Laura Chapman, intrepid researcher, reports on Bill Gates’ next adventure in education.
| comment |
Gates is not finished with meddling in public education. Far from it. In case you missed it, here is the new twist on how he will be spending money. In June of 2019, Alex Gangitano of The Hill reported “Bill and Melinda Gates launch lobbying shop.” The new Gates Policy initiative will lobby for the same issues as the foundation, including “ US education and outcomes for black, Latino and rural students specifically.” This will be 501(c)(4) initiative led by the current director of the Gates Foundation, Rob Nabors, who was White House director of legislative affairs for President Obama. According to Nabors, “the group” hopes to avoid giving to political groups, but will focus “almost exclusively on legislative outcomes and the lobbying effort.” According to Nabors, they hope to “accelerate outcomes” without getting too “wrapped up into broader political types of issues.” “They are interested in learning what works and what doesn’t work.” Nabors said the lobby shop will be using data the Gates foundation has collected from programs it has funded. Organizations designated as 501 (c) (4) are supposed to promote “social welfare” and may directly engage in some political activities. For details on the limits and advantages of the Gates 501(c)(4) tax structure, see https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/other-non-profits/life-cycle-of-a-social-welfare-organization. Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post noted that Gates has a long history of influencing legislation without having a lobby shop. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/06/19/bill-melinda-gates-have-spent-billions-drive-their-agenda-education-other-issues-now-they-have-created-lobbying-group-push-even-more/#comments-wrapper And there is ample evidence that Gates has failed with most of his education projects (from small high schools, to the Common Core, to identifying “effective” teachers) with many of these failed ventures the result of placing his foundation staff in the US Department of Education, and vice versa. Gates has launched a new method of trying to have his way. So far, there is very little news about this lobby shop dubbed the Policy Initiative. Nicholas Tampio, who has a higher education blog, has some ideas about Gates lobby shop, timing of the announcement, and why the initial focus may well be on post-secondary education. Tampio thinks the announcement of the lobby shop (in April) and a very low profile since then makes sense because Gates wants Congress to pass legislation that will do a triage on public university programs. See more of his reasoning at https://www.higheredjobs.com/articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=1988 I think Tampio is right about timing and initial focus. Gates has been pushing for legislation that will do a triage on publicly funded postsecondary programs, including four-year and graduate degree programs. He wants to see programs defunded, whither, and die if they produce a poor return on investment for students who complete them (or don’t, or take too long to complete them). In May 2019, Gates put together a “Postsecondary Value Commission” whose charge is “to define the value of postsecondary education in the US.” This 30-member commission includes Dr. Mark Schneider, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences USDE who was commissioner of the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and now has oversight of NCES. All members of the Commission are DC insiders or academics who know perfectly well that they will be tweaking recommendations and data points already in use or easy to get. The Commission’s work will be completed in June 2020. The efforts of the Commission will produce rankings of best economic value degrees and credentials. https://www.postsecondaryvalue.org/members/ This Postsecondary Value Commission is set up to push years of Gates-funded policy work, especially “A Blueprint for Better Information: Recommendations for a Federal Postsecondary Student-Level Data Network (2017). This is a summary of Gates-funded work since 2015, work that included 11 commissioned policy papers justifying specific “metrics” (p. 10) for tracking student’s personally identifiable information (PII). Data attached to PII are essential for linking progress from high school into postsecondary programs, completion of those programs, and ultimately to calculations of economic returns. Economic returns are tracked through IRS data, financial aid, loans and loan repayment rates, and measures of cost-effectiveness of online programs with “personalized” instruction versus course credits and seat time. http://www.ihep.org/research/publications/blueprint-better-information-recommendations-federal-postsecondary-student Specifically, the new Gates lobby shop may be able to influence the “College Transparency Act,” (S.800) co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and now in committee. Among other provisions, S.800 gives the Commissioner of National Center for Education Statistics extraordinary power to use databases that include student’s personally identifiable information (PII). The Act is rationalized as necessary to address the student loan crisis. It does nothing about that but S.800 does empower the Commissioner of NCES to appoint an “advisory committee” to oversee implementation of the College Transparency Act. I am confident that Gates would like to help populate that “advisory committee.” Moreover, if S. 800 passes, I am confident he would love to introduce amendments that would permanently allow federal agencies to use PII, cradle to career. Gates yearns for his free use of PII for linking data on education–conditions, “Interventions,” and outcomes of interventions–from infancy to workplace. He is a data guy. He thinks data should be the ONLY basis for judgments and policy formation. His ambition is far greater than his wisdom. He thinks he can and must “accelerate” change in education and his other ventures, he hopes to move fast and if he break things, he has already said that he will try something else. |
|---|
Laura H. Chapman
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A prominent plank of the Gates agenda for many years has been to persuade Congress to overturn the prohibition against the federal collection of personal data of all students, called the federal student-unit record system, a ban which has existed since the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, in 20 U.S.C. sec. 1001. Originally it was to be a data system that the government would collect on all children, birth through higher ed and beyond, but because of the organized and fierce opposition from parents, they now have appeared to settle for data collection for all higher ed students and beyond including IRS income data etc post graduation. For more on this see https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/federaldatasystem/ and https://postsecondary.gatesfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/PostsecondarySuccessAdvocacyPriorities2016.pdf Their best hope to achieve this is indeed the bill that Elizabeth Warren introduced, as Laura points out above, the College Transparency Act. Ironic because more lately Warren has adopted good privacy positions in her campaign literature. But one could only imagine how the feds under Trump or someone similar could misuse this data.
