or link??
To call this journalism is a stretch. I’m thinking dictation. I could be wrong. But not likely!
Each and everyday.
The Gray Lady strays.
Good lord!
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-bill-and-melinda-gatess-pillow-talk.html?_r=1&referrer=
Even for an editorial, how cringe-worthy, needlessly intrusive and just plain silly.
“The Gates Foundation hasn’t given up on America’s teachers and students.”
Ugh. Can we take some kind of national vow to stop sucking up and deferring to billionaires? None of us asked the Gates Foundation to take over US public education and it wasn’t by our design that our political class, our “representatives” are completely captured by 15 billionaires.
I frankly don’t care that they haven’t “given up” on us despite their clear disappointment in our performance on “outputs”. For goodness sakes. Have some self-respect.
I have given up on Bill Gates. Waiting for better programs than Microsoft produces.
Let’s also not forget how Gates effectively made sure that whatever he produces quickly becomes obsolete. Education “Reform” 4.0 is a feature, not a bug, in Gates’ world. We can be sure that future versions will be forthcoming, so that more cash can weaseled out of the pockets of others for something that rarely, if ever, has the feel of an actual upgrade.
‘Although the Gates’ normally pay attention to results…”
Bill Gates employed stacked ranking for nearly a decade at Microsoft while ignoring overwhelming evidence that it was highly toxic to the atmosphere and highly counterproductive.
Despite all his talk about being “data-driven”, Gates has no clue what ‘evidence-based’ means.
It most certainly doesn’t mean “trying stuff based on free-market ideology’ as Gates apparently believes.
Had gates stayed at Harvard to finish his degree, there is at least a chance that he might have learned what “evidence based” means.
‘in the case of education reform they are unfazed by failure. ”
Unfazed by “failure” because their definition of “failure” is not the same.
“Failure”
One man’s failure is another’s success
Shuttering schools is opening chests
Coffers filled with public jewels
For which the corporate vulture drools
When I was at Microsoft, we regarded the requirement to set individual quantifiable goals as a joke. Seriously. How does one quantify the ability to work as a member of a team?
SomeDAM Poet: re Bill Gates and Microsoft and the miseries of stack ranking—
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
To one and all: the owner of this blog has previously referred to the kind of “education reform” pushed and mandated by folks like Bill and Melinda Gates as a “vanity project.”
More than ever, I think that is an extremely apt description.
😎
Absolutely true. It is an extremely apt description of Gates and his “vane” games. Stacked rankings is a manufacturing term and has no place in teaching. Egads.
“Vanity project”–good term for it.
Unfortunately, the past few issues of VF have shown a troubling trend that IMO, is eerily similar to Time magazine’s abandonment of its historical values. As a wary subscriber, I hope it can be chalked up to an aberrational blip.
Since the main stream media is minimally covering him, I wouldn’t mind seeing some big name stars start to come out for Bernie Sanders, too.
Even though big stars may jeopardize a bit of their tax money, it would be in the best interest of all, yes?
Uh-oh. Commented on the wrong post. Exit stage left.
If anyone is analyzing the Gates on education, there are two things to be measured. 1. How much of their money are they spending? Relatively speaking, not very much. 2.How much are they influencing the direction towards privatization of public education, no matter how destructive it is to a significant percentage of people who suffer damage? Not as well as they would like, but far more than is healthy for the future of public education.
Gates has been the worst thing to happen to Obama’s presidency. He is getting his money’s worth far more than he realizes.
Any pol who takes direction from a couple of billionaires at the expense of the broader public interest does damage to their own presidency.
Billionaires exist and they can do whatever they want with their own money. Politicians deferring to billionaires is a choice those politicians make. Any influence Bill Gates was able to get was given to him by President Obama, knowingly and willingly.
Mr. Gates bought his influence with Pres. Obama. Yes, knowingly and willingly.
AMEN.
Of course they are not discouraged. Because their goal is not improving education.
