Why do so many billionaires think that it is their responsibility to redesign education? I, personally, would prefer to see them spend their time figuring out how to reduce poverty, how to provide medical care in low-income communities, how to provide affordable housing for all. But they don’t ask me.
Chalkbeat reported recently that three of our biggest billionaires are combining forces to discover “breakthroughs” in education. As usual, the billionaires—Gates, Walton, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative—assume that they will discover a magic trick that solves all problems. Like the Common Core, which David Coleman and Bill Gates believed would raise test scores and close all achievement gaps. They assumed that standardization of curriculum, standards, tests, and teacher training would produce high test scores for all students. Except it didn’t.
Matt Barnum wrote:
Three of the biggest names in education philanthropy have teamed up to fund a new organization aimed at dramatically improving outcomes for Black, Latino, and low-income students.
The Advanced Education Research & Development Fund, announced Wednesday, is already funded to the eye-popping tune of $200 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Walton Family Foundation. (Gates and Walton are also supporters of Chalkbeat.)
AERDF (pronounced AIR-dif) says its focus will be on what it calls “inclusive R&D,” or bringing together people with different expertise, including educators, to design and test practical ideas like improving assessments and making math classes more effective. Still, the ideas will have “moonshot ambitions,” said the group’s CEO Stacey Childress.
“One of our mottos for our program teams and the projects they fund is ‘heads in clouds and boots on the ground,’” she said.
It’s an unusually well-funded start for a new education organization, especially as big education funders have seen their influence wane in recent years after some of their ideas showed uneven results and prompted backlash. AERDF suggests these funders still have significant ambitions for improving education in the U.S., even if those efforts are less splashy — or controversial — than they once were.
The organization emerged from work that began in 2018, when CZI and Gates teamed up to invest in R&D. That resulted in a project known as EF+Math, which funds efforts to embed lessons in executive functioning — a set of cognitive skills related to self control and memory — into math classes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are tens of ed reform orgs.
Public schools need their own orgs.
What would a think tank that actually valued public schools AS PUBLIC SCHOOLS and not as edu-product delivery systems come up with and what would we try?
All public school policy shouldn’t come out of an echo chamber that doesn’t value public schools and would just as soon replace them all with private contractors.
Private schools don’t go looking for advice from people who are opposed to private schools. Charter schools don’t either. Why should public schools?
Are the families who attend public schools really onboard with 3 billionaires directing what goes on in them? Can we offer them an alternative to the echo chamber?
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OMG, did they even bother to consult the research that would tell them what the real problems are (poverty, vastly unequal funding, etc.)? This is the research that has been used by Finland and others to create excellence in their systems. Maybe they should give it a whirl.
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Two out of those three aren’t trying to support public education — they are trying to im<,/b>port public education onto their own delivery platforms, and of course the mainscream corpulent mediacracy is all gung-ho for that.
The other one just want to destroy non-corporate public education because a non-brainwash populace gets in the way of their will to power.
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They have ulterior motives with regard to their investments as you mention. They are not focusing on students’ needs. They are focusing on how they can use their preconceived notions such as “online learning” or “executive functioning” and apply them to poor students. Anyone that seeks to improve education must start with student needs, not assessments or delivery systems. As long as they ignore the social and emotional needs of poor students, they will be wasting their money.
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exact statement: They are trying to import pubic education onto their own delivery platforms. ChaCHING.
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Arg, please edit the bad bold tag.
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Why don’t these billionaires use all their wealth and power to campaign for universal health care, a national health care system, like all the other advanced democracies. But no, they are using all their billions to destroy our universal education care system. K-12 education is free and open to all, rich or poor, it needs support not the equivalent of educational Trojan horses to undermine the real public schools.
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There’s nothing new under the sun. The billionaires want more tests, tests all year long, tests all the time, so that they can have yet more profitable data to surveil and profile young Americans. There is no way to make the test results seem uplifting instead of degrading. There is no way to make standardized tests useful for teachers. This is merely computerized CBE, competency-based education, repackaged again. It’s called R & D instead of research because they’re developing products to sell and make money. To Gates, Zuckerberg, and the Waltons, schools are labs and students are rats. It’s bad enough when billionaires buy rockets to fly themselves into the stratosphere; the “moonshot” fantasy world they inhabit causes them to keep their heads in the clouds and their boots on everyone else’s throats. Criminal.
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Well said. The billionaires are bullies with weaponized wealth.
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I, personally, would prefer to see them spend their time figuring out how to corral the death and destruction machine that is the military industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned 60 years ago. . .
. . . but that ain’t happening as they probably make too much jack “supplying the army with its tools of trade.”
