One of the myriad problems with billionaires like Bill Gates pouring tons of money into reshaping our education system is that people like Bill Gates are not educators. They rarely have even a small amount of education in what education is and should be. The way people like Gates have gone about financing and promoting “education reform” is a good example of their rudimentary misunderstanding of what public education should be. The billionaire philanthropist has used his “charity” to force legislation to filter taxpayer money away from traditional public schools and into the privately funded and run charter school systems that promise better education.
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss reports that a new report, studying a partly Gates-funded initiative to use student test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness, is out. That report says what almost every single education expert without a MBA predicted: you can’t, because test scores are not a good way to evaluate educators. The “project” cost municipalities participating in the educational dead end around $360 million.
The six-year project began in 2009 when the foundation gave millions of dollars to three public school districts — Hillsborough County in Florida (the first to start the work), Memphis and Pittsburgh. The districts supplied matching funds. Four charter management organizations also were involved: Alliance College-Ready Public Schools; Aspire Public Schools; Green Dot Public Schools; and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools.
The study—conducted by the Rand Corp.—evaluated the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching project launched by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2009. It found that “the initiative did not achieve its stated goals for students, particularly LIM [low-income minority] students.” Another way to say this was that “With minor exceptions, by 2014–2015, student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better than they were for similar sites that did not participate in the Intensive Partnerships initiative.”
Strauss reports that in total, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent around $215 million on the project, while the school systems—and therefore taxpayers— covered the rest of the costs, which amounted to $575 million. Not unlike the business world where billionaires come from, it turns out that the “evaluation” systems they try to come up with can be found in a first year survey philosophy course on solipsism.
It’s important to note here that the Obama administration supported this backwards student test score bullshit. Educators were disappointed in Obama’s Race to the Top initiative back then, and it turns out, for good reason. While there was hope that in leaving the failed “No Child Left Behind” platform of previous administrations, the reliance on private business to help lead the charge in experimenting in reforms left a lot to be desired. More importantly the fact that politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to play into the fallacy that we need to have some fucking results metric for how we spend money in education while we do not demand that of any military funding of any corporate funding, of any utility funding.
One of the most important things to understand about the Gates Foundation and other billionaire “philanthropists” is that they make more and more money and develop more and more political power through their “philanthropy.” By nature, this means it isn’t actual philanthropy. It’s a business investment. And so while I don’t believe Bill Gates sits in an underground lair, beneath a volcano, cackling and planning to take over the world, I also believe it’s important to realize that the work being done is not at all charitable.
As The Nation reported back in March 2020, the billions of dollars lost in tax revenues due to breaks people like Gates receive for their “charity” tends to far outweigh what they actually put into their charities. The profile is worth the read, but here’s a short summary of what it details.
While there is no credible argument that Bill and Melinda Gates use charity primarily as a vehicle to enrich themselves or their foundation, it is difficult to ignore the occasions where their charitable activities seem to serve mainly private interests, including theirs—supporting the schools their children attend, the companies their foundation partly owns, and the special interest groups that defend wealthy Americans—while generating billions of dollars in tax savings.
One might be cynical and say that Gates’ push towards philanthropy came at a time when the public perception of the “Richest American” was as low as it could get. And while some have talked about the coincidence that Gates’ philanthropy ramped up at the same time his company Microsoft began a public relations initiative described as their “charm offensive,” one reality remains: After more than a half a billion dollars, and six years of thousands of young students and adult teachers’ lives spent, we are no closer to creating better educational systems of support for teachers and students.