There’s been a lot of evidence of the efficacy of high quality, developmentally appropriate Early Childhood Education (ECE) for decades. If “improving education” had really been the goal of Gates, he would have started with ECE, not finally gotten around to it after getting his hands all over everything else in education. Tech is more lucrative with older students than with babies…
I really dread the notion of Gates’ involvement in ECE. Preschoolers who are at-risk are already over tested IMO and those tests have to be administered 1:1, so they cut into class time very significantly. If test-scores for preschoolers are tied to teacher evaluations, I think we will see even more testing and, God forbid, a loss of valuable play time, a focus on academics and a lot of test-prep –none of which could be characterized as high quality, developmentally appropriate ECE.
A report just issued states that most pre school teachers nationwide, generally college grads, only earn $11.75 per hour and live in poverty as do most of their students.
Story of my life. Then we get to retirement age and receive unlivable SS checks based on decades of low pay and can’t ever really retire. Unless you have a partner with a second income, it’s a life of poverty and you have to keep working until you die. That’s not easy to do when your health is failing. For single people trying to live through this on their own with no safety net, I honestly don’t see a solution that sustains survival.
ECE Professional: What is worse politicians are setting up Social Security to “fail” so they will have to “reform” it. What they should do is take the limit off the contributions so billionaires pay a lot more.
Retired Teacher, I get emails from progressive organizations that advocate for increasing SS payments, and I agree that raising what high income earners pay would help a lot. It’s ridiculous that there has been such a low cap on them for so long. But most politicians in both parties, other than Sanders, don’t support any kind of tax increase on the 1% –probably because the pols are tied to corporate America by the purse strings.
From yesterday in The Nation: “How Childcare Actually Causes Poverty in America: If the people who prepare your lunch deserve a living wage, the people preparing our toddlers for school do too.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-childcare-actually-causes-poverty-in-america/
I’m guessing Gates has no plan to help raise the wages of ECE teachers, since we have long been the most exploited educators in America, followed very closely by adjunct professors –both of which have comprised the majority of jobs that I’ve had in my 40+ year career.
The point of this article was to describe where the Gateses were likely to go next with their philanthropy, not to make an assessment of their giving to date. Plenty of experts do that kind of thing far better that Inside Philanthropy could, including you, Diane. Meanwhile, there’s often not enough intelligence about what big ed funders are planning next. That’s where we come in.
As for the Common Core, we’ve often reported on the controversy here, including looking at the funders who are working to block the Core.
In this case, we simply noted:
“Despite the controversy surrounding the standards, the Common Core has been adopted in the majority of states…”
Only to have Diane write this:
“To discuss CCSS without referring to the controversy surrounding the standards is lazy (or star-struck) journalism.”
Um, what?
Sorry, David, I didn’t take that parenthetical comment as seriously as I should have. You did refer to the controversy. While it is true that Gates’ CCSS were adopted by a majority of states, many outside observers (including me) believe that they will never be national standards, connected to a national test (or two). As more parents discover that the tests were made hard on purpose so that most kids are expected to fail, the pushback will grow.
My point was that the Gates’ billions for reform have produced nothing but chaos. I fear their entry into early childhood development and teacher preparation. Having watched the foundation, its idea of reformed is centered on measurement.
The NYTimes & Inside Philanthropy articles on Gates are both puff pieces. What is with all the people who fawn over him?
That includes those who apparently don’t realize that avoiding critical questions and in-depth probes IS fawning. It’s as if everyone thinks that if they go lightly on him, then Gates will bestow a sizeable portion of his riches on them. He probably rarely, if ever, hears the truth about the damaging effects of his actions due to all the ingratiating sycophants in his life. (I don’t say never because I often blast that at him on Twitter, though he probably never reads what I write, and others probably do the same in that forum.)
People fawn over billionaires, Reteach 4 America, the way people in other cultures fawn over Sun Gods. They dazzle. The highest value in our society is riches, and they are the richest. They have the magic touch. Once you pass a billion, you will never ever be poor again, or even middle class. Ordinary people are awed.