Thank you, Ms. Haimson, for your long-term attention to this extraordinarily important issue. If Gates got his way, here, this would be a major step toward Orwellian totalitarianism.
Ditto, thank you.
We live in frightening times of the billionaires designs. Not this. Just NOOOOOO!
Thanks, Laura, for posting the info. for readers to understand.
Barbarians at the gate won’t willingly leave. And, they are opportunistic in finding fellow exploiters, some of whom manipulate tribe members to secure cover and support.
A Gates initiative begun a few years ago-
Frontier Set, designed for higher ed, which disproportionately targeted the financially weaker HBCU’s. The program described a collaboration on curriculum and delivery.
Two state higher ed systems are part of it. The two major organizations representing public universities are also part of it.
Gates wants more personal data he can use to design more products he can sell. I am shocked, shocked, shocked, I tell you.
LOL.
Bill Gates also compared Trump to JFK
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/12/13/bill_gates_compares_trump_to_jfk_after_phone_conversation.html
Bill Gates also does not rule out voting for Trump if Democrats make him pay too much in taxes.
https://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-doesnt-rule-out-voting-for-trump-if-democrat-1839686670
Bird of a feather flock together. Why is Bill Gates letting Trump lead their flock?
Dysfunctional billionaires…I’d love to round them up and give them a big taste of their horrible “so-called” medicine.
The Emperor that unified China a couple of centuries before Christ was born dealt with people like Gates in a rather brutal way.
The 1st Emperor would have them all gathered together. His troops would force them to dig a huge mass grave. Don’t do what you were told, you’d die faster.
The grave would be filled with dry wood and set on fire while all those want-to-be powerful men like Bill Gates were forced to stay in the giant pit with the fire. Once the fire was over, the grave would be filled in. No markers. The word would spread. No one else would even attempt to medal in his government.
Gates also flew on convicted sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s plane and visited Epstein at his residences on several occasions, staying “late into the night” on one such occasion when Epstein was entertaining the former Miss Sweden and her 15 year old daughter.
The NY Times reported that Gates emailed colleagues about the meeting “A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late.”
People can draw their own conclusions.
Gates will sit on his perch in Valhalla where he can tinker with young lives. He will use his money and influence make the curricula of state schools more relevant to the job market. Liberal arts degrees do not provide enough value add to the degrees of middle class children in Gates’s world view. He will be pushing STEM degrees in these schools. It sounds like social engineering to me. http://theconversation.com/gates-launches-lobbying-arm-higher-education-on-agenda-119077
Gates will never reach Valhalla. Once he is judged by the only Judge, he will end up dying twice.
I am a child of a blue collar family. If Gates had been calling the shots, I probably would not have been able to have majored in French. I taught French for four years. I also got a master’s in TESOL. Lucky for me, I was hired in a school district to teach ESL which was my dream job. I got the job because my district had numerous Haitian students, and my language background helped me communicate with parents and newcomers.
Daily Kos has an article about the University of Cincinnati- “How Privatization Corrupts Public Universities”, the title starts with the words, “Boldly Bankrupt”.
Thanks for the post. I taugt at that university for seven years. Instead of taking an earned sabbatical, I resigned from a tenured full professorship. It had become clear that the university was going to chase producers of cash and cut programs in the arts and humanities. There is a token certification for art majors who want to teach. Everything is about entrepreneurship, faux partnerships, demands that the “creativity” of fine arts majors be linked to their jobs and income after graduation The “Boldly” in the Daily Koz article refers to the current fundraising campaign.
Activism originating from DAAP… may it grow and take over every department and college in the PUBLIC University of Cincinnati.
All your base are belong to us. –The creed of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Sanders may have Warren’s idea of a wealth tax in the back of his mind.
