Ruth McCambridge, editor-in-chief of the NonProfit Quarterly, wonders why Bill Gates continues to pour new money into his failed initiatives. Is it because he can never say he was wrong? Actually, he did admit he was wrong in 2008, when he pulled the plug on his $2 billion bet on breaking up big high schools into small high schools. There may have been some positive results, but he wanted better test scores and when he didn’t get them, he deep-fixed the whole idea.
McCambridge was annoyed to see that Gates is still offering grants to anyone who might breathe life into the Common Core standards.
She read Nicholas Tampio’s book Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy, and she was convinced that the Common Core is beyond salvation. Despite the multiple rejections of the Common Core, Gates won’t let it go. He just gave $225,000 to the New York State Board of Regents to advertise the value of common standards (read: Common Core).
Getting a grant of $225,000 from Gates is like getting a tip of $10 from an ordinary person. It is small change, crumbs from his table. It won’t buy anything. It certainly won’t derail the parents who hate Common Core and the related testing.
Back when Common Core was first released, it was nearly impossible to find any organization that had not collected large sums from the Gates Foundation to promote the Common Core. Reporters commented that they couldn’t find anyone to interview who was not on the receiving end of Gates money.
There is an expression in Yiddish: Gournish helpf’em. That is not a literal transliteration but the idea is, “It won’t help.” “This dog won’t hunt.” It’s over and the only one that doesn’t know it is Bill Gates. Everyone is quite willing to take his money and pretend that they can breathe life into this dead fish. They can’t.
Tampio likens the situation to the heavy pre-selling of an expensive movie, in that “advertising can inflate opening day ticket sales, but then a movie sinks or swims based on word-of-mouth. The Common Core standards are a bomb, and no amount of advertising can make people enthusiastic about them. Making a few changes, primarily to the explanations, and renaming them as the Next Generation Learning Standards should not fool anyone.”
Tampio also accuses the foundation of trying to control the narrative with public relations grants. This is also far from a new charge about that institution, which has taken to serially apologizing for its anti-democratic behavior but is well known for its grants to media organizations covering topic areas in which Gates has major initiatives.
Gates is still under the illusion that he can buy respectability and acceptance for Common Core.
He can’t.
Bill Gates got his business chops partially from his willingness to cut off nonproductive ventures. (Remember “Bob”?) Since education reform doesn’t have a bottom line, he is foundering a bit. I still think national standards are a good idea but I thought that they would be generated from the bottom up, not from the top down, especially not from a private company which not only didn’t include a continuous improvement plan but actually copyrighted their standards and forbade experimentation and modification! (Danger, Will Robinson, danger! … wasn’t this obvious?)
To hell with national standards!
How did this country get to the moon and back, become the biggest baddest death and destruction machine, produce so many technological marvels, etc. . . without those national standards?
You hit it, Duane! The most powerful nation ever without national standards. We let professional teachers teach in community based schools.
Oh, Duane
There you go again with your moon landing claim. 🙂
Gates has ego issues.
So do his followers. I was just flamed and trolled by a good number of FB users for criticizing his ventures. These folks were brutal. I don’t get it—people have written countless testimonies about his detrimental interference in education, yet I was attacked over and over for being critical of his education enterprises. He has a cult following, unfortunately. Newsflash: not one identifies as a public school teacher.
Some people never learn, and Gates is a prime example. He continues with his grand standardization design, and lots of states continue on this path, though they may call it by another name. The term “common core” is toxic among most politicians. The emphasis on testing continues to feed the privatization frenzy. Gates still hopes to impose cyber instruction that will supplant human teachers, and curricula standardization is a necessary component of his misguided grand plan. I hope some of the recent research on the harmful impact of too much screen time on young people stymies Gates’ cyber incursion into public schools.
If Bill Gates and the other “reformers” really want to attack the root causes of why so many children don’t do well academically in school, they should spend their money and use their influence to fight housing segregation, job discrimination, and poverty.
They won’t — actually, they can’t, because they derive no glory in those battles, just hard work and bitter opposition from racists and bigots…and that group includes many billionaires and politicians.
There’s no glory or profit in fighting segregation and poverty.