Thanks, Diane! I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but it makes a lot of sense, since money does seem to be what’s valued most in our society now –a value I don’t share. (Though I don’t have any and that deficiency is certainly the reason why my life is truly a disaster today, I’ve never thought money mattered most in life.) But this would help to explain why people, including middle and low income folks who voted against their own best interests, elected billionaires like Bloomberg and Rauner. It’s also probably why “Trump Would Be GOP Nominee if Vote Were Held Today:” http://www.politicususa.com/2015/08/01/trump-gop-nominee-vote-held-today.html
I suspect celebrity also plays a role in that, since many Americans are enamored by celebrities as well. I don’t really get that either though. I detest pop media and think it’s a setup to distract people from what really matters, but I guess a lot of others have fallen for it, maybe because so many celebrities are wealthy, too.
Cash deprived states are blackmailed into accepting CC and RttT to receive federal funding. California resisted at first, but has now folded to the Obama mandate. It is dollar driven, not academically driven.
Diane Ravitch has been essential in exposing vulture philanthropy. Opportunists disguised their plotting, in various ways, to make it easier for politicians to sell to the public and, themselves. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and discount retailing’s self-aggrandizing kings, starve communities of resources and pocket the remaining scarce dollars.
Regardless of forum, those who shade, obfuscate, or fail to speak up, reflect America’s shame. The national assets snapped up in Russia, by oligarchs, shows our country’s present and future.
A magazine that has articles about charter school funders and ignores the 18% interest return that Wall Street makes on charter school debt and, that fails to make clear, the tax dollars spent in capital markets, reduce available resources for students, is complicit in an unimaginably destructive sales campaign.
Speaking of reform … are there any teachers who are attending today’s Better Together California Teachers Summit 2015? Would love to see Ms. Ravitch run a post on this: http://www.cateacherssummit.com.
I checked the website of the California Teacher Summit and noted the sponsors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Teach for America, and several tech companies. The two keynote speakers were not names I knew. One is an athlete turned astronaut who is a motivational speaker. Although the summit is described as “for teachers, by teachers,” I am not sure about that. Without a lot of money, teachers could not organize this event. And if it didn’t fit its agenda, the Gates Foundation would not fund it.
They said that the Common Core was done “by teachers” too. We all know how THAT was done!
Thanks, Diane, for spelling out that this ersatz education conference is merely for the benefit of CCSA and the Rheeform movement. When I received this announcement, I considered attending since it was close by…then, in a nanosecond, when I read the funders and speakers lists, I deleted the invitation.
This is great:
“About two years ago, the Republican-dominated southern suburbs of Mecklenburg County elected Paul Bailey to represent them on the school board. He was endorsed by a roster of GOP officials that included three state legislators.
That made Bailey’s comments on the Republican-dominated General Assembly this week all the more striking.
“I’m extremely concerned that we have a state that is dismantling our public school system,” he said. “This state is going in the wrong direction when it comes to public education.”
“I’m a Republican,” Bailey told me after Tuesday’s board meeting. “But I’m just tired of this crap.”
Bravo. My hat is off to him. Maybe North Carolina public school children finally found an advocate in government. I don’t care if there’s an R or a D after his name and I bet they don’t either.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article29547202.html?utm_content=buffer799d7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#storylink=cpy
Based on their track record all I can imagine when I hear that they are redirecting their funding toward early childhood education is a bunch of three year olds on chrome books and preschool teachers with headsets. I can’t say I feel any better about their new focus. God help the preschool teachers!
And testing. LOTS of testing. God help the preschool CHILDREN.
And implanted microchips. LOTS of implanted microchips. Gate…I mean God help the preschool teachers & children.
“Direct Data Dump”
Earbuds are just fine
But microchips are best
Implanted in the mind
To prep for VAM and test
Stack ranking, for Microsoft, served its purpose – churn. Everything the reformers do causes churn by design. Can’t collect a pension if you don’t stay around long enough. Can’t get tenure unless you’re there 4 years. Can’t keep your job if the test scores aren’t sufficient. Get marked ineffective by design, so you’ll become disillusioned and leave, making way for TFA, school closures, charters, etc. Drum up some charges and put you in a rubber room. Which, by the way, how do they get away with that–hiring TFA while keeping vets on the payroll and paying double salaries? Should be a lawsuit by the taxpayers to get rid of the TFA and the replacements and put the real veteran, qualified, certified teachers back in the classrooms. Wonder why the want to get rid of LIFO? So then can fire the vets and keep the TFAs. Bingo.
