Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center has written a thoughtful (and optimistic) commentary on the Gates Foundation’s latest big bet on reforming education. The new one will invest $1.7 billion in networks of schools in big cities, in the hopes that they can work together to solve common problems.
Welner, K. (2017). Might the New Gates Education Initiative Close Opportunity Gaps? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/bmgf.
Welner notes that the previous big initiatives of the Gates Foundation failed, although he believes that Gates was too quick to pull the plug on the small schools initiative in 2008, into which he had poured $2 billion. Gates bet another $2 billion on the Common Core, and that was sunk by backlash from right and left and in any case, has made no notable difference. Gates poured untold millions into his plan for teacher evaluation (MET), but it failed because it relied too much on test scores.
Welner says that Bill Gates and the foundation he owns suffer from certain blind spots: First, he believes in free markets and choice, and he ends up pouring hundreds of millions into charters with little to show for it; second, he believes in data, and that belief has been costly without producing better schools; third, he believes in the transformative power of technology, forgetting that technology is only a tool, whose value is determined by how wisely it is used.
Last, Welner worries that Gates does not pay enough attention to the out of school factors that have a far greater impact on student learning that teachers and schools, including poverty and racism. These are the factors that mediate opportunity to learn. Without addressing those factors, none of the others will make much difference.
Welner is cautiously optimistic that the new initiative might pay more attention to opportunity to learn issues than any of Gates’ other investments.
But he notes with concern that Gates continues to fund charters, data, technology, and testing. He continues to believe that somewhere over the rainbow is a magical key to innovation. He continues to believe in standardization.
It seems to me that Kevin Welner bends over backwards to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. With his well-established track record of failure, it is hard to believe he has learned anything. But let’s keep hoping for the best.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=055wFyO6gag
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TAGO (credit to Senor Swacker, & haven’t seen this for a while, but is most fitting)!!
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Wish Gates would just GO AWAY and leave the rest of us alone. Gates has no clue. Gates is in this FOR GATES and his stream of money.
Gates has never had to budget anything his entire life, and he wants us to trust him with his pathetic record of DEFORMS? I think NOT. I hope we are not dummies.
Gates is like Dump…EGO driven and he giveth with one hand and taketh with the other hand with lots of strings attached.
I TRUST Public School Teachers, not Gates.
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“The Gates Blind spot”
The Gates Foundation blind spot
Is everywhere they gaze
Cuz seeing’s one thing blind cannot
And blind as bat is Gates
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LIKE!
Gates is BLINDED by his $$$$$ and elitism. He has NO CLUE, but likes to pat himself on the back and expects us to do the same.
He needs to “clean his own house” all by himself. That should keep him busy for eons.
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“Blinded by Billion$”
Blinded by billion$
Dazzled by dollar$
Gates and his minions
Feigning as scholars
Fakesperts with “theories”
Testing and more
Data and queries
CCRAP at its Core
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Gates and his foundation “suffer from certain blind spots?”
My, that’s awfully polite. To follow up on the image, the man and his minions don’t have blind spots, they live in total darkness, a darkness created by Gates’ infinite greed and will to power, and they spread that darkness across the land.
Gates and his foundation are batting zero (thankfully, since their projects were born in bad faith and have been very destructive), with every project of theirs having failed, and failed badly.
If I was a betting man, I’d place a large wager on this one failing, too, despite Mr. Welner’s apparent eagerness to Believe.
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“The Eye of Sauron”
The seeing Eye of Sauron
Controls with searing gaze
With billionaires to call on
Like Zuckerberg and Gates
The Nazgul ain’t got nothin’
On techy billionaire
Whose stranglehold on children
Is causing much despair
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Professional educators are tired of having Gates use his wealth to buy policy that has no basis in fact. He uses his wealth like a sword to gain access to our young people which he uses like guinea pigs. Public education should not be Gates private playground when the education of young people is a stake. It is irresponsible to continue to allow Gates to have access to large numbers of students without him first demonstrating that his proposal has validated merit confirmed by an independent researcher. He should have to pilot his plans in a controlled setting before releasing them on the general public in a coercive way as he had done in the past.
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He should have to pilot his projects on his own kids.
See how well that goes over in the Gates household.
“Storming the Gates’ ”
If Gates Foundation test
Were piloted on Gates’
I’d really bet the rest
Would duck related fates
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With Bill Gates, expect the worst, but cross your fingers, knock on wood, pray to God, and hope for the best.
That way, we shouldn’t be disappointed (anger is okay) when Gates, once again, leaves public education in worse shape than it was before he started to foolishly meddle with it.
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“In January of 2018, the Foundation will issue an RFP to fund about 30 [Networks for School Improvement], ‘defined as a group of secondary schools working both collectively and individually with an intermediary to use a continuous improvement process to improve student outcomes through tackling problems that are common across the network.’”
So, Bill Gates discovers “continuous improvement.” And what does he want to do with it? Why, use it to “improve student outcomes,” of course. And so it seems Bill Gates isn’t concerned with from where “student outcomes” come. For if he were so concerned, he’d focus on improving what produces student outcomes. And what produces student outcomes is principally a function or feature of the quality of the top, controlling leadership of what produces student outcomes. Thus Gates might first work on “continuous improvement” of top leadership quality (no one below superintendent), including himself, especially since his is a “continuous” run rather than a “continual” run of a failed paradigm, Welner’s optimism notwithstanding.
Every district is at least of collection of schools and not necessary a network of schools. But if the district has charter schools and such, then the district absolutely is a collection of schools incapable to fully function as a network, by definition. Thus by his funding of charter schools and such, Gates’ “Network for School Improvement” thinking has failure built in.
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Longish.
