Bill and Melinda Gates ignore critics of their philanthropic efforts to change society as they wish. They even host weekly meetings with other billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg and Charles Koch, to share ideas about redesigning the world.
In an article in Forbes, Gates defended his record and blamed me for the failure of the Common Core standards, which happened because I used the phrase “billionaire boys club” in my 2010 book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Resting and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Actually, the book scarcely mentioned Common Core, Which was not yet complete when the book went to press but it specifically criticized the hubris of Gates, Walton, and Broad for foisting their half-baked ideas on American public education, even though they are unelected and unaccountable.. I pointed out that they threw their weight around merely because they are billionaires, and I referred to them as the Billionaires Boys Club.
Yes, they do undermine democracy. The truth hurts.
It is gratifying to know that my pen is able to get his attention. I regret that he has refused to meet with me over the past decade. I have some good ideas for him. But he doesn’t listen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You are the worst nightmare of the Billionaire Boys Club, and yes, Bill Gates should blame you b/c you have been a relentless informed and articulate advocate for public policy and democracy which his class of ignorant oligarchs despise and demolish. He won’t meet you b/c he is afraid of you, for good reason.
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Boudica takes on the Empire!
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Or, for more contemporary readers: “Help me Obewan Knobe, you are all we got…”
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Are you saying that I am 1958 years behind the times, Roy? LMAO!
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It is hard to say. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away might be anytime.
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Also, to those of us stuck in the era of the telegram, you misspelled Lama. Or were you not talking about an Inca camel?
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Llama, Roy, llama! 🙂
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The wording in that column actually has the author, Randall Lane, blaming you, not Gates — we don’t know from the wording whether Gates said that. So it’s kind of interesting if that just came from Lane’s own head.
Also, it’s quite a lapse for Lane to write about the power of billionaires without mentioning the currently hot book “Winners Take All: The elite charade of changing the world,” by Anand Giridharadas, which devastatingly examines whether elite so-called “philanthropists” are actually just reinforcing a social order in which they remain on top with their so-called “giving.” (My local bookstore said, “We can’t keep that book in stock!” as in it’s flying off the shelves.)
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The “Winners-take-all” book is also well-known to the villainthropic enablers in Silicon Valley. With justice, their minds will be turned against Gates and Z-berg.
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a line worth repeating and repeating: “…philanthropists” are actually just reinforcing a social order in which they remain on top with their so-called “giving.”
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Why should billionaires have the right to insert themselves into public policy when nobody voted for them? Gates’ hubris will never allow him to answer that question. Government may seem “risk averse” to brazen entrepreneurs, but their objective is not to sell products. Their presumed objective is to serve the needs of the public. Government should be good stewards of the public trust, which is why they should demand evidence before a program is adopted. Entrepreneurs have no such obligation. The churn out products like pancakes and hope some of them cut the muster while the failures wind up in the dustbin.
The problem with market based education is that it allows private companies to toy with the education of students, particularly poor minority students. These unsubstantiated products become imposed on students because billionaires like Gates buy the people at the top in order to sell products to schools. No wonder there is a backlash to privatization and reckless tech adoptions. They are failing, and the only reason they remain is that they are backed by lots of money by people like Gates that have have the ability to use their wealth to buy politicians and other representatives.
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The billionaires don’t even pay for the schools, before or after the oligarch deform. The donor class live in wealthy enclaves far from where their plotted destruction occurs. Billionaires like Gates show their disdain for the common good by living in states w/o income taxes i.e. the states with the most regressive tax systems in the nation.
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The idiocy of this statement is patent:”“Philanthropy is there because the government is not very innovative, doesn’t try risky things and particularly people with a private-sector background—in terms of measurement, picking great teams of people to try out new approaches,” says Gates. “Philanthropy does that.”
The “government” invented the Internet, space satellites, a system of mass public education, built the Interstate highway system and funds the majority of medical research while pharmaceutical companies spend vast sums on marketing. If Bill Gates and his buddies the Kochs did not spend much of their time weaseling out of paying their fair share of taxes and starving the public sector of resources, it could do a lot more.
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Philanthropy is not about profit. Gates and other billionaires want to monetize students and education. It’s villainthropy.
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Ray
Your message should be heard by all legislators, government appointees and the general public.
Gates’ bs is echoed in the rationales to make Wall Street richer with social impact bonds.
If there is any group that Americans should lack all faith in, its the financial sector that lies, cheats, steals and drags down GDP by an estimated 2%.
If Gates valued anything other than himself he would have taken on Wall Street to make Americans more prosperous. But, Gates lacks true competitive spirit. He only goes for wins in a weight class below him.
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Ray, that statement was the one that jumped out at me, too. That Gates thinks that is obvious from over 20 yrs of manhandling govt ed policies. That Lane just hands the sentiment off w/o any pushback there or elsewhere in the article paints him as a credulous, starry-eyed billionaire-kisser.
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I have worked for the federal government. The government does not innovate. New ideas and concepts are killed by the bureaucracy.
