Laura Chapman sees the latest Gates plan for school reform as yet another effort by Gates to control and remake public education for his own gratification. She describes his plan for “networks” as another stab at philanthrogovernance.

She writes:


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.