The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued an annual report called the “Goalskeepers Report 2019,” signed by Bill & Melinda Gates.
The theme is “Examining Inequality.”
It is a useful compilation of data about inequality from around the world, focused mainly on Africa.
There are two things that really bother me, however.
First of all, Bill Gates has never admitted or apologized for the damage he has done to American education by his munificent support for high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, Common Core, and charter schools. His initiatives have wreaked havoc, demoralized teachers, harmed schools and communities, and he never says “I was wrong.”
The second thing that bothers me is that I do not believe that Bill & Melinda Gates wrote the report to which they affixed their names. It is unethical to claim authorship of something you did not write yourself.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Gates has NO SUBSTANCE. He’s a w*****. no matter how hard he tries … and by using others’ too.
Why, does the software industry release BAD software? Ask Gates.
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Diane I opened the site, but then didn’t read it because I didn’t want to agree with the cookie warning.
But about the ethics of affixing one’s name to someone else’s writing: In one sense, it’s like the president (any president) who uses a speechwriter, and yet it’s their own speech or writing. It’s just how a differentiation of functions works in a complex situation, like a government or a corporation; and they have to sign off, so to speak, speaking for the company as a whole, and claim at least agreement with the ideas in the speech or writing. In this case, good writing becomes a pretty screen for the autocrat’s arrogance and ignorance that it runs interference for.
On the other hand, Gates has victimized himself with his history of applying well-funded amateur ignorance. He seems to think: I CAN fund it, therefore I am qualified to do it. THE BIG NEWS: It Doesn’t Work–money has never been, and never will be, an equivalent of intelligence. CBK
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Everyone understands that letters and reports and speeches by politicians usually are ghost written. I see no purpose in Bill & Melinda signing their names to a report they didn’t write.
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dianeravitch In either case of politicians or ceo/philanthropist/oligarchs, it’s a talk-the-talk and/or walk-the-walk thing. CBK
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Not only is there no purpose to it, it’s of a piece with this Gates couple loftily addressing the world annually as if our President(s) in a State of the Union message. Galling.
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The Gates Floundation was heavily criticized recently for giving an award to rightwing extremist Modi of India. They awarded him for his program of publicly shaming people who defecate in public, completely ignoring human rights violations. It was like giving Trump an award for shaming people who golf while bibulous on Twitter. It’s just one of the problems with Gates: not able to see the big picture. And of course, the obsession with data analytics and surveillance is ever present too.
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And in this report, Gates praises the human rights abusing, autocratic government of China for turning its society into a capitalist den of iniquity and greenhouse gases.
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Should Bill and Melinda become concerned about inequality, they could feed the hungry, house the homeless and revolutionize the corporate tax structure. Until then, spare me their report. Teaching in Passaic, Paterson and Newark has afforded me a close up look at poverty.
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Abigail,
You are so right.
I am reminded of a line from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays where he chides reformers who are exercised about injustices 3,000 miles away but ignore the injustices in their own town.
Bill Gates could easily fund health clinics in every city in America.
He could lobby Congress to raise his taxes.
He could lobby the Washington State Legislature to impose corporate and income taxes.
His concern is not for poverty in his own back yard.
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What do you have against the homeless and hungry? The last thing Gates needs to do it get involved in another “cause”. Revolutionize the corporate tax structure? Now you’re talking. If Gates is truly committed to doing good in the world, the only way for him to do so is to pay his (and Microsoft’s taxes.
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Signing the report was PR, nothing more.
Speculating, Bill and Melinda are opposed to worker associations, are pro oligarchy, and like others of that ideology i.e. Robert and Rebekah Mercer and Charles Koch, they believe public schools inculcate socialism in students. That’s why Bill doesn’t say he’s wrong.
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If Bill and Melinda really want to make a difference, they should use their brilliance and money to fight climate change as this is the most existential threat of our time. Many of the Central Americans heading our way are climate refugees as are many Africans that are trying to enter Europe.
While this article acknowledges the great inequalities among various people, the irony is that the privatization that the Gates support creates greater inequality and increased segregation. Creating separate and unequal schools should never be a national goal. We should be supporting inclusion, integration and equity to provide increased access to opportunities for our diverse students. It is time for these two billionaires to do some honest self reflection.