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Privatize the military? NASA? National parks?
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My husband works for the Veterans’ Administration. An attempt at privitization resulted in longer waits and less optimal care. Privitization is NOT the answer.
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“The government does not innovate” –Charles
Hmmm. Everything ever created under a DARPA grant, the Human Genome Project, the national transportation system, the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, GPS,the Internet, radar, nuclear missiles. Or let’s just take a few NASA spin-offs:
1 Food
2 Health and medicine
3 Transportation
4 Public safety
5 Consumer, home, and recreation
6 Environmental and agricultural resources
7 Computer technology
8 Industrial productivity
But one could keep this up all week.
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LOL
Charles must have a lot of empty space where his educated brain is supposed to be. I think that is what we call ignorance.
Governments, not just the United States, have funded innovative projects for millennia.
If Charles reads books, he might even learn this on his own — that is if he is capable of overcoming his deep-seated confirmation bias.
My first suggestion to Charles is that he read the nonfiction book “The Man Who Loved China” by Simon Winchester.
“He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind’s most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people.” …
“After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country’s long and astonishing history of invention and technology.”
For fifteen-hundred years, the autocratic imperial governments of China funded the research that led to hundreds if not thousands of innovations.
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Most scientific research is funded by the government, not private industry.
Most medical breakthroughs have been funded by the federal National Institutes for Health.
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Private companies see no short term benefit in basic research so they won’t fund it.
It’s important to add that funds for basic research, similarly for funds for education, has been cut more and more.
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Bob, you have many pertinent examples above, but I’d take issue with the NASA list you provide. This is part of NASA’s propaganda to obfuscate the fact that it no longer has (and hasn’t had one in decades) a coherent mission as it tries to save and increase its annual appropriation. Too many people of our generation still have a wide-eyed, JFK-inspired hope for NASA that does not reflect today’s reality.
Every one of the examples you cite is correct, but is that a reason to continue funding them? Every large scale project or program has discoveries and applications of ideas that result from the overall mission. But those are not reasons to support them. For example, few people know that the era of standardized containers used to transport goods by air, water, or roads began with the Vietnam War. Military specialists figured out the most efficient way to get the millions of tons of supplies needed in Vietnam and the idea was adopted by businesses throughout the world once they saw how efficient it was. But to claim that one reason a war would be a good thing is because it leads to discoveries that aid commerce is absurd.
But that’s what NASA and its supporters do. They say nonsensical things that imply, for example, a mission to Mars will lead to great new discoveries and products—we’ve all heard the “NASA got us microwaves” talking point. The one mission NASA should have is to use it’s resources and energy to better understand what is happening to our planet, but a right wing political agenda is doing everything to eviscerate it. Instead we get idiotic things like missions to Mars that are built on nothing more than a “because it’s there” mindset. So I’m with you 100%, I just think your example, however well meaning is misplaced. (And c’mon, Tang? 😉)
As to Diane’s point, I would argue that a vast majority of people—certainly MAGA cult members—do not understand that federal spending is spread around the country, not in buildings in DC. The vast bulk of National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation funding is supporting research throughout the nation and, if the ideas are very good, in other nations. Scientific and medical research funds provide substantial support for higher education institutions in every state. Many could not survive without it and it’s probably some of the best money we taxpayers spend.
The simplistic argument that government institutions (we’ve got to quit saying “the government”) don’t innovate ignores the fact that private subcontractors and consultants are paid through appropriated tax dollars.
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Beautifully said, Ray!!!
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Imagine the wealthiest man in the world. Imagine the man is a business predator. Imagine the man greased every wheel possible plotting for the destruction of public education in American democracy. And, imagine he impatiently schemed for profitable school brands in an oligarchy.
THEN, IMAGINE THE NATION’S STRONGEST WOMAN STOPPED HIM. IMAGINE SHE UNDERSTOOD AMERICA”S CHILDREN DESERVED BETTER THAN THAT MAN.
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Yes
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The Forbes’ headline and Gates’ photo- priceless.
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I think it’s causing my right eye vitreous to detach!
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Tired of paying those capital gains and estate taxes? Frustrated by the inability of Congress to eliminate Social Security and Medicare so that wealthy families like yours can enjoy their indoor home golf courses in peace?
These social problems might look difficult, but they really have simple solutions. They’re so simple, they’re simple-minded!
It all comes down to economics, which, of course, lower-caste persons like teachers simply don’t understand. That’s why I pay nonteachers, the good folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute of Instapunditry, to explain it to them.
The costs of public schools are almost entirely in facilities and teacher’s salaries, but the latter can be eliminated by taking a disruptive approach to public education: Put a thousand prole students in a room at keyboards and have them be overseen by a minimum-wage proctor with two weeks of TFA training. It’s long past time to put this in place. I mean, seriously–how long has it been since the invention of the cubicle farm?
Depersonalized learning. Because prole children need to be taught to have the grit to sit down, shut up, and do what they are told for extended periods of time. It’s a no-brainer.