Actually, I think a stupidity tax would raise more money. Tax billionaires based on the stupid ideas they have had and imposed on the public. Common Core alone could raise hundreds of billions a year as long as it remains in existence (even in states where the name has been changed to something else to avoid criticism)
A stupidity tax would reach more people than a wealth tax but it wouldn’t raise as much revenue.
It could be a progressive tax so that the rate was highest for those whose stupidity ended up costing the public the most.
I think Bill Gates would owe about $300 billion for Common Core alone.
Maybe he could borrow from his friends Jeff Bezos and Jeffrey Epstein to cover the tax. Oops, nix the second Jeffrey, who has been incapacitated (at least temporarily)
Gates: Stack rank everyone
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping-2/
Stay away from Gates and his awful, shabby products. Gates is @%#&.
Use “Open Office” not gates’ Word. Open Office is free and compatible with Word and Pages.
Gates is a cancer.
I predict Gates won’t last much longer.
He looks like a Zombie.
Thinks like one too.
Maybe this is why he wants to accelerate things: he wants the fruits of his “work”. If all goes well, Bernie will manage to put him behind bars.
Btw, what is Sander’s exact plan to get rid off billionaires? Because he does say, they shouldn’t exist.
Ballancing the Budget”
A “stupid” tax could raise us lots
On stupid plans and stupid plots
Of billionaires, with mega bucks
A taxing boon, like sitting ducks
A taxing boon on sitting ducks
Forget about Windows, too. Use Linux. It’s free.
I wonder if Warren got snookered into this. It’s a bit off-brand for her.
I think not. She is pursuing this AS IF it will address the student loan crisis. She has not been attentive to the implications of thinking about postsecondary education beyond “economic return on investment.” It is no secret that studies in the arts and humanities, and social welfare services, and education are choices not usually driven by the hope of making big money. She is correct in wanting to address student loan debt, but this effort does not do that. It functions as if a premptive triage discouraging enrollments in low ROI programs. It ignores labor market conditions that are never predicted more than ten years ahead. It reflects some very narrow thinking about the value of education.
I wonder what people say to this: in the countries in Europe I know about, there is no liberal arts education, there are no gened classes. People go to college to prepare for a job. The “wider” education of the people is assumed to happen in the first 12 grades.
Sympathy for DeVos. She was born a billionaire. She’s never been expected to solve a problem. Her sympathies lie with the lenders not students
ROBERT’S RULE: If you are wondering whether a new policy, procedure, technology, law, regulation, or system is a good idea, just think of the worst person at the worst time in the future wielding its power.
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/21/roberts-rule/
Robert’s rule of power”
Robert’s rule of power:
Think about the worst
Think about the Tower
Trump is but the first
You said it better than I, SomeDAM!
I am but a channel
For wisdom of the teachers
A Diane Ravitch panel
That lurks beneath the bleachers
SDP, don’t give any ideas to Gates. What you are describing is a poet machine that takes the input of a group of people and produces poems. On second thought, I may want to sell this idea to Gates so that I can pay for my kids’ college. So just sit where you are.
What makes you think
That I am not
A poet spitting poetbot?
Whose klank and klink
Is like a tool
A poetbot, you silly fool
Excuse me for thinking, you are human. Is the programmer who created you, human?
“He wants to see programs defunded, whither, and die if they produce a poor return on investment for students who complete them (or don’t, or take too long to complete them).
VAM-ming is coming to higher ed and it will be on steroids:
Data attached to PII are essential for linking progress from high school into postsecondary programs, completion of those programs, and ultimately to calculations of economic returns. Economic returns are tracked through IRS data, financial aid, loans and loan repayment rates, and measures of cost-effectiveness of online programs with “personalized” instruction versus course credits and seat time.
So, Máté, other than you, where are the university mathematicians who are going to stand up against VAM and expose the fraud that it is?
So far, we have heard only crickets from statisticians and other mathematicians at places like Harvard, where Chetty produced his much touted (Chetty picked ) VAM study.
First they VAMmed the k-12 teachers , but I was not a k-12 teacher, so I did not speak out.
……..
Then they VAMmed me.
That’s the question, SDP. I have no answer, though I suspect, few profs thought it was their job to intervene.
It seems to me, one of the problems is that profs think, VAM needs to be studied scientifically and criticized as if it was a scientific work in order for them to be involved. But there is no reason to jump to the conclusion that VAM has anything to do with science. VAM should have and could have been stopped before it had entered “scientific” circles. VAM has never got to the level of science:
1) It was proposed and implemented as a method to evaluate teachers without any previous human experiments.
2) The actual connection between the concepts used in VAM and its real life application to human experiments has never been properly described.
All a scientist officially can say is “I don’t see myself wasting time to evaluate an idea which has never even rose to the precision level of a theory which then would be appropriate for scientific study.”