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One of the most well established correlative characteristics of successful businessmen is secrecy about their plans/agenda.
If an anti-socialism ideology drives Gates’ venture philanthropy, he won’t be signing a report that says that.
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retired teacher “It is time for these two billionaires to do some honest self reflection.” First, they will have to understand their own service to two conflicting “masters”: (1) Do good and (2) sell technology, not necessarily in that order. CBK
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I don’t find it at all ironic that the policies of the owner and former CEO of a company (Microsoft) formerly (and formally) charged by the US justice department with engaging in illegal monopolistic practices would increase inequality.
That’s what monopoly is all about.
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People like the Gates don’t reflect much. They appropriate!
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I thought VAMpires didn’t even have a reflection
And even if they did, it’s hard to self reflect if all you have is a one way mirror.
Self-reflection
One way mirror
Little help
For finding error
In oneself
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Who appointed Bill and Melinda the “Goalskeepers” (sick)?
Judging by the fact that they keep getting richer every year despite their pledge to give away all their money (except for millions for their children, of course, cuz you know, how could they ever survive if they actually had to work for a living?), I’d have to say Goldkeepers is much more apt.
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Great catch. The Gates have appointed themselves the Umpires of the World.
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If they are honestly keeping score, Id have to say that it’s teachers 100, Gates 0 at this point.
But of course, it will be at least (another) ten years before we know (for sure (sort of)) whether their education “stuff” worked.
I have always been impressed by Bill’s intimate familiarity with the arcane jargon of education, haven’t you?
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Gates keeps restarting the countdown clock on that 10-year stuff
When did he make the prediction?
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When he said it is pretty much irrelevant because he never even defined what he meant by “worked”.
“When I use a word like ‘worked’ “, Bill said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more not less”
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Bill said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more not less”
Another arrogant turd with too much money and power. What does an arrogant turd look like? ANSWER: Every billionaire using their money to subvert the country and the world and mold it into what they want it to be.
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Gates’ giving pledge has a timepiece that runs counter clockwise. Venture villainthropy accrues instead of depleting.
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ill tell ya who appointed them the cash 90 billion of them
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Umpires and VAMpires
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When Umpires are VAMpires
The game is for blood
And firings and “re-tires”
Are lost in the flood
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OK. I’m going to talk out of school.
I’ve been a writer and editor for most of my adult life. For several years, I worked as a freelance substantive editor and ghostwriter for a major US publisher, and in that capacity, I edited (and often dramatically rewrote) books by many of the country’s leading public intellectuals. And one thing I can tell you, based on this experience, is that EVERYONE needs a good editor. We all do. It’s easy to overlook errors in one’s own work because one stops seeing the familiar.
Those who haven’t spent a lot of time in the book business might be surprised at how dramatically, for the most part, the work that ends up in print differs from the one initially submitted to the publisher. That person who gets a brief mention in a book’s acknowledgements is often the one who did much of the heavy lifting. In the book business, there are a lot of unsung heroes.
So, let’s talk about Diane Ravitch.
I have been fortunate enough to have a gander, a few times, at manuscripts by Diane before these were seen by most others, and the really shocking thing about her writing is how clean it always is from the outset. She writes extraordinarily well. Her writing is extraordinarily well organized and well informed. She can turn a great phrase. She has a superb sense of narrative structure–of how to begin and end a piece interestingly, of how to elaborate an idea and make an argument. She doesn’t waste words. She uses simple, unpretentious vocabulary. She doesn’t say more than is necessary but, importantly, also doesn’t say less. In other words, she has the integrity to spell out the complex argument when that’s what’s required in order for the reader actually to understand what she’s writing about. (Explanations should be as simple as possible BUT NOT SIMPLER.) She writes with humor and intelligence and draws upon an extraordinarily well-stocked mind, and her command of grammar, usage, and mechanics places her in the 99th percentile among professional writers. And finally, she writes and rewrites and rewrites. (Ansel Adams once said that the secret to his photography was what he threw away.) In other words, she understands that great writing is typically great revision.