And ofc that’s why we needed the Common Core State Standards–one top-down bullet list from the Ministry of Truth to key online depersonalized education software to so that it could be sold “at scale.”
Easy, huh?
Oh, and visit our website for information on reviving the droit du seigneur.
Remember: in American education research, punditry, and legislation today, we write the checks. And we own the world’s largest collection of local, state, and federal judicial and legislative bobblehead dolls.
Need software for real-time surveillance and tracking, cradle-to-grave, of student and worker emotional responses and social credit worthiness? We can help fund your project there. All your base belong to us.
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Your post explains the inner workings of an oligarch’s brain. These people are not experts in education. They are experts in suppressing democracy through monetary manipulation. They are on the eternal quest for ROI. Before we had laws that would allow them to invade public schools, we never heard from these billionaires. Where was all their “good will” when they could not profit from their bad ideas?
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Vouchers and charters to siphon off public schools and eliminate teachers’ unions. TFA to eliminate career teachers with pensions that have to be paid. The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth to do educators’ thinking for them. And standardized tests for prole children to turn schools into institutions for menial test prep and prepare them for obedience in the gig and service worker economy. We’ve got it all!
Let’s face it. Subservience is alienating, so prole kids have to be taught gritful submissiveness. Depersonalized learning is ideal for that. Otherwise, they might start innovating and having ideas and thinking themselves capable of acting independently within some sort of crazy democratic state.
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The trickle-down theory created by Milton Friedman and launched on its long journey of total destruc6tion by President Teflon Ray-Gun in the 1980s has not died a deserving death and continues on as a 4th stage terminal pancreatic cancer out to destroy civilization as we know it.
Many of the wealthy have turned Trickle Down into their god who is really Milton Friedman. They are not alone. There are millions of people that don’t have wealth that also worship “it” making wealth their god. Like buying lottery tickets, these middle class and poor people think they are going to get rich and don’t want anything to stand in their way like a pension system.
The idea of working class people having a pension burns a hole in the minds of these godless people that worship at the altar of avarice. Every dollar out of their reach is a dollar they cannot steal and invest in stocks and deposit in savings accounts where most of it will sit and grow and never be spent.
The rest of us that work and retire and then live off of those earned pensions, spend most if not all of what we earn, because we are not wealthy enough to hoard most of our wealth and never spend it.
Meanwhile, the Trickle-Down people dream of getting their hands on every dollar they can even if they have to steal it and hiding it away in tax shelters just like the Gates Foundation.
All of these Trickle-Down people are genetically related to King Midas and have a prion disease that eats holes in their brains.
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I really believe, Lloyd, that Bill Gates believes that he is operating, in his philanthropy, out of noble motives. I also think that he sees some of his philanthropy as a win-win for his businesses and for those affected by the philanthropy. The capacity for delusion when one stands to benefit personally is very, very great.
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I agree … Bill Gates has justified in his mind that he is doing good and that he is right and the rest of the world is wrong, except for anyone that agrees with him.
Lord Acton explained why powerful people think this way back in the 18/19 centuries.
Power and Authority
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
“Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”
“Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.”
“Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.”
“Absolute power demoralizes.”
https://acton.org/research/lord-acton-quote-archive
And, Barbara Tuchman also wrote about this in her book, “The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam”. She used actual historical events to show how powerful men somehow corrupt their own thinking.
“Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government — (in the case of billionaires like Bill Gates the pursuit of rich and powerful people that are so wealthy they are a government into themselves) — of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives.
“In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display.”
Bill Gates is at the height of his folly but he will probably never suffer from the results of that folly born of his corruption. The rest of us will.
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The damage that he has done to American education is incalculable. Imagine if those billions had been spent to provide wrap-around services for poor kids in the United States. It’s so freaking sad, all of this. Oh, the power of a bad idea!!!
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If we are reincarnated like Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism believe, then what will Bill Gates be in his next life … a cockroach, a slug, or an Ebola virus? Certainly, he will not come back as a sacred cow.
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The Billionaire Butchers Club
The Billionaire Vultures Club
The Billionaire Ogres Club
The Billionaire Brutes Club
The Billionaire Ruffians Club
The Billionaire Beasts Club
The Billionaire Clods Club
The Billionaire Philistines Club
The Billionaires Troglodytes Club
The Billionaires Vandal Club
The Billionaires Degenerate Club.
The Billionaires Sadist Club …
But boys, really …. when were they ever innocent boys? They were born and raised to be trolls, brutes and, bullies.
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Keep trying to meet him Diane!
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What I’d really like to see is a meet up between Diane and Alexandria Ocasio Cortes!
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A meetup in front of a camera — televised to the nation and the world.
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Yes – under the title Great Thinkers – Outside the Box Edition.
I’ve seen a couple of videos of late of the old Dick Cavett Show. If I remember, they were broadcast in the afternoon on the east coast. That level of intellectual conversation on important topics has vanished.
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I agree. It’s never a good idea to give a platform to an idiot. Why debate an idiot, anyway?