You are correct. Gates still hopes to supplant human teachers with computer-based instruction management. His misquided vision requires extreme standardization of vocabularies for education, including computer codes for “everything” that can be programmed for instructional management systems.
The B&M Gates Foundation is a premium level contributor to the IMS Global Consortium. IMS stands for Instructional Management Systems. The aim is to standardize vocabularies for education well beyond the Common Core, through the work of CEDS, the Common Education Data Standards, and in collaboration with The IMS Global Consortium.
The IMS Global Consortium is also supported by about 180 vendors and users of software for education, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Among many buyers of IMS Certified products are schools in Houston, TX; Volusia County, FL; and Gwinnett County, GA. IMS Global has relationships with computer-centric education agencies in Japan, the Netherlands, the European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Spain.
An IMS Global certified product is guaranteed to be interoperable, meaning one click plug and play, simple to use. Recall Bill Gates’ electric plug metaphor for what educators need? CEDS and IMS Global are treating that idea as more than a metaphor.
Gates is among others who are determined to see the future of education written as if online platforms should and will be the new normal, not just for education in the United States, but extended well beyond our borders.
In this respect, computer-centric education is being developed to minimize or by-pass national and state policies. The intended “global” reach of IMS Certified Products (available from an online catalog) strikes me as an effort to pre-empt democratic governance of education, devour financial resources for profits from computer hardware and software, and divert attention from more humane approaches to education.
More generally this transnational initiative distracts attention from the civic importance of local public schools, communities, and higher education programs. Computer-centric education also points toward a future with fewer teachers, fewer brick and mortar schools, and more authority over education delegated to mega-computer companies, tech-friendly lobbies, private foundations, and venture capitalists. Add instructional delivery by the algorithms and data organized as “artificial intelligence.”
The intended revolution in education is almost entirely dependent on affordable on-demand Internet service, money for devices with an average use life of four to five years, and work-arounds or roll-backs of privacy laws. These vulnerabilities deserve more than all of the cheerleading for edtech and unrelenting efforts to deregulate that industry.
FUNDERS/ SPONSORS of IMS GLOBAL: https://www.imsglobal.org/initiativesponsors.html
K-12 DIGITAL LEARNING REVOLUTION PROGRAM: https://www.imsglobal.org/background.html
CEDS ELEMENTS, CODES: with mention of Bloom Taxonomies (1956) and Howard Gardner Multiple Intelligences (1983) https://ceds.ed.gov/elements.aspx
We can look forward to a “Nineteen Eighty Four” dystopia, unless parents, health care professionals and teachers stand up for the rights and well-being of our young people.
computer-centric education is being developed to minimize or by-pass national and state policies.
That’s it. In a nutshell.
Gates absolutely abhors democracy.
He abhors it within his own company and he abhors it within our broader society.
For evidence that this true, one need look no further than the sneaky way Gates (in collusion with Arne Duncan and David Coleman) got the vast majority of the states to adopt Common Core sight unseen in a short period of time with virtually no legislative debate.
Gates knows that democratic debate greatly increases the chance that his ideas will never get past the proposal stage because smart people will demand proof that that the ideas have been vetted by teachers and other education experts and shown to work on a small scale before they are loosed on millions of children and teachers.
SDP, DELETE THE WORD “VIRTUALLY.”
There was no legislative debate about whether to adopt the CC.
I will keep studying these links. Are there any good articles or books on IMS? tampio@fordham.edu
Destruction of the lives of all people outside his technocratic circle is Gates’ goal. Standardization and testing are the tools he uses toward that end. Sacrifice the many to preserve the few. He’s not stupid. He’s not stubborn. He’s evil.
He’s a deeply dishonest person who will go to great length to get what he wants.
According to Microsoft co founder Paul Allen, Bill Gates actually plotted with CEO Steve Balmer to cut Allen out of the company when Allen was diagnosed with cancer.
Allen said in his autobiography “I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off.
Misquoting that old film favorite:
Being rich means never having to say you’re sorry.
Quite honestly I don’t understand why EVERYONE doesn’t realise that Bill Gates (who didn’t even graduate from college) knows NOTHING about education! If he hadn’t come from a rich family, he probably wouldn’t have been able to get into college (like many from rich families – Bush, Trump, etc – whose degrees were bought for them).