Another flop for the Gates Foundation and for top-down reform

  "I was pretty naive about how long the process would take." -- Bill Gates

“I want the foundation to be the neutral broker that’s able to bring up the real data of what is working and what’s not working." -- Melinda Gates

Far from being an honest broker, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's biggest private foundation, has had the greatest influence on shaping the nation’s education policies.

During the past two decades the power philanthropy has leveraged billions of its tax-exempt dollars to inject reform policies into the public system with no public oversight or accountability.

Bill Gates, one of the top three richest men in the world, supports public education the way a rope supports a hanging man. When his imposed reform ideas fail to produce the desired measurable results, the mega-foundation does a few mea culpas and then pulls its funding, moves on to their next big reform idea and leaves school districts and even their own spawned reform groups hanging in the wind.

Last week, RAND, hired as evaluators by Gates himself, issued a massive and mostly negative evaluation of the Gates Foundation’s overblown effort to redesign teacher evaluation, compensation, and employment practices in three school districts and four charter school management organizations.

Now we're hearing reports out of their Seattle headquarters that a major shift in education investments is taking place, away from teacher evaluation to curriculum reform. What that means is anyone's guess.

This from teacher/blogger Larry Ferlazzo:

The Gates Foundation came out with a report this morning admitting that their heavy-handed, and expensive, focus on teacher evaluation was a failure. The report’s authors suggest that maybe other factors were more important for students which, of course, just about any teacher could have told Gates before the money was spent.

Back in 2016, the foundation promised there would be a major shift in its modus operandi. Melinda Gates, announced the fund was backing away from its support for Common Core standards in light of the political shift from federal to state mandates under The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

She claimed that she and her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, "learned an important lesson" from the pushback against CCSS in recent years after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting national education standards, claiming such a massive initiative could not be successful unless teachers and parents believe in it.

“Community buy-in is huge,” Melinda Gates told the Washington Post, adding that cultivating such support for big cultural shifts in education takes time. “It means that in some ways, you have to go more slowly.”

The term "buy-in", when used by corporate-style reformers, is revealing, not