Regardless of their original intent and meaning, many Shakespearean quotes have remained powerful in our popular culture--especially from the enduring Hamlet.
"Brevity is the soul of wit" is one of the most misunderstood, since those using it as a serious truism ignore its source, the flawed and pompous Polonius. Yet, there remains value in returning to the kernels of truth that run through Hamlet.
The recent New York Times examination of Bill Gates' influence on the education debate reveals a growing infusion of money:
"The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy--quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy."
And the direct use of Gates funding to support powerful voices in education discourse:
"Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation. . . . Mr. Hess, a frequent blogger on education whose institute received $500,000 from the Gates foundation in 2009 'to influence the national education debates,' acknowledged that he and others sometimes felt constrained. 'As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct,' he said. 'There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.'”
What has followed this piece?
Gates has pleaded that the education debate is polarizing and that his millions/billions are actually only a drop in the bucket: "But the New York Times neglected to mention one important fact that is key to placing the work of our foundation in the right context--that our spending, though significant, is barely more than a half of one percent of what the country spends on education every year."
And Hess has called for some clarification:
"More broadly, if someone thinks it's problematic for the Gates Foundation's efforts to influence public policy through research and advocacy (and I don't), then I'd imagine they'd have been even more aghast at the Ford Foundation's decades-long effort to change educational finance policy through the far less democratic approach of litigation or Ford's current giant investment in promoting a very particular equity agenda. And I assume they'd recoil from the Annenberg Challenge's advocacy for rural schooling, as well as efforts to push federal and state government to fund the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. But I'd be curious to see some clarification on that."
Well, I am all for clarification so let me start by returning to Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 when the Queen at the play arranged by Hamlet exclaims: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
As an entrepreneur, Gates expects the public to believe both that his philanthropy funding is "significant" (his word)--
"We can take risks others can’t, and we can push the boundaries of the discussion and debate. We fund innovative new ideas. We follow the evidence and support the brave work underway in the field. We can foster and join important collaborations, but we also hope we can push new thinking"--
and simultaneously not dictating people's words and actions.
Yes, I believe wealthy and successful businessmen spend money all the time that is inadequate for the purposes they seek and ultimately ineffective. (Please accept the irony here because as with the Polonius carelessness I mentioned above, we must recognize that Gates has already proven my sarcasm to be true in his bungled small-schools project--which discredits him on many levels for having even more influence on the education debate today.)
And Hess, like Gates, may be telling us more by what he avoids saying than his contorted effort to deflect concern over his purchased advocacy by suggesting that other people are doing it too--reinforcing the suspicions of many that the Billionaire Boys Club is essentially 12-year-olds with lots of money.
Hess wants to distance himself from "some kind of nefarious Gates plot," but he is taking a typical tactic from the right-wing playbook that allows him, he hopes, to make a claim that is inaccurate and then to discredit his own claim (just listen to any episode of Limbaugh's show if you can).
For both Gates and Hess, let me clarify.
I think no one is suggesting evil secret plots. In fact, I think the concern of those of us in education who have devoted our lives to teaching and scholarship is that a billionaire with no expertise or experience is driving education reform through the weight of his wealth while those with experience and expertise in education are in effect silenced simply because we do not have that wealth.
In the U.S., wealth equals influence, regardless of how wrong that money is. So again to be perfectly clear, no one believes the money Gates is wielding to be insignificant, and let's hope that fewer and fewer people fall into the trap of believing that those bought by that money are doing anything other than promoting an agenda that the money is intended to sustain--an agenda that has little to do with the lives and futures of children (except as potential consumers).