So, when Diane Ravitch signs off on something she’s written, yes, it is hers. If you haven’t worked on the editorial side of publishing, you probably don’t have a good sense of how very rare that is.
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What you describe is the difference between a scholar and a pretender.
BTW, I always seem to do my best editing after I hit send.
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I always seem to do my best editing after I hit send. Oh, yes!!! Me, too!!!
WordPress, give us an Edit button!!!!
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I always do my best editing after a few beers.
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“WordPress, give us an Edit button!!!”
YES!!!!!!
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Actually,I think the typos add flavor.
And sometimes selfcorrect produces some very funny stuff.
With an edit button, all of that would be gone without a trace.
Also, sometimes it’s informative to see the thought process and in particular changes in the thought process.
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Bob, what a beautiful commentary! And how fortunate I was that you selflessly volunteered your time to edit my new book. How many times did we trade chapters at 1 am? Or 3 am? Who would believe that with all this arduous work on your part, we have never met? The book will be published on January 21, 2020. The publisher has thus far lined up events in Brooklyn, Boston, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. If anyone has the outreach to create other events, contact Lucy Nalen At Knopf. Her email is lnalen@penguinrandomhouse.com
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I was just talking to a public school parent about creating a panel about what’s going on with education in Tulsa. We have a Broad trained superintendent (Deborah Gist) and seem to be moving toward a portfolio district with great support from local philanthropists. We also have a Gates VA teacher evaluation. I would love to have you as a keynote speaker in January. I wrote to your publicist. How much do you charge?
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BJC,
Don’t invite me to speak. Give every Tulsa board member a copy of my new book SLAYING GOLIATH, which will be officially published on January 21. I demonstrate and document the utter failure of VAM, charter schools, vouchers. The entire faux “Reform” effort has only one purpose: DISRUPTION. It has not improved any school district in the nation after 20 years and billions of dollars wasted.
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I’ve been carrying around a quote by a very smart woman I know, named Diane. I have it in my plan book at school just in case I need it. I found it with all of my other stuff from last June, left down in my 160-year-old basement, a place where not many people venture. I made sure I found the paper when I went back to class a few weeks ago. (I hope I’ve transcribed the quote correctly. Sorry if I haven’t) The paper is folded, frayed…it looks somewhat beaten up (like the way I feel after 32 years teaching.)
“…teachers can’t teach children how to think critically if they are not allowed to think critically. They can’t teach freedom of speech if they are not allowed it.”
Bill Gates might be powerful and rich. But he has acted like a boss, not a leader. Just like Trump is not a leader. So many people today are confusing the two ideas..
Leaders can handle dissent. They encourage free speech and critical thinking. They can bring people together. And, leaders are able to admit when they have made mistakes.
Schools are not businesses. And, therein lies one of the fundamental mistakes of so many of the alleged school “reformers”: applying a business model to schools, to our children. It’s been a tragic error that’s hurting our kids and our nation..
I’m really looking forward to the 2020s…a fresh decade that will hopefully bring a new course for the United States.
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Beautifully said, John. Amen to this!
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Thanks, Bob.
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Well stated!
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Bill Gates never says, “I was wrong.”
Donald Trump never says, “I was wrong.”
“Yes, Bill Gates really compared Donald Trump to JFK — and said Trump could help education”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/11/yes-bill-gates-really-compared-donald-trump-to-jfk-and-said-trump-could-help-education/
I think that the only differences between Bill Gates and Donald Trump is that Bill Gates doesn’t sent out tweets early in the morning to attack and troll any individual that criticizes him, and Gates has a better PR-propaganda team, and he listens to their advice (smart people that know what the boss wants to hear) for creating a fake image that Bill Gates is a “saint”.
Who is more dangerous: Bill Gates or Donald Trump?
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The world desperately needs good toilets. I am very, very happy that Mr. Gates has put his considerable resources behind this. I do wish that he could grok how damaging his promotion of the Common [sic] Core [sic] and of high-stakes standardized testing has been for US K-12 education–how much these things have distorted pedagogy and curricula and prevented real innovation in both. That’s very, very sad, indeed, and it’s difficult for many of us not to be extremely angry with him as a result. He has almost single-handedly destroyed K-12 English language arts education in the United States and is clueless about his role in doing that.