How many teachers are now selling insurance? How many will become second career people because the teaching door has been slammed shut by churn?
Data be damned. Anyone can massage the data, and the reformers are so good at that, and rhetoric, while I’ll be damned, they can make one believe the sky is purple. They are masterful spin doctors.
Gates is driven by a return on investment and his enormous ego. Melinda is a sycophant along on his coattails. I cannot imagine they believe half the crap they do; its just done because it is expedient and they are bulldozers getting rid of everything that stands between them and profit. The cost is, of course, to use their terms, human capital—they toss the human capital away to make room for their own barracudas, computers, programs, etc.
Yep, shake things up! Bang on your TV set to adjust definition!
How’s that work on flat screens?
Computer virus? Drop it down the stairs a few times. See if that shakes it out. Still no good? Soak it in disinfectant while it’s on. More problems? Fire your electrician.
Warren Buffet, who is second only to Gates in wealth according to Forbes magazine this year, (not counting the Walton family) will be gifting most of his estate to the Gates Foundation. You can be sure that succession plans for the Gates Foundation have been made giving it a very long life and arc of influence on the “sectors” where he and his wife and their successors send money.
As for billionaire investments in early childhood education, Gates seems to have been asleep at the wheel.
Goldman Sachs, Pritzer and others have figured out how to do deals on early childhood education, with an estimated 5% return on investment for people who want to get on board.
Utah and Chicago have already bought into this new “financial product.” The product is a contract that allows intermediaries who represent the interests of the investors to hire and fire staff and oversee their work in a manner that “guarantees” each cohort of students reach specific milestones on time. One of these milestones is entering kindergarten ready to learn, another is a version of grade 3 proficiency in reading, another is on-time completion of high school. The students are screened to ensure that any with serious special needs students are excluded.
The investors are betting that minor learning problems can be corrected prior to entering kindergarten or at least by the time students enter first grade. All of these plans involve some statistical estimates about the money saved in social welfare costs by investments in early childhood–if those programs are “high quality.”
All of these plans all depend on have well-matched cohorts of students who are excluded from the program. The excluded students function as a control group, a counterfactual, so investors can be given good evidence that the program is in fact “paying off” as expected. There are huge overhead costs in these contracts, including payments to lawyers, accountants, auditors, the program CEO and managers, an external program evaluator and the evaluator’s staff. There is also the potential loss of professional expertise, especially if CEOs are looking after program outcomes only–as is typical in business and financial dealing.
These financial products are marketed as great deals for investors and for the public—mainly on the basis of claims about lifetime savings in social welfare costs if these programs are of “high quality.” At least in theory, that means key staff have a college degree in early child education. In one foundation-funded program in Tulsa, OK Teach for America amateurs are being prepped in one summer to enter pre-school classrooms.
For an example of TFA’s idea of a “great way to teach preschoolers” see https://www.teachforamerica.org/top-stories/update-punk-rock-preschool—-business
Nothing like getting TFA lessons about capitalism before kindergarten.
“Capitalism before kindergarten” That’s why we see, as promotion, children wearing suits at websites with titles like, learn to earn.
It’s reflected in a former TFA executive director’s favorite project, elementary school children in navy blazers and bow ties, which she described as “so powerful”. My description- disgusting.
“My description- disgusting.”
Yes, this manipulation of children is absolutely sick, I can think of few things worse…
I’m reminded of the Tom Lehrer song:
Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down.
“That’s not my department,” says Werner Von Braun.
I’m curious what people, including and maybe especially Diane Ravitch, think the Gateses could do with their money that would actually be effective.
Fund school libraries. Fund arts programs that have been cut. Fund field trips. Remove funding from testing. College scholarships. Any number of things.