I think that the Gates initiatives announced in several venues and examined by Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center are really more of the same old effort by Bill Gates to establish philanthrogovernance as a national norm. Gates wants to micromanage and standardize education. He is not alone. In fact, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is almost always joined by other foundations in so-called “collective impact” efforts.
Gates has said he wants to invest in more than one “Network for School Improvement” defined as “a group of secondary schools working both collectively and individually with an intermediary to use a continuous improvement process to improve student outcomes through tackling problems of the same kind across the network.”
From Gates’ examples, “an intermediary” turns out to be any non-governmental agency that can enlist the cooperation of school officials, especially superintendents, in outsourcing major decisions about school policies and practices to other agencies, including universities, consultants of all kinds, and others in a tangled web of sometime dubious deals and partnerships a plenty.
Consider his models for future funding. One is the “California Office to Reform Education”known as CORE. CORE is a non-governmental administrative office set up to receive private funding, then put that money into schemes that will standardize practices in eight California districts. CORE’s bait persuaded the superintendents of Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Ana to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that they would standardize their practices and have a common assessment. CORE operates with funding from these foundations: Stuart, William & Flora Hewlett, and SD Bechtel, Jr, (Stephen Becktel Fund). Add the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which alone has sent over $7.6 million to CORE.
The superintendent’s initial bait for signing the CORE District MOU was the prospect of being exempt from Race to the Top accountability, and dodging some oversight by the California Board of Education. CORE lives on.
Worst of all: CORE Districts have agreed to expand testing. In addition to student test scores, attendance and the like, the new metrics include results from dubious surveys from students, teachers, parents, and non-teaching staff.
Then all of these metrics are hashed and mashed into ratings of schools and those ratings are fed directly from the CORE district to the website GreatSchools, That website sells school data to Zillow, aiding the practice of redlining. The Gates foundation has sent over $9.3 million to fund the operation the GreatSchools marketing website. Find the other funders at the website. The 2013 CORE District MOU can be seen on page 189 of this document: https://www2.ed.gov/policy/eseaflex/approved-requests/corerequestfullredacted.pdf
Gates also thinks that “LIFT Education Tennessee ” is an exemplary network. In this case, superintendents who were willing to accept outside management of their work helped to create LIFT. LIFT is an umbrella organization of 12 geographically separated districts ranging in size from four schools to 221 schools, that work together “on common problems of practice.” The website shows what this means: Participants in the network push the Common Core and use criteria for effective Common Core teaching adapted from the Student Achievement Partners Instructional Practice Guide Version 1.4 – revised 8/1/16. See https://lifteducationtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/LIFT-Instructional-Practice-Guide-K-5-Literacy.pdf
Gates also thinks Chicago’s Network for College Success is exemplary. This network is supported by 13 foundations, and it has six “partners.” Some partners are local and not surprising (e.g., Chicago Public Schools and University of Chicago Consortium on School Research). Others deserve some scrutiny. For example, Targeted Leadership Consulting is an executive coaching consultancy located in California and Hawaii. A Denver-based consultancy called The School Reform Initiative offers three tiers of services from consultants who are ready ”to develop our core practices within your educational setting.” Another partner is the Reading Apprenticeship at WestEd, a combination of online and on-site strategies for teaching reading developed with a SEED grant from USDE, and priced by WestEd at $3,500 per participant for a combination of outside coaching on “close reading” (as in the Common Core), but with greater attention to developing content knowledge.
Partners proliferate. Another “partner” is the To&Through Project which seems to be an administrative umbrella and fiscal manager for two other partners. One is the Urban Education Institute’s “UChicago Impact,” the producer of a 100-item online “5Essentials School Improvement Survey” of teachers, students, and parents. The survey results are said to predict “school success” through research-tested diagnostic analysis.
Schools find reports from their surveys on the web along with recommended strategies for improvement. One remedial strategy is writing SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and time-bound). SMART goals are a vintage 1980s corporate management technique attributed to George T. Doran, a consultant and former Director of Corporate Planning for the Spokane Washington Water Power Company. Here are the UChicago Impact survey questions (now required in Illinois, and marketed elsewhere). http://help.5-essentials.org/customer/en/portal/articles/800770-illinois-5essentials-survey-questions.
There is one more partner in the layers of Chicago networks that Gates admires: the Network for College Success (NCS), housed at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Among other activities, NCS has a Freshman OnTrack Toolkit, and provides To&Through training institutes to all Chicago public high schools. The aim is to get ninth graders on track for college.
According to NCS, a student in Chicago is considered On Track if he or she has accumulated five full credits (ten semester credits) by the end of ninth grade (freshman year) and has no more than one semester F in a core subject (English, math, science, or social science). Additional criteria are no suspensions and low or no absence. This tool kit was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Spencer Foundation. In my judgment, the toolkit is a proxy for a dedicated team of school counselors assigned to ninth graders. The meaning of college-ready is totally disconnected from encouraging students to think about a major for college and how that might influence the courses you should take in high school. Don’t be a ninth grader who dreams of studying the arts in college. Studies in the arts do not count in this scheme. https://ncs.uchicago.edu/sites/ncs.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/toolsets/NCS_FOT_Toolkit_URAD_SetA_0.pdf
The To&Through Project project is funded at least $30K by contributions from eleven sources, all deep pocket family foundations in Chicago, along with Boeing Company.
Gates wants to normalize philanthrogovernance especially of a kind that imports corporate management schemes into schools. Gates is determined to undermine the public governance of schools at the state, local, district, and school levels. He is really fond of enlisting superintendents who are willing to outsource school and district governance. Only one signature and the deal is done. Long before Trump, Gates mastered the art of deal.
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