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Gates and David Coleman and Jason Zumba and other deformers never admit they were wrong.
They always just claim their policies were poorly implemented.
In other words, “someone else screwed up, not I”
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Trying to answer the question of who’s more dangerous, Gates or Trump, I stumbled on an idea. Gates will love it. Stacked ranking of billionaires. We give billionaires an annual multiple choice test on emotional intelligence. Plugging the scores into a VAM algorithm, we rate them in categories: humane, human, inhumane, and inhuman. Every year, we take away all the assets of the bottom 16% and give a merit bonus of five dollars each to the top 16%. Meritocracy! Everyone wins. Except those who don’t.
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Now that’s “social justice!”
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Great idea but we have to “Go Postal” and burn down most of our cities to make it happen.
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Although “inhuman” covers it, I think we need an explicit category for “NOMAD” (flawed, imperfect robots who believe they are perfect) when it comes to people like Gates.
https://youtu.be/G6o881n35GU
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I used to post that in response to the “Virginia SGP ” nitwit who used to post about VAM here.
Like Gates, it fit him perfectly.
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He didn’t invent DOS either.
>
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He didn’t invent Disk Operating System, but may very well have invented Denial Of Service.
Back when I had a Windows PC, I got denied service on a daily basis every time the system crashed.
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I and millions of others who were ” lucky” enough to have a Windows PC.
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“All lives have equal worth”
Every life has equal worth
To billionaires like me:
Consumers all, to death from birth
Who pay an OS fee
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They call us human capital, like they own us, like we’re livestock.
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I think you just revealed how “they,” [that think they are gods and we should worship them] most of the upper one-tenth of one percent, think about all of us working-class people that live in poverty or in the middle class.
Their (those fake gods) perception of the upper ten-percent might be slightly different like we will let them have money because they are our hammer to keep the rest of the working class under control.
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It’s no accident that the VAM system that was so widely used on teachers (and pushed by people like Bill Gates and economists William Sanders, Eric Hanushek, Raj Chetty et al was originally designed (by economist William Sanders) to gauge the effect of different factors (eg, feed) on the growth of livestock.
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“Human capital husbandry”
“Human capital husbandry”
What it’s all about
Collecting super-humans
Geniuses no doubt
Selecting chosen assets
Rejecting all the rest
Johnny’s good at singing?
It isn’t on the test
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The report is fascinating.
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Thomas Piketty pretty much laid it all out several years ago with facts and figures that Gates can only dream of understanding.
Gates is just concerned about the pitchforks at this point.
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Who knows? It’s impossible to get “Inside the Mind” of such a person, despite documentaries made by court singers.
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I suspect that Mr. Gates understands Mr. Piketty pretty well. We are headed for a crisis. The enormous bifurcation of wealth and income will have extreme consequences.
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Someone should look at that report with an eye toward plagiarism.
I bet they would find it.
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The Goalkeeper Report is part of an effort established by Bill Gates, called the Council of Global Philanthropy.
I have poked around the website of the Council of Global Philanthropy https://www.cof.org/topic/global-grantmaking and concluded that this organization has been set up to facilitate “social impact investing” on a global scale.
I was dumbstruck to see the Greater Cincinnati Foundation contributing to a “field guide to guide impact investing.” https://www.cof.org/content/impact-investing
I have also poked around the website for the Goalkeepers Report. In a section called “Accelerators,” I learn about a “Room to Read” program with four “Partners.”
One is “Credit Suisse with a link that tells you about social impact investments.
There are projects posted at the wensite. An early project managed by the Brookings Institution focused on “metrics to measure learning.” If you are at all familiar with “social impact investing,” you know that payoffs to investors are based on respectable proofs of “impact” based on metrics.
Here is a link to a third and final report of the “measure learning” effort managed by the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution with participation by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/global_111516_lmtf.pdf
The Goalkeepers Report is a global version of the Gates effort to organize “philanthropists” in the US for “collective impact.”
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