I think Gates should get out of education altogether. At this point, the only tolerable exceptions would be if he wants to adopt and provide resources for some needy public schools and fulfill donor requests from teachers, but he can’t have another agenda so no strings attached.
And he should divest from fossil fuels. Gates finally agreed to invest in alternative energies recently but he refused to let go of dinosaurs. So much for the man who supposedly adores innovation, as well as all the bogus claims from his apologists who say that he has enough money and doesn’t want more.
Elder Wise, this is an important challenge for Gates. Fund something in education that is controlled by the recipients, not by you. The highest form of charity, according to the Talmud, is when the giver doesn’t know who will receive his gift, and the recipient doesn’t know who gave it.
Ah Diane, tell me what state has gotten rid of Common Core? My records show not ONE state has gotten rid of Common Core and even the states that didn’t apply for RTTT have Common Core. Changing the name or calling CC standards something else doesn’t change the fact that they have Common Core aligned standards. Even Texas has Common Core they just don’t call it Common Core but of course the text books do. But lets not lose sight of the facts. Common Core is a failure as far as we are concerned but as far as the people pulling in millions Common Core is thriving quite nicely.
Opportunity Network has a website page that says they “created Inside Philanthropy”.
Opportunity Network has a logo for America’s Promise Alliance. The following sponsors were identified on the linked page, Pearson, Ford Foundation, State Farm, GE Foundation and a couple of telecommunications firms like AT& T, with pages showing students and the appearance of Aspire branded activities. There is also a logo for Jump Start Children First, with sponsors listed in the linked page, Goldman Sachs, MFS (global money management) and Pearson. Is there any connection between Opportunity Network’s, Inside Philanthropy, and the publication linked in the Ravitch post or, are the similar names, coincidental?
Diane,
I totally agree that people are awed by billionaires and money and celebrity. Case in point: the embarrassing popularity of Donald Trump in the polls. There is a kind of love-hate attitude this country has with money. I guess many people would rather watch their homes, jobs and lives fall away while the rich get richer. I’ve always thought it’s going to take the majority of what is now the middle class to become destitute in order to see the stirrings of real grassroots social change.
In dark hours, I think you are right. The horrors of armed revolution can not be averted. When oligarchs are sociopaths, the outcome is pre-ordained.
I was a principal in Charlotte, North Carolina when the Measures of Teacher Effectiveness initiative was all the rage. I also go to the Gates Foundation job site periodically. I believe that the Gates want to make a meaningful contribution. However, it appears their Foundation has become caught up in bureaucratic organizational entanglements that do not allow them to “see the forest for the trees.” I realize that many of the corporate giants who have acted to make the public schools in their image have their bottom line at heart. Yet some seem to have an interest in meaningful change. The biggest impediment to changing the public schools for the better is a profound ignorance about how the public schools have developed and the unique organic culture encompassing individual schools. This technological grab bag that has resulted through the standards movement has profoundly taken the focus away from students. I wish we could get this message to the Gates. I honestly believe they would act in the right way if they understood the complexity of our enterprise and really listened to the school house. Maybe they should spend money to listen for a while.
The ONLY way to slow down this movement is to stop talking about it and take action. FORM A PAC. RAISE SOME MONEY. HAVE A PERMANENT PRESENCE ON CAPITOL HILL. Members of congress are not reading op-eds or blogs or even scholarly journals about education. They are being educated by the lobbyists who represent the interests who support this movement. The only way to educate them is with permanent “boots on the ground” in Washington. comment by: Connie
Connie,
We do have a PAC. It is called the Network for Public Education. We have a C(3) and a C(4). The former is tax-exempt. The latter is not. The latter makes political endorsements. Join us. Help us.
Post by Connie. The only way to stop this movement is to stop talking about it and take action. FORM A PAC. RAISE SOME MONEY. HAVE A PERMANENT PRESENCE ON CAPITOL HILL. Members of congress are not reading op-eds, or blogs or even scholarly journals about education. Their opinions are being formed by lobbyists who are up there 24/7 “educating” them about the issues. Until those opposed to testing understand this and develop an effective legislative strategy, nothing will change no matter how valid the arguments that are made. You are not being heard.