Or even better spending their money to help eliminate that specious mode of thinking so peculiar to Homo Supposedly Sapiens-god worship, faith belief nonsense.
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How much will it take to buy a university’s education department in which the following “revelations” are made by well-paid “scholars” after copious “research”:
Children who attend $50,000/year private schools with very small classes generally do well in school.
Children in affluent communities who attend well-funded public schools – often with experienced union teachers – generally do well in school.
Children in poverty stricken areas more often struggle in school, especially when their families are coping with not having the same easy access to healthcare, dental and eye care, food, homes, technology, and expensive individual tutors, therapists and other resources when their kids struggle academically. However, not every low-income student faces the same educational challenges and the ones that don’t face those challenges can do well in public schools despite their schools not have the resources of the private and affluent public schools that serve children who don’t have those economic challenges..
Some of the low-income children who don’t face those challenges and are able to learn in public schools will also be able to learn in charter schools and in private schools that are exclusively for children who don’t struggle academically, because those schools will not allow those students to remain if they do struggle academically.
Conclusion by people who would never get a job in ed reform because they have a sense of morality and integrity: Therefore we need to make sure the families living in poverty have all the same resources that the families in those affluent schools have and aren’t in distress because of food, medicine, housing and income insecurity. We need to make sure all students have access to the small class sizes and education resources that the children from families who are financially secure have.
Conclusion by the “researchers” funded by Gates/Walton/Zuckerberg: We need to establish more schools that cherry pick the poor kids that would also do well in public schools and toss the rest like they are garbage!
The conclusion of this is already preordained. It is like the Republicans hiring paid researchers to see how to stop the pandemic, and the only acceptable conclusion is to have all restrictions and mandates banned and everything open for business. With those of privilege given medical treatment that is entirely different than what their paid “scholar” shills will advocate for the rest.
Maybe these guys can hire Emily Oster.
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Ahem, the problems won’t be solved by the same
name-calling, tutelage, coulda/woulda/shoulda,
“strategy”, that has yet to stop them.
If not now, when will it be evident? Using
the same strategy, again and again, and expecting
different results, is …..
Year after year, running over the same old ground,
what have we found?
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Billionaire “reform” goes round and round,
Products, schemes and destruction bound.
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Great point! Yes, round and round. So we will continue to point out the bs WHILE we try to find a solution. But guess what? Sadly us mere mortals haven’t found a solution yet bc 1/we are no match for these aholes and 2/everyone is bought and sold. Honestly, I hate when ppl are like, “stop complaining and find a solution.” I even saw the word “solutionary” which I hate almost as much as “disrupt.” We will continue to fuss AND fight, and I will continue to point out the bs and I reserve the right to bemoan and b*tch about it. Truly, it is NOT our job to “solve” everything, fair wages, etc etc. These are a given in most countries around the world. But we WILL continue to try. I’m gonna keep being outraged and scream and complain as much as I want to, while trying to fight this uphill battle.
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On a somewhat related note, another study by elite economists, from Wharton in this case, is being promoted by The 74 – that should tell you something (Hmm, did they finance the study? https://www.the74million.org/about/ ) – has concluded that pandemic era “learning loss” “will be a drag on the future GDP of the United States for decades in the future.”
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/5/17/covid-school-closures-long-run-effects
I’m no economist but even I can spot some of their rather suspect methodological assumptions. Chetty, et al, redux anyone?
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Anything from an “elite economist” should be examined carefully. They look at issues in an economic vacuum. They know nothing about teaching and learning or the resilience of the human mind.
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You have an excellent BS meter, Sally. This is just another of the pseudoscientific justifications for Ed Deform put out onto the media waters from time to time by the neoliberal oligarchy that wants to end public schooling and replace the teaching of most children with depersonalized education software for the proles.
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Yup. But because it’s from Wharton (or Harvard or Stanford or JHU etc.) it has instant credibility and will be reported by the NYT, WAPO, WSJ, and NPR.
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WTAF?! This is the first time for me seeing these jerks actually attempting to tie learning loss to GDP. Bc our students are just widgets and market share. I’m just dumbfounded, but never surprised. The 74 is sooo gross. Thank you for sharing this! Will definitely be sharing on.
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Once again, no one from a public school is in leadership:
https://www.aerdf.org/about-us/
They must deliberately exclude public schools because there are so many more public schools than there are charter schools they really have to WORK to make sure they never hire anyone who ran one.