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Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is certainly under Bill Gates’ skin, isn’t she! Boil down the interview, and Gates is saying billionaires won’t pay taxes because they don’t want to, and they don’t want to because their foundations are, with their unaccountability, better than democracy. He implies that billionaires already decide our laws and are therefore above and superior to them. He is a monopolist, plain and simple. He decided long ago to monopolize education along with everything else. He will not stop experimenting on us like lab mice. He will be stopped, eventually though. He’s not ready to accept it, that the taxman is coming, brought by AOC.
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Michael Dell was quoted as saying that his foundation, to which he gives more than 70percent of his earnings, is a better steward of his money for the good of the community than a voted representative assembly.
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His foundation allows him to put his personal vision on the new world order.
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Here is wonderful and timely take-down of the Gates Foundation in the Non-Profit Quarterly, one of the few places that philanthropies get some critical scrutiny.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2019/02/15/the-2019-gates-letter-what-surprises-them-scares-us/?
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Thanks for the link.
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Oxfam report on income and wealth inequality:
Click to access bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-summ-en.pdf
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Nonwithstanding my admiration for Diane’s crusade against idiocy, for Gates or anyone else to lay the failure of Common Corpse at the feet of any one person is evidence of their belief that they can personally change the world. CC failed to produce because of a wildly diverse group of people who did not like it.
Opposition to the CC came in Tennessee from conservatives who distrust anything from the west coast. Oddly enough, they are not taught to distrust Koch and ALEC the same way, but they certainly did not like the CC. It came as well from teachers who did not like aspects of the lists of things we were supposed to teach. Some of these teachers were conservative and some were more on the other side of things. Some opposition came from the general reaction on the part of independent thinking people against being told what to think.
It seems to me at the attempt to lay the failure of a curriculum at the door of one individual is a part of the hubris that rules a class of people who perceive their own success as a derivative of themselves. How far from the truth history has shown this to be. The European Fascist reaction to the growth of classical liberalism suggested that true human greatness lay with the individual acting in concert with the wishes of a great man (emphasis on the masculine in the face of the rise of women’s suffrage in that era). Fascism was defeated in that era, victimized by its own errant belief in the superiority of the intellect of a violent philosopher king as the avatar of greatness, and opposed by a generation of those who believed that there was something holy about individual freedom, personal responsibility, representative government, and freedom of commerce.
Common Corpse failed, but it is still with us in many ways. Hopefully, its carcass will be put to good use by good teachers, who have always been good at taking idealistic notions that are handed down to them from above and making the good parts of them a part of a balanced approach to teaching the children that are the reason of their chosen profession. The teachers will carve off the things they like, and use the rest for an object lesson in what not to do. The people will live on.
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The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are still very much with us. Most states, now, have adopted some very, very slightly massaged version of those execrable standards paid for by Bill Gates, who wanted a single national bullet list that depersonalized education software developers could key their products to so that those products could be sold “at scale.”
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“Most states, now, have adopted some very, very slightly massaged version of those execrable standards paid for by Bill Gates, ”
Tennessee is certainly one of these states. It’s ridiculous how little they changed even the wording of CC for the TN standards in math. The accompanying teacher evaluation has been getting worse (TVAAS).
They now have some kind of portfolio model.
Portfolio growth models produce authentic student growth measures unique to an individual teacher’s students. Through video, audio, and still pictures of student work, teachers capture student growth in real time.
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“The people will live on.”
Roy, we are not in ancient or war or slave times when survival is an accomplishment. A generation of kids’ (including my own) education got screwed up big time, teachers’ job have become impossible. If we don’t hold Gates and the other education leaders accountable for forcing CC on us, they will keep doing similar experiments forever.
People sit in jail for years for growing cannabis while people screwing with our kids’ lives roam free, making a fortune in the process.
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“In the US, new research by economist Thomas Piketty shows that over the last 30 years the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50% has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1% have grown 300%.”. –Oxfam, “An Economy for the 99 Percent,” 2019.
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Thanks, Bob. I didn’t know about Oxfam. Here is the link
https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/economy-99
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This is off topic but I thought it bears repeating. I don’t know a lot about where Harris stands on other topics but there are months to learn.
…………………………
“Listen, I just think that we have got to recognize that there are a lot of failures in the design of our criminal justice system, and they can be repaired, and we would actually be smarter with taxpayer dollars to understand this essential point,” Kamala Harris said in Columbia. “Prevention is smarter than reaction. Putting money in public education is smarter than putting money in mass incarceration.”
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The Foglifter
The billionaire was beaten
By lady with a blog
Who managed to defeat him
By dissipating fog
The fog was thick as butter
Could cut it with a knife
But lady simply uttered
“The Common Core is hype”
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Well-done Poet.
Not only is Diane among the strongest in the nation, she is among the most important.
