I was contacted last week by a writer for “Inside Philanthropy” to comment on the Gates Foundation’s new program to fight poverty. My response was that I was pleased to see that the foundation was acknowledging the need to combat poverty after wasting billions on the Common Core and teacher evaluation.
I thought it was a good sign. I didn’t realize when I was asked how very little the foundation was committing: $158 Million over four years. Compare that to the foundation’s expenditure on Common Core, probably $2 Billion. And that was a disaster.
Although Bill Gates is often treated as if he were Mother Teresa with megabucks, not everyone is impressed.
Read what Ruth McCambridge, the editor of “Nonprofit Quarterly,” said about the foundation’s “tone deafness.”
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/05/04/not-to-niggle-but/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
my comment on their blog.
Narratives are not enough. We are drowning in spin and stories as if words were sufficient to address the excesses of the Gates Foundation among others.
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In the marketing and lawyer world, UP really means DOWN.
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I’d be thrilled if Gates were just donating (any amount of) money and letting experts in the field do with it as they see fit. But we all know that’s not what Gates is going to do. Just like he’s an “expert” on education and healthcare in developing countries, I’m sure he’s an “expert” on poverty and he’ll know just what should be done. The people already working on poverty are about to have the Gates experience and it’s going to be a wild (and ugly) ride. I’m actually rather pleased that he’s not “donating” more. The more he “donates” the more control he gets. Maybe – hopefully – this pittance isn’t enough to completely take over the existing system.
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Gates has a HUGE EGO problem.
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It’s only a problem if you are not Bill Gates.
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Misdirection and public relations, pure and simple…
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Bill Gates is a hungry Grizzly dressed up to look like a friendly, loving, cookie baking grandma
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Bingo.
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Gates makes a fundamental error in everything he does. He doesn’t listen to people. He believes in data (highfalutin polls and statistics) so much, he can’t hear people telling him when he’s misinterpreting the data.
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His whole approach to doing things is bassackwards.
You are supposed to find out what people want and need before you do something.
He assumes because his approach (to give people what HE wants to give them instead of what they want) worked with his software, it will work in other areas.
But the reason it worked with Microsoft (at least at the beginning) was that people had no other choice but to accept Gates’ buggy stuff.
Once people had a choice, they naturally tried to move away from MS products but Gates used his monopolistic position to force people to keep using Inferior MS stuff like Internet Explorer.
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Then started relying on stacked ranking and almost destroyed Microsoft with it. So, he imposed stacked ranking on public education.
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I don’t think he relates well to people. He is more comfortable with machines.
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Only with machines that don’t talk back.
Gates would undoubtedly hate machines that thought for themselves and had opinions that differed from his own.
Especially given that such machines would be much smarter than he is.
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“Dean Droid”
If Gates were crossed by Droid
By very smart machine
He’d likely be annoyed
Cuz Droid would be the Dean
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I love to repeat word of wisdom from a writer – RUTH MCCAMBRIDGE –
[start sentence]
When someone is promising to change a narrative but they have no capacity to interrogate their own belief systems, that’s probably not going to work.
[end sentence]
This particular wisdom about “a true promise” is the absolute truth in all aspects in life from an individual to a community and society in a nation or in global relation.
Hopefully, all educators can solidly lean on this basic principle in order to educate young students regarding how to assess their own individual promises and their leaders’ promises.
Likewise, educators can assess their superiors’ promises as well as their Blue/Red congressmen/women’s promises before and after an election. Back2basic
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Bill Gates is just naive — but naive actions can have severe impact on people’s live, as with all the anguish and suffering inflicted on teachers because he encouraged teacher evaluations and terminations based on student test results without even thinking about the myriad factors that influence how children learn…especially the factors arising from poverty and broken families. Such naive failure to consider all influential factors makes you wonder how he went about writing programming code. And then there’s his naive support of charter schools, oblivious to the multiple ways that charter school operators skim money away from educating children…to say nothing of racial resegregation of children in charter schools. Mr. Gates, behind his actual gates, doesn’t realize how very many students need current textbooks in their school, and food to eat before coming to school, and clothes to wear. Yes, I prefer to think of Gates as naive, instead of outright evil like so many other billionaires who are using their wealth for social engineering that violates the fundamental precepts of our nation’s founding philosophy. If Gates wants to really do something to improve the education of our nation’s children and to pursue social integration, he should set up a foundation whose mission is to buy homes for people of color in community enclaves where there are few or no people of color…and not just one home at a time, but multiple homes so that the people of color have each other for support during the initial period of living among the larger community. Only when people live together as neighbors do they learn to know and to understand each other. Mr. Gates just doesn’t “get it”.
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I’m not sure that naive is the right word; arrogant fits better. He admits that perhaps his efforts could be wrong headed but never apologizes or does anything to clean up his mess when his efforts backfire.
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Gates is not so much naiive as he is willfully ignorant. He simply does not listen to people who tell him he is wrong.
Just look at the way he views Diane Ravitch, as his “greatest adversary” — rather than as someone from whom he can learn something.
I think naiive much better describes the millions of people who believe every word that comes out of Gates’ mouth simply because he is a tech billionaire.
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Gates on education, Error.
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Billyan err
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Just read that the Gates have been shopping for (another) home in the Chicago area.
Perhaps that’s why they’re donating so little money, Dienne.
They are amongst the chief villainthropists; in fact, change that to villainthropests.
Can’t these people just.leave.us.alone? (We’ve already got Vallas {who has been making the front page–he’s running for Chicago mayor–by calling Rahm a “bully” among other things he’s [Vallas] been up to} &, of course, Arne has been here for awhile: works for Laurene Jobs’ Emerson Collective. where he is “saving” Chicago youth.)
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If they build another house,I hope they actually have a decent architect do the design.
Their “compound” in Washington is a tasteless, sprawling monstrosity.
It looks like it was designed by a committee of Microsoft programmers.
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Ha, ha, SDM–you didn’t even have to write a poem to make me laugh!
&–more horrors–they may build another monstrosity (we have enough of them) here in Chi town.
Again–LEAVE.US.ALONE. Make like “Bobby” Jindal!!
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