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No one from a public school here either:
Jim Shelton, Chief Investment and Impact Partner, Blue Meridian Partners
Lisette Nieves, President, Fund for the City of New York
Bror Saxberg, Vice President, Learning Science, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Sara Allan, Director, Early Learning and Education Pathways, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Caleb Offley, Senior Advisor, K-12 Education Program, Walton Family Foundation
Stacey Childress, CEO, AERDF and NewSchools Venture Fund
Another ed reform echo chamber production.
I guess they’ll use public schools to test the products.
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Here’s a lead for the researchers: look at how France narrowed the achievement gap prior to 1991’s Jospin Deforms. E.D. Hirsch writes about this.
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This interview with Vivek Ramaswamy about his book “Woke Inc.: Inside America’s Social Justice Scam, is worth watching:
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/corporations-gain-profit-power-when-they-pretend-to-care-about-causes-argues-author-of-woke-inc-118948933928
“Big business uses progressive-friendly value to deflect attention from their own monolithic pursuit of profit and power…… When Amazon issues a public challenge to Walmart to pay workers $15 an hour, we can simply chuckle to ourselves that Jeff Bezos is just doing what he does best: undermining his competitors when they’re most vulnerable.”
He goes on to say……I don’t think we should put our trust in corporations to be altruistic . . .it’s a magic trick and it’s undermining our democracy and trust from within.
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Imagine if these bastards just sent a home library of classic children’s books, from Goodnight, Moon to the D’Aulaires’s Book of Greek Myths to every poor kid in the United States.
Imagine if they for once did something decent.
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What if they just paid their taxes and their workers?
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Exactly, Dienne!!!!
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AAAHHHH! bringing together “people with different expertise INCLUDING EDUCATORS. What’s the “different expert”? Tech Entrepreneurs? Wall street types? How soon do you think the “educators” will be sidelined. Why not START with educators. Sigh.
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Exactly.
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So pissed to read this. Could you imagine if they put their billions into REAL publlic education? Poverty as we know is the biggest driver for educational inequities. But by all means, continue pretending you know what is best, while directly contributing to poverty. Just stop already!
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Spot on!!!
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The only obituaries I want to read are the ones about billionaires like Gates, Walton, and “S”uckerberg.
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“Assessment for Good… will focus on creating better student tests that shift from focusing on students’ deficits to their strengths” haha belly laugh (is that like “Through the Looking Glass”?) And the clincher: “Lovelace said the goal is for the tests to provide results that are useful to teachers and families throughout the year, not to replace state exams.” Oh, I get it. CBE/ ‘personalized ed’ [= testing all the time] PLUS annual state-stdzd tests… brilliant!
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Kids need to believe that school success can lead to financial security. Offer scholarships to any students whose grades qualify them for college or a professional training program. Promote the program to make sure the students and their parents / guardians are well aware of the deal during elementary school years. Once those steps are in place, just get out of the way. My bet is that the results will astound everyone who is paying attention.
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Huh?
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I wish it were that simple Donna. It’s a nice thought. It’s been tried many places, many times before. I am sure there is research we could find. .
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If you don’t want billionaires interfering with education (and you shouldn’t), why do you want them interfering with poverty/homelessness relief, healthcare, etc.? Don’t you see they do the same thing there? By definition, billionaires are not qualified to “figure out” these things. These problems exist because there are billionaires.
If billionaires really want to help, they could spend their days standing on a street corner in any major city (or rural area, for that matter) passing out hundred dollar bills and let people decide for themselves what to do with it. Or they could, y’know, pay their workers and their taxes.
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Yes! Every they start to blatt off in the media we need to fill the air with shouts of —
PYT PYW ! PYT PYW ! PYT PYW !
Pay Your Taxes Pay Your Workers !
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I don’t understand this point. Billionaires do pay their workers. Billionaires do pay their taxes. So do very rich people.
They pay exactly what they are legally obligated to pay. Just like we all do. How many of us have taken a taxi or Uber and paid the driver an extra $20 dollars in cash (above the tip) because we know that he deserves more? Or give the people who cut our hair or perhaps mow our lawn or deliver an order an extra $20 each time because we know they deserve it?
The problem is that the billionaires aren’t obligated to pay higher wages or more in taxes because of our laws, which are directly affected by the fact that a few (not all) short sighted progressives were perfectly content to have a right wing Republican choose 3 new Supreme Court Justices and, y’know, make sure Citizens United is not repealed, so that rich people can have even more power and labor less.
Billionaires aren’t going to pay more in taxes unless they are legally obligated to do so. The solution is to have laws that require them to do it.
So I blame the people directly responsible for having 3 right wing Supreme Court Justices who will make it very hard for progressive legislation to happen for the next decade and hard for progressives to be elected. That is everyone who did not vote for the Democrat in 2016. Whether they did it because they adored Trump or because they convinced themselves that it wouldn’t hurt the progressive cause if a right wing president chose new right wing Justices. They were wrong.