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What Diane has said repeatedly about the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] (each of those descriptive terms is inaccurate to the point of being Orwellian Newspeak) is that a) they should have been subjected to intensive analysis and debate by scholars and teachers before they were implemented and that b) small-scale studies should have been done of them to see what consequences they had. If anything, she was agnostic about those standards, and the arguments against them have grown on her. Bill was in a hurry. He wanted one national bullet list that educational software could be keyed to so that those products could be sold “at scale.”
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The Foglifting Ladyblog fighting the Foggers.
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Is that meant to read “choice and testing”?
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The Charge of the Gates Brigade” (based on “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
Half a bake Half a bake
Half a bake, “Onward!”
All in the Valley of Dumb
Bill and Mel foundered
“Forward, the Gates Brigade!
Charge for the schools!” he said.
Into the Valley of Dumb
Bill and Mel foundered
II
“Forward, the Gates Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the Coleman knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to test and try
Into the Valley of Dumb
Bill and Mel foundered
III
Teachers to right of them,
Teachers to left of them,
Teachers in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with fact and stat,
Boldly they tuned out that,
Into the Ravitch jaws,
Into the mouth of cat
Bill and Mel foundered
IV
Flashed all their nonsense bare,
Dashed was their savoir faire
VAMming the teachers there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered.
Plunged in with mir’s-n-smoke
Valiantly went for broke;
Cluelessly rushin’
Reeled from reality’s stroke
Shattered and sundered.
VAMming attack, for naught,
Bill and Mel foundered
V
Teachers to right of them,
Teachers to left of them,
Teachers behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with fact and stat,
While Bill and Mel chewed fat
They that had fought the BAT
Came through the Ravitch jaws,
Back from the mouth of cat,
All that was left in end:
Bill and Mel foundered
VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Gates Brigade,
Bill and Mel foundered
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Sorry, I will not honor the charge of the Gates Brigade. But I will run out and dance in the streets if I hear the Gates Brigade and its commander came to the same fate as the charge of the light brigade.
I’m not into dancing but someone will have to celebrate.
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Well done, SomeDam! My own version of such a parody: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/the-coring-of-the-six-hundred-with-apologies-to-alfred-lord-tennyson/
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Thanks, Bob.
I much enjoyed your most excellent version.
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And I, yours, as always. Your verse is such a delight, SomeDAM. Thank you for these contributions. What joy you bring to these pages!
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Bill Gates, based on the most adverse impact on the most people, is one of the worst people alive today. His influence bought by wealth could pry American democracy from the grip of oligarchs like himself, but he chooses to be a despot.
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“Philanthropy is there because the government is not very innovative, doesn’t try risky things and particularly people with a private-sector background—in terms of measurement, picking great teams of people to try out new approaches,” says Gates. “Philanthropy does that.”
Yes Gates tried risky things — ie , experimented — on millions of school children without knowing ahead of time whether any of his “education stuff” would work (he said it might take ten years to know that but we already know it’s a bust after 8) against the advice of teachers and critically, without the informed consent of parents.
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The victims from Gates’ scorched earth, education offensive were forced into “risk”. Ohio pensioners were forced into Enron’s “risk” by Kasich. Risk taking doesn’t apply to Gates, John Arnold at Enron, nor Kasich. Risk is defined by potential loss. When the principals in a financial transaction force consequence onto others, it’s not risk taking.
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They truly have been risky ventures, but he assumes none of the risk. What’s $2B (though I’ll bet it’s been considerably more than that) to him? One might say he is risking his reputation, but is he? Or can he buy the media necessary to rehabilitate it? Is he rich enough to buy history? He’s certainly rich enough to try.
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The arrogance behind such self-assuredness permeates this whole billionaire crew. It’s like they consider democracy and humility a weakness.
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Gates is looking haggard and old these days. Time waits for no one. Welcome to the club, Billy boy. Despite the seeming deification of the masters of the internet age, they’re surely human just like the rest of us. The failure of Gates’ education schemes will stand as a lasting testimony to that fact.
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my nephew and his wife sent me a book for Christmas….Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas ……Gates has a review of it written on the cover….presumably by a robot. The book is excellent. Gates’ review seems meaningless.
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It is all your fault, Diane, that the ill-informed, mis-informed ideas of the reform crowd are not working out ! !
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Yes, it would be like NASA blaming Physicist Richard Feynman for pointing out the failure of the O ring in cold temps that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger to explode.
Perfectly logical.
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If only Diane Ravitch hadn’t got in the way, two decades of high-stakes standardized testing would have closed achievement gaps and would have improved student outcomes. But see what we have? No change in those gaps. No improvement in test scores. It must be Diane’s fault because billionaires are infallible.
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$.40 of every dollar that Gates “donates” to his foundation comes from taxpayers because he avoids taxes on that amount when he calls his money, charitable giving. Therefore, the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation costs us, the taxpayers, $44,200 per month.
Dean Baker makes the preceding points in a new article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “End Bloated Salaries in Non Profits….”