I think the only reason the American Statistics Association published a study on VAM was because of political pressure. The proper reaction of scientists should have been to write a letter to Obama where they would have explained 1) and 2) above and stated that they were outraged that a child experiment such as CC together with VAM was allowed to be conducted in this country. Normally, ethically much less objectionable experiments are halted in scientific circles. A 1000 signatures on such a letter from the most prominent social, natural scientists and statisticians would have made an impact. The ASA report was polite, since that’s what a scientific paper is supposed to be, and hence it had no teeth to make a noticeable mark on politics.
Now that public universities will likely be VAMmed (I see signs of already), profs might write “the” letter. But who knows? Gates and the other billionaires shell out grants to profs left and right. Plus, sending a letter to Trump is like throwing it in the fire after sealing it.
A letter to Trump
Addressed to “Dump”
“Dispose of VAM”
“It’s just a sham”
But mail’s returned
Cuz Trump ain’t there
The “Dump” address
Is Tony Blair
But Trump’s address
Is “Ref-fuse One”
A giant mess
Which weighs a ton
Well, how do we get rid of all the VAM garbage? VAM disposal stations? But that stuff should never be recycled and if we burn it, it pollutes our planet. Hm. Take the VAMage to the Moon along with those who littered with them?
Shoot the VAM into the SUN along with the vammers behind the scheme.
How hot is the Sun? The temperature at the surface of the Sun is about 10,000 Fahrenheit (5,600 Celsius). The temperature rises from the surface of the Sun inward towards the very hot center of the Sun where it reaches about 27,000,000 Fahrenheit (15,000,000 Celsius).
“The Act is rationalized as necessary to address the student loan crisis. It does nothing about that but S.800 does empower the Commissioner of NCES to appoint an “advisory committee” to oversee implementation of the College Transparency Act.”
Warren must know this.
From Tampio’s article
“Sad to say,” Carnevale explains, this disruption “could be brutally efficient for higher education. Industry change is almost always about what’s next, not what’s best for the workers and institutions directly affected. Just ask an auto worker.”
Many colleges and universities are economic anchors, cultural centers and sources of community pride. I believe the “brutally efficient” disruption of those institutions could spark more public backlash than the Gateses expect.
So Tampio frames this as part of the Disruptor movement Diane’s book is about.
“He is a data guy. He thinks data should be the ONLY basis for judgments and policy formation.”
I think Gates is a data guy only when it comes to decide what should happen to other people, especially if they are Latino or African American. Does anybody believe that he is datadriven when it comes to his own kids? Do his kids participated in Common Core?
Gates fashions himself as data-driven, when what he really is is a data driver, driving the data wherever he is going (to Hell?)
“Data driven”
They never are given
A chance to decide
When data are driven —
Along for the ride.
“Data driver Bill”
When data are driven
Driven to Hell
He’ll ne’r be forgiven
As near I can tell
Good point. Gates is a data driver, screwing it up in our ….
“Driving Miss Crazy”
Standards drive the testing
And testing drives the teaching
And teaching drives divesting
From outcomes worth the reaching
Future Ed, housed at Georgetown University, published Chester Finn’s pro-testing article and, articles criticizing Diane and Bernie. The make-up of Future Ed’s advisory board and, the organization’s location in D.C. at the nations’s oldest Catholic university gels for me, the combined dangers of neoliberal and GOP authoritarian rule.
IMO, Georgetown’s shared spotlight with Stanford and harvard in the admissions scandal is a wake-up call to the threat.
Linda wrote, “Georgetown’s shared spotlight with Stanford and harvard in the admissions scandal is a wake-up call to the threat”
Who received the bribes, individuals that worked for the universities or the universities?
“Thirty-three parents of college applicants are accused of paying more than $25 million between 2011 and 2018 to William Rick Singer, organizer of the scheme, who used part of the money to fraudulently inflate entrance exam test scores and bribe college officials.”
“A total of 20 people have now pleaded guilty in the case, which also indicts Loughlin, of Full House fame, and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli. Loughlin, 54, and Giannulli, 55, have pleaded not guilty to charges that they bribed athletic officials at the University of Southern California to get both of their daughters, who do not row, admitted to the school as crew recruits.” …
“Fifty people have been charged in the scheme, which prosecutors say ran from 2011 until 2019. Sports coaches and professionals from multiple universities were indicted, along with SAT and ACT examination administrators and employees from a college counseling and preparation business.”
https://time.com/5549921/college-admissions-bribery-scandal/
Those charged had to have known that legit donations would buy entrance to private schools. Jared Kushner’s dad did. Their motives are the same as the deformers’ deceits -it’s the draw of duplicity in taking advantage of others …of a cagey theft from the deserving.