I agree these billionaires are greedy and self-serving. But they aren’t breaking the law because the law allows them to be this way. And will continue to enable them until the Democrats have such a sweeping victory that it doesn’t matter that a small percentage of their party opposes progressive legislation.
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The law allows them to be that way because they use their billions and trillions to prostitute the politicians who pass the laws which allow them to prostitute the politicians which allow them to prostitute the politicians which allow them to prostitute the politicians which allow them to prostitute the politicians … which allow them to prostitute the politicians to pass the laws which literally, all too literally these days allow them to get away with murder.
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Jon Awbrey,
I agree! That’s why I kept trying to tell people in 2016 that repealing Citizens’ United and the Supreme Court was so important! There was even an open seat and some people believed “sending a message” was more important than the Supreme Court.
There was always too much money in politics, but Citizens United was a disaster.
The January 2010 decision was 5-4. I was so looking forward to a 4-5 decision repealing it when Scalia’s seat was open. So was Bernie Sanders, by the way, who made it clear to his supporters that “sending a message” by allowing the right wing to replace Scalia wouldn’t be good for progressives.
From the Brennan Center for Justice, an organization whose integrity I have never seen questioned”
“With its decision, the Supreme Court overturned election spending restrictions that date back more than 100 years. Previously, the court had upheld certain spending restrictions, arguing that the government had a role in preventing corruption. But in Citizens United, a bare majority of the justices held that “independent political spending” did not present a substantive threat of corruption, provided it was not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign. ”
“As a result, corporations can now spend unlimited funds on campaign advertising if they are not formally “coordinating” with a candidate or political party.”
“The ruling has ushered in massive increases in political spending from outside groups, dramatically expanding the already outsized political influence of wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups.”
“In the immediate aftermath of the Citizens United decision, analysts focused much of their attention on how the Supreme Court designated corporate spending on elections as free speech. But perhaps the most significant outcomes of Citizens United have been the creation of super PACs, which empower the wealthiest donors, and the expansion of dark money through shadowy nonprofits that don’t disclose their donors.”
“A Brennan Center report by Daniel I. Weiner pointed out that a very small group of Americans now wield “more power than at any time since Watergate, while many of the rest seem to be disengaging from politics.“
Let’s not forget what the votes for Ralph Nader in 2000 (8 years of Bush/Cheney) and the refusal to vote for the Democrat in 2016 by people who should have known better got us.
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so insightfully pointed out, the progressives can influence Biden and the Democrats and grow in power, but when Republicans reign, they are in far more danger.
Imagine a world without Citizens United. It wouldn’t automatically mean the progressives were in power, but it would mean that the billionaires had a lot less influence on everyone. Which is absolutely good for progressives.
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What can you do, even RBG dropped the ball on CU …
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RBG didn’t drop the ball. And with 5-4 Supreme Court, she could have likely written the opinion reversing Citizens United! That’s an opinion I’d love to read. And the current Supreme Court would be 6-3 in favor of legislation that helped progressives to win more elections.
Trying to blame RBG is nonsensical. Her resignation would have left Citizens United standing exactly as it is now. The only people to blame are those who did not vote for the Democrat in 2016 because they are directly responsible for why this Supreme Court decision will stand for a long time. I certainly understand why the far right anti-labor people voted the way they did — I just don’t understand why a small number of progressives kept saying over and over again “it didn’t matter who wins” did.
But if you voted in 2016 because it “didn’t matter” to you whether Citizens United allowed billionaires to control politics, you certainly shouldn’t try to blame Ruth Bader Ginsburg or someone else because you got played by the far right.
Citizens United will stay the law for who knows how long because Trump won. We all knew that and our vote demonstrated whether that was important to us or not. I respect that it was not important to some progressives and that is their right. And I respect that it is important to them now, but at the very least, they should be willing to acknowledge their mistake.
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Not blaming RBG, just sayin’ even she didn’t see it coming until too late, so what can you expect of lesser mortals? (Moi? Never voted for a Ripofflichen and never will, can’t even imagine how anyone doesn’t see them for what they are.)
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Jon, I am still angry at RBG. She thought she was immortal. She wasn’t. She survived multiple instances of cancer. She gave Trump a third seat on SCOTUS.
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I was speaking only about the CU decision, where she voted with the majority on some Pollyanna Idealist grounds about the First Amendment Rights of Corporate Persons, merely tossing a Sop to Cerberus by way of an effete ineffectual dissent on a technical point.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
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I do hold RBG accountable for not stepping aside in 2014, when Obama could have replaced her. The Court would have still had a 5-4 majority, but a lot better than 6-3.