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I agree with Bob Shepherd up there at 3:03 PM yesterday. I was sorely disappointed in The Late Show episode (Feb 12th–you can see just that portion on You Tube, so be sure to watch it, unless you think it will make you ill)–Colbert introduced them as philanthropists, & the whole segment presented them as such. S.C. did ask Bill if he was running for president (because every billionaire “philanthropist” should, right?), & he said no. Both he & Melinda are just happy to help in the way that they’re helping (!!!).
Of course, they are really villainthropists but, as Bob wrote above (& Lloyd agreed, as well), they really do believe that what they are doing is good. Too bad for them (but especially for us, for “other people’s children”) that they are so extremely misguided.
I don’t think Bill has the capacity (I don’t know what Melinda’s story is) to examine the gravitas of just what he’s done to American students, teachers, parents, communities, public schools. If he did, he would have been able to read Diane’s words, questioned what has happened, & he would meet her and would talk to her. In so doing, then, he would reconsider, just as Diane has done.
But, as aforementioned, he hasn’t the capacity for understanding how his technology & foisting his ignorance upon America’s school system has damaged & destroyed–& continues to do so–real education.
He & Melinda remind me of the billionaire couple on the most excellent series Breaking Bad. Too bad there’s not a Walter White (or, correctly, his alter ego–how could I forget his name?)out there to keep them in line, to force them to think, and then to do right by the rest of us.
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Bill Gates thinks what he is doing is “good”, as in “…(school) brands on a large scale” ?????
Isn’t Bill lying about giving away his fortune in his own lifetime?
If Bill gives away money with strings attached that ensure his continued wealth, it would explain why he never drops from the list of the top 5 richest men. Philanthropy’s not his thing.
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Adolf Hitler also thought what he was doing was good. His methods were much more violent. Bill Gates and his Billionaire Bully’s Club lurk around in the shadows using their wealth and the power it buys to manipulate government in the same directions but without the gas chambers, ovens and machine guns mowing people down by the millions.
Eugenics in America: The Legacy of Sanger and Gates”
History of Eugenics
“The Eugenics Movement was a potent political force in early 20th century America. However, its membership was of a much different ilk compared to Hitler and the jack-booted soldiers of the Third Reich. As Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times,” …
“Decreasing Population Through Better Health Care?
“As did Sanger, Gates believes in the eugenist Thomas Malthus’s idea that the sustainability of the world’s resources is completely dependent upon maintaining population control. Ironically, Gates believes that improving health care, primarily through vaccinations, will accomplish this.”
http://www.catholicstand.com/eugenics-in-america/
Hitler and Gates both have this in common, but Gates is not using armies and concentration camps to accomplish the same thing.
Oh, and anyone that comments I shouldn’t use Hitler to compare anyone to, I want you to know ahead of time that I think you should go twirl your hoop in the middle of the street.
Every generation has its potential Hitler or more than one. All you have to do is focus on Donald Trump, a want-to-be Hitler, who is angry because the United States isn’t cooperating with him so he keeps ramping up the anger in his Tweets and attempts to stir his base to violence in his fascist, hate-filled rallies.
Then there is Duterte’s ‘Drug War” in the Philippines that has claimed thousands of lives outside of the legal system.
And what about Putin and Kim?
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“Gates is not using armies and concentration camps to accomplish the same thing.”
I think methods Gates is using to control people are modern equivalents of the methods the Maffia used.
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Then we better be keeping a careful eye out for the Gates hit man when Bill gets tired our criticisms and wants to silence us.
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Soon enough, he’ll sue.
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10 years after your book, “The Billionaire Boys’ Club” is considered old fashioned, sexist. It leaves out the billionaire girls who also make their money work hard to screw up children’s lives.
I hope that soon we’ll talk about “The Billionaire Girls’ and Boys’ Prison Cell”, a coed single cell where for the next 50 years, these rowdy girls and boys can throw their ideas at each other about bettering the World. No TV, no computer access, so their only entertainment is talking and listening to each other.
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&–with more than a touch of irony–that prison being run by GEO or Southwest Key!
Hey, thar’s lots of money to be made in jailing billionaires!!
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Nah, they will go to the People’s Prison and will work for rent, food, utilities. The money freed up will go to all of us.
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Retired – ” to examine the gravitas of what he has done ” He is one who heavily emphasized the good teacher bad teacher philosophy. This thinking has done huge damage to the morale of teachers. It has turned principals into cops looking for deficenties instead of being encouraging coaches. It has set a divide between younger and older teachers. TFA also likes to bash older teachers with coded language. Asian and European countries respect older teachers. LAUSD underhandly waged a campaign against older teachers. Michelle Rhee is famous for firing teachers. What other professional field does this happen in ? New Orleans teachers loss their jobs because of a natural disaster ? Gates has much to reflect on.
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Gates to his shaving mirror: Mirror mirror on the wall, Who’s the smartest of them all?
Mirror: why you, Bill, of course!
The one way mirror
One way mirror
Little help
For finding error
In oneself
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“Asian and European countries respect older teachers. ”
Not accidentally: teaching is one of those professions where experience and maturity are necessary for mastery. For scientists, this is not necessarily the case, but for artists, musicians (if they survive past 30), it is.
