Business-Managed Democracy

Business-Managed Education

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promotes the standard business agenda of ‘rigorous’ curriculum and instruction, assessments and accountability, as well as market competition between schools and the establishment of charter schools.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is worth some $30 billion and gives away over a billion dollars each year, mainly in education, so it is particularly influential in education policy. It accounts for a quarter of all philanthropic donations in the school education sector. It distributes much of this money to schools but increasingly it is funding groups promoting particular types of school reform, what the Foundation calls “advocacy work”.

In 2009 the Gates Foundation devoted $78million to education advocacy out of its total donations for education of $373 (see annotated tax return), four times as much as four years earlier:

"We've learned that school-level investments aren't enough to drive systemic changes," said Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation's United States program. "The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer."

In 2006 Gates Foundation Tom Vander Ark, head of the education section of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “envisions a system in which public authorities oversee schools but do not run them, and Gates Foundation money is directed towards projects that fit that vision… Schools would receive public support only if they performed and parents chose them.”

The Gates Foundation funds front groups, such as Teach Plus, to oppose unions on issues such as seniority and the evaluation of teachers according to standardised test results of their students. It also funds the major teachers unions.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations...
The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million "to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns." It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place "strategic data fellows" who could act as "entrepreneurial change agents" in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Sue Peters, a parent and co-founder of the local chapter of Parents Across America pointed out that "Nobody elected Bill Gates to run our schools, and yet his money is driving so many policies and so many of these reforms," so that parents voices "are drowned out because we don't have the dollars behind us."

Examples

The Foundation donated $125 million to New York schools, to reform schools so as to bring “a CEO mentality to education… We’re converting the role of the principal into a CEO role…”

The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the National Centre on Education and the Economy (NCEE) which set up the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. It funded a report by the Commission that called for schools to be run by independent private contractors rather than school districts. School districts would write and oversee performance contracts for the schools that the contractors would have to meet.

The Gates Foundation gave $135 million to promote and fund charter schools between 2000 and 2004. It has provided funds for the expansion of KIPP schools to high school level. It gave $1.8 million to Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles in 2006 for five new charter schools. The Foundation has also given $30 million to NewSchools Venture Fund for developing charter schools.

Now, he has thrown his support behind the idea that America has too many bad teachers, and he is pouring billions into the hunt for bad teachers... he has bought the support of a wide range of organizations, from conservative to liberal. He has even thrown a few million to the teachers' unions to gain their assent... Gates has gotten the federal government to join him in his current belief that what matters most is creating teacher evaluation systems tied to student test scores.
Gates seems not to know or care that the leading testing experts in the nation agree that this is a fruitless and wrongheaded way to identify either good teachers or bad teachers.

In addition the Foundation and the Broad Foundation teamed up in 2007 for a $60 million “Strong American Schools” campaign to ensure that education was a strong election issue and to promote strong curriculum standards, standardised testing and merit-based pay for teachers.

The Gates Foundation funded the development in 2007 of The Turnaround Challenge: Why America's best opportunity to dramatically improve student achievement lies in our worst performing schools, and its subsequent implementation efforts. The Foundation spent $90 million on implementing the Turnaround strategy in Chicago — Chicago's Renaissance 2010 (Ren10), giving Arne Duncan a high profile that helped get him his subsequent position as Secretary of Education.

However the results of Ren10 have been disappointing. The Chicago Tribune reported:

The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance 2010—that displaced students ended up mostly in other low performing schools and that mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms. Together, they suggest the initiative hasn't lived up to its promise by this, its target year.

In New York Bill Gates personally funded ($4 milllion) Learn-NY, a group which campaigned to enable mayor Michael Bloomberg to be elected for a third term, so that he could continue to push the Gates educational reforms in New York city schools. Eli Broad also donated millions of dollars to Learn-NY.

In 2009 the Gates Foundation teamed up with Viacom (one of the world's largest media conglomerates) to form Get Schooled, which enables Gates personnel to have input into television programmes such as ER, Law & Order: SVU and Private Practice and also the creation of new programmes to advance the cause of business-directed educational and health reform. 'It could be called "message placement": the social or philanthropic corollary to product placement deals in which marketers pay to feature products in shows and movies.' In return the Gates Foundation is subsidising programmes that Viacom broadcasts.

One of Get Schooled initiatives is the movie, Waiting for Superman, which was sponsored by the Gates and Broad Foundations. It is, according to Nation magazine, a "documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education"

Current Educational Policy

After the election of the Obama administration in 2008 the Broad Foundation boasted:

With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time, and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan incorporated The Turnaround Challenge prescriptions into federal policy and referred to it as "the bible" for school restructuring.

The Gates Foundation also funded The New Teacher Project which produced an influential report in 2009, repeatedly cited by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, that was critical of teacher evaluations that consistently gave teachers high evaluations. Other Gates funded non-profit groups then advocated new systems of teacher evaluation resulting in their redesign in some 20 states.

New appointments in the Department of Education, following the revolving door principle, included:

• Duncan's first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, from the Gates Foundation;
• Duncan's second chief of staff, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund;
• Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali had worked at the Broad Foundation, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust;
• General counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of major Gates grantee, Advance Illinois;
• Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton had worked at both the Gates Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund.
• Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, served on the board of directors of Broad's education division until February 2009.

Some Funding Figures

The Foundation funds many advocacy groups and think tanks including:

• Achieve and its American Diploma Project Network ($3.2m in 2009)
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  The Education Trust ($4m in 2009)
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  American Enterprise Institute ($500,000 in 2009 "to support original research and analysis to influence the national education debates and create a supportive policy environment for dynamic reform")
• 
  Reference: Jennifer Anderson, ‘Stand for Children pushes back against critics’, Portland Tribune, 20 July 2011.
  Stand for Children ($3.5 million in 2010)
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  Brookings Institution ($238,500 in 2009 "to improve media coverage of secondary and post-secondary education")
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  Alliance for Exellent Education ($1.873m to promote high school reform and support for common core standards)
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  Center on Policy Education ($461,000 in 2009 to track state adoption of common core standards)
• Education Equality Project
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  Education Sector, co-founded by Andrew Rotherham,"one of the most frequently quoted Washington analysts who comments on education news. He writes the popular blog EduWonk" ($1m in 2009)
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  Bellwether Education Partners, founded by Andrew Rotherham ($951,800 in 2011 "to support policy and communications work designed to shape the public and policy debate on public education reform in the United States")
• National Council on Teacher Quality ($630,000 in 2009)
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($400,000 in 2009 "to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns")
• Teach Plus ($1m in 2009)
• 
  Reference: ‘Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009’, New York Times, 21 May 2011.
  Thomas Fordham Institute, headed by Chester Finn Jr. "longtime advocate of national standards" ($530,000 in 2009 to support common core standards)

Links

• 'Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation', Wikipedia
• 'Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation', SourceWatch