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Jon,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, along with all the 3 other liberal justices, from Citizens United. You seem to be focused on the meaningless fact that all of those 4 dissenting justices, including Ginsburg, joined into one part which Clarence Thomas objected to.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg made it clear that she opposed Citizens United and wanted to repeal it in 2014, when she was still very much alive and all that needed to happen was for a Democrat to get elected to fill the empty seat in 2016 and Ginsburg would have written that opinion brilliantly and I would have loved to read it.
The people who opposed Trump and voted for the Democrat in 2016 cared about Citizens United and the Supreme Court, and the people who opposed Trump and did not care about Citizens United being repealed or having a right wing Supreme Court voted for someone other than the Democrat or didn’t vote. That is their right, but it certainly takes chutzpah for someone who didn’t care about getting big money out of politics in 2016 to be complaining about money in politics because they actually had a chance to do something about it in 2016 and instead they used their vote to demonstrate that they didn’t think repealing Citizens United mattered as much as “sending a message”!
Diane, we shall have to disagree about RBG, especially as we would be in exactly the same situation we are in now – with Citizens United still in place – except that the Supreme Court would have lost its most respected and strongest liberal voice dissenting from 2014 to 2020. I suspect that over those 6 years, Ginsburg may have even quietly influenced John Roberts a bit. Sure it now seems like a bad decision now, but I don’t think even Ginsburg could have imagined that Mitt Romney would be quite that openly craven and hypocritical to just refuse to fill an open seat if there was a Democratic President.
What I do know is that Ginsburg would have been of vital importance if the Democrat had been elected instead of Trump, and Ginsburg would have led the liberal wing in repealing Citizens United. Having Ginsburg lead that wing – even for just a few years – would have very likely accomplished things that Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan plus Ginsberg’s replacement could not have done without her leadership. Those 3 just don’t seem to have the gravitas that Ginsburg had.
If everyone who cared about getting money out of politics had made that their big issue instead of making “sending a message” their big issue, and the liberals got their majority on the Supreme Court, then people would have said “if only Ginsburg hadn’t resigned, this Supreme Court would have made some bold changes, but now these justices don’t have a strong enough leader to do that, why didn’t Ginsburg just stay on a few more years?”
We all knew of the possibility that Republicans would win the Senate in 2014, but none of us had a crystal ball that told us that the Republicans would simply stop allowing votes on any Democrat President’s nominations for federal judges or Supreme Court Justices (unprecedented).
But we didn’t need a crystal ball to know one thing for certain — that the winner of the 2016 Presidential election would fill an already open Supreme Court seat and if a Democrat won, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have the majority she needed to lead the repeal of Citizens United.
It would have been absolutely fantastic if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the opportunity to lead the majority in repealing Citizens United. But if that wasn’t important enough for some people to use their vote to insure that happened, then I don’t understand why they are complaining about money in politics! How can we get rid of money in politics if the people who claim to care about it would rather vote to “send a message” than vote for a president whose victory would have meant that Citizens United was repealed?
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Or take a page from Andrew Carnegie and build some libraries or free Internet zones.
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Diane
Why does Bill Gates get to decide that all teachers get injected with the mRNA novel operating system (term used by Moderna) or lose their jobs?
Losing my job after 25 years of service
On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 9:01 AM Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: ” Why do so many billionaires think that it is their > responsibility to redesign education? I, personally, would prefer to see > them spend their time figuring out how to reduce poverty, how to provide > medical care in low-income communities, how to provide af” >
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Sharleen, don’t lose your job. Get vaccinated.
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This response is a little late. I haven’t responded for a long while. I just wanted to appreciate the insights of others. However, when I read about the billionaires trying again to control our education system, my blood starts to boil. It is time for all educators to cry out “Foul”!
Just like dictators try to control everyone including their minds so our billionaires are trying to get control of the minds of the youth who eventually grow up. If they really cared about the young minds, they would do a little research and support the informed educators and their philosophy. Constructivism supports diversity and in turn creativity. High test scores accomplished through memorization leads no where except to mindless people who will never fly to the moon.
I only need to look at my grandchildren and observe all the many different interests, skills, and abilities- all nourished and encouraged at home starting with reading to them every night as infants.
If the billionaire really cared about a true education they would help the poor, the hungry, the sick, and homeless. Fund the education system without strings attached. Leave educators do their job.
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Wouldn’t it be great if billionaires spent their free time and money giving back more of their wealth to the workers that created it for them?
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