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“Gates has much to reflect on.” Yes–I agree–he does…but he won’t.*
That was my point. It has been mentioned on this blog, before, that some believe Gates is on the spectrum. That having been said, it’s questionable as to his capacity for reflecting, for questioning, for having any appropriate feelings/empathy for what he has perpetrated.
Still, IMO (&, it would appear, in all of those who’ve commented here)that’s not a pass–&–what’s Melinda’s excuse?
They are the poster children for “I’ll do what’s best for MY kids, but all of the bad stuff (that we’ve been pedaling) is for ‘other people’s children.'”
I’m not disagreeing w/any of you above; I’m most certainly not defending him. He is a Villanthropist with a capital V. (Melinda, too.)
& yes to Akademos, below: “Wow, is he proving himself dim & myopic!”
*If he did, he would most certainly talk to Diane…& then would do a 180, just as she did.
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Wow, is he proving himself dim and myopic!
Common Core was doomed by misconception, lack of conception, refusal to properly consult and consider, refusal to perform due diligence, insane haste and totally backward implementation from start to finish — and it was finished from the start.
Probably exactly the same issues that must come up weekly now.
These aren’t idiots, but they are so, so far from great minds that what they are pretending to do is truly ridiculous and dangerous, as we’ve seen and lived through.
They should give up half or three quarters of their wealth to those who could and would earnestly and properly try to solve some of the real problems out there. And they could take up sudoku or something. Gates could play it competitively somehow with an AI robot, while Koch physically attacks the machine from behind, if it’s theater they want. Sadly, that’s about all they are capable of, theater and disaster.
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From Huffpo today-
Similar to Kaepernick’s act of conscience, a student refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance at a Florida public middle school. The situation with the teacher escalated leading to the student’s arrest. Reportedly, during the conflict the teacher asked a question related to the student going back to where he came from.
The school’s principal was the Florida Council of Instructional Technology Leaders’ “Innovative Principal of the Year for 2018”. According to the bio of the school’s academic dean, the dean has the attitude that all new innovations warrant a try by students. “We wouldn’t know if we didn’t try.”
From top down, it appears it is time for the school to focus on more important values than digital bells and whistles.
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Indeed. The district in which I teach insists on teaching coding classes for elementary students. But not social studies. So kids come to my geography class not knowing what the continents are (or even what a continent IS), what “U.S.” stands for, even where the U.S. is on a world map. But by dang, they know coding–in time for that to be obsolete by the time they’re grown.
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Nah, coding will not be obsolete, it’s just not part of basic culture all need to acquire, such as geography or the classics.
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What a putrid paean to a spoiled psycho.
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GREAT Book about Gates: The Educator and The Oligarch.
http://garnpress.com/garn-book-excerpts-the-educator-and-the-oligarch-a-teacher-challenges-the-gates-foundation/
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Thank you, Anthony Cody & Garn Press!
Anthony Cody’s George Orwell Award from NCTE:
2015
Anthony Cody
For his work, The Educator and the Oligarch, aims to set straight the myriad issues relating to education and education reform as it is told through the lens of the Gates Foundation. Many teachers generally criticize the Gates Foundation and its role in education, but this book critically analyzes specific examples regarding the Gates Foundation’s nuancing of the conversation around education. Using accessible, clear, and optimistic language, Cody presents a clear counter narrative for the public and anyone interested in the present and future arcs of public education in the United States to go beyond beginning in the quest to know what really might be best for systemic reforms in public education.
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Bill Gates is a brilliant person. He can point to truly astonishing accomplishments. But here’s what happens to successful, wealthy people, sometimes: they come to be surrounded by sycophants and yes men and women eager, above all, to tell the boss what he wants to hear.
I’m pretty certain that Mr. Gates has no notion how extraordinarily damaging, on the ground, his major education initiative has been. And he isn’t likely to take the time to sit and listen to someone knowledgeable enough to explain to him the damage that he has done, because that would take a LOT of time, for the devil is in the details.
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic], the high-stakes standardized testing, VAM and school grading and merit pay, have been disasters. Especially in ELA, the damage has been profound. But one cannot explain why and how this is the case in a soundbite, and it’s easier to stay in the echo chamber and listen to one’s praises being sung.
Diane, don’t expect that invitation very soon, but please, if it ever comes, invite me to join you. I need to talk to this guy about those “standards” and those tests and what’s wrong with them and what actually happens in classrooms and in educational publishing houses as a result of them. It’s shocking, really, and probably, to him, will be counterintuitive. But the damage that has been done to ELA, and to kids, is profound and demonstrable.
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I’m not serious about this. I think it about as likely to happen as, say, Trump announcing the cancellation of his stupid wall and a multi-billion-dollar aid campaign for Central and South American refugees. In some alternate universe. . . .
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Don’t mention that name tonight to me!
