Why Bill Gates Is Not The Man To Reimagine New York Education
It literally took less than an hour for the pushback to start. Governor Andrew Cuomo dismissively questioned why school buildings even exist these days, and announced that he was enlisting Bill Gates to help reimagine education in the Empire State. From a dozen different corners, the objections came.
One day later, Cuomo’s Facebook page attempted to soften the announcement. “Teachers are heroes & nothing could ever replace in-person learning,” the post began, before assuring readers that the reimagining would be done “in full partnership with educators and administrators.” That does not appear to have calmed anybody’s fears.
So what’s the concern?
Bill Gates gets blamed for plenty of crazy things. One pandemic conspiracy theory is that he has engineered all of this so that he can implant brain chips (and if that’s not enough for you, this chips will supposedly include the mark of the beast).
But the Gates track record in education deserves more careful scrutiny. For people who haven’t paid close attention, it may seem a simple matter—a very rich guy wanted to give money to help with education. What could be wrong with that?
The Gates Foundation has undertaken several projects in education. They have not gone well, and while Gates has always had the ability to walk away from these projects unscathed, not everyone has been so lucky.
At the beginning of the new millennium, Gates decided that perhaps breaking large schools into smaller schools might yield some improvements. Gates spent billions of dollars piloting programs, creating thousands of small schools across the country and ultimately walking away from the project when he decided that it wasn’t producing results. What’s important to note that not only did Gates decide what kinds of structural changes he was paying for, and not only did he leave many districts to figure out what to do next with the half-finished experiment that was their community school system, but Gates also set the terms for what a successful school would look like. You might be able to think of many benefits to having your child in a smaller school, but Gates only looked at three—attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test.
These are factors that can be reduced to data, and data has been a singular focus of Gatesian reform. If data is the new oil, then public schools are the new Texas. The Foundation put at least $100 million into inBloom, a massive project intended to mine data from students and staff at schools. Somehow, backers failed to anticipate that there would be considerable resistance to the idea, and inBloom ended as a massive failure.
The next Gates project was an attempt to improve the teaching profession through training, hiring and evaluation. Again, a mountain of money was spent, and again, the project was ultimately judged a failure—in part, because it did not raise student scores on standardized reading and math scores. And again, the Gates Foundation walked away from the program; Hillsborough School District in Florida was one system left holding a multi-million dollar bag.
Of course, the most infamous Gates education project was the Common Core State Standards. Gates did not invent the Core, but as detailed by Lyndsey Layton in 2014, he provided financial backing, organization, and sheer clout to swiftly push them into every state in the nation. The amount of money that Gates spent to support the Core is hard to know exactly—the sheer number of groups and size of the checks written is staggering. But Gates spending on US education involves billions of dollars and has directly influenced how trillions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. And while some still argue that the Core was a success, it would be hard to find any broad-based agreement. What the Core did do, however, was help drive the two Gates defining factors—a focus on data collection and defining down success as “good scores on a math and reading test”—deep into the US school system.
Nobody has expended more money and influence on US education, and yet even by his own standards for success—raising reading and math test scores—Gates has no clear successes. Nor are there signs that he is learning anything from his failures. Reading through years of the annual Bill and Melinda letter, and you find acknowledgement that their latest idea didn’t quite pan out, but the problems are never located within the programs themselves. Teachers didn’t have the right resources or training. The Foundation’s PR work didn’t properly anticipate resistance. After years of failed initiatives, the latest Gates newsletter concludes not that they should examine some of their own assumptions, change their approach, or invite a different set of eyeballs to look over their programs—instead, they should just do what they’re doing, but do it harder. “Swing for the fences.”
Currently the Foundation is focused on factors like curriculum and in particular computer-delivered education. This may seem like just the ticket for a governor who also questioned why his state is still bothering with brick-and-mortar school buildings. But regardless of what you think of the policies and programs that Gates is pushing, it’s important to remember that while he may be great at disruption, he has yet to build anything in the education world that is either lasting or which works the way it was meant to. And he can always walk away, having barely dented his fortune.
It’s not quite correct to say that Gates has always failed in his educational projects; he has managed to infect much of the education establishment with his belief in a narrow definition of success and a thirst for “data.” But his larger projects, ill-conceived and based on faulty assumptions, were rightfully doomed. It seems at best counter-intuitive to ask Gates to partner with the state to reimagine education. Gates can afford another education failure; can the state of New York say the same?
source: forbes