I just spent four hours on the phone with a Microsoft employee in the Philippines trying to get my “Word” program unlocked.
Without Word, I have no access to anything I have written.
I hoped to edit my book but access was denied.
A little note said I could reopen my account by signing up for a free month, then signing up for a year at $99.
I signed up.
I was denied a renewal.
I called Microsoft, went through at least 30 minutes of robots, then reached a lovely young woman. She took control of my screen, changed all my passwords, she too tried to reopen my Word program, and every time she got kicked out. After three and a half hours or more, I didn’t know whether to cry, scream, throw my computer against the wall, or curse out that billionaire. I decided to do the last. Three and a half lost hours and I finally got access to Word again.
I hate Microsoft. I had to forget the free month, and pay the $99 up front. I hate Microsoft.
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Exactly, Diane. Gates has created an alternate universe with inferior software and lured people in. Word is a joke, exactly of the same quality as CC and VAM.
But there is a software world that has been created by the public for the public which is free and it simply works.
Gates’s argument against free software has always been “but there is no professional support”. We have something much better, and you just described what professional Microsoft support really is.
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Apple has excellent support. When I call with a problem, I get a callback within five minutes from a knowledgeable person.
Microsoft has horrible support. The young woman was sweet and lovely. I could barely understand her. She asked my permission to take control of my computer and had free run of all my passwords for hours. Word—and only Word—was locked and deactivated. The screen said I could activate it by signing up for a free month subscription, after which I could then sign up for either $69 or $99. Each time I signed for a free month, my request was denied. Then I offered to pay the $69, and that was denied. At the end of a grueling session with the technician, I paid the $99 and that was accepted. Microsoft service is Big Brother.
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My husband traces the downfall of the American democratic experiment and the rise of the plutocrats to Bill Gates’ winning the decision that Microsoft was NOT a monopoly. He has a point.
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Ironically, the person at the Justice Department who prosecuted Microsoft was Joel Klein, who later as chancellor of schools in NYC received large grants from Gates Foundation.
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“Ironically” seems the wrong adverb. May I suggest “corruptly”?
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“Without Word, I have no access to anything I have written.
[…]I had to forget the free month, and pay the $99 up front. ”
There is a program called “LibreOffice” with which you can edit word documents and other MS Office files. It of course is free, so no registration, no key to enter before use, nothing, just open a file and edit it.
https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/who-are-we/
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Thanks. I will check it out.
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He isn’t brilliant. He was lucky. Listen to talk. You won’t hear brilliance. You won’t hear insight. You won’t hear empathy. You will hear a geek at play with the lives of other people.
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The speculation that he’s on the Asperger’s spectrum is believable.
I fault celebrities for perpetuating the myth about his “philanthropy”. Evidently, they don’t read exposés.
And, corporate-owned media conspire with the Gates’ PR machine.
History will condemn Bill Gates.
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“He was lucky.”
According to “Thinking fast and slow” by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, most CEOs who are considered successful, in fact, simply got lucky. A truly fascinating read, from cover to cover.
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“Bill Gates is a brilliant person.”
I think many doubt this, Bob. Unless you mean “brilliant in screwing other people over”., but only billionaires use the word “brilliant” in this context.
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Well, brilliance can work in many ways, for good and ill. Reworking DOS and creating a business based on that OS was prescient. Leveraging that OS monopoly to destroy competitors in the spreadsheet and word processing markets and get the world onto his products was pretty crafty. He’s one of the few who understands the role that meat-eating plays in global poverty and global warming and pollution–the calorie economics there. When people eat plants (legumes and grains), they get all the calories from those. When the feed crops to animals (corn, soybeans) and then eat the animals, 90 percent of those calories are lost–they went into the life processes of those animals. 90 percent!!!! Seventy percent of human land use is for agriculture. 70 percent of the crops grown are fed to animals. And then 90 percent of those calories are lost. It’s as though one left one’s tap running 24/7 because one wanted, occasionally, to stop by and wash one’s hands. Gates knows this, and he’s written about it. But most people don’t know this, and they don’t want to. Recent studies have shown that flying insect populations, worldwide, are down 75-85 percent over the past 40 years and numbers of wild vertebrate individuals have declined, on average, by 58 percent over about the same period. Most of this ongoing catastrophe is due to loss of habitat and to nitrogen run-off from fertilizers. Again, Gates knows this, and has written about it, but most people don’t want to.
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More erosion of American democracy at the hands of the tech oligarchy-
On Jan. 15, Tyra Mariani was named President and COO of New America. (The foundation was in the news last year after a charge that it fired staff who wrote a paper warning against the concentrated political, social and economic influence of tech monopolists.)
Mariani’s bio shows the following-She got her job at Chicago Public Schools through a Broad Residency program. She founded the Greater New Orleans Region of New Leaders and, was associated with New Leader principals in post Katrina New Orleans.
And, she also had a stint at McKinsey and Co., a firm in. the news last year for allegedly enabling authoritarian political regimes. McKinsey brags about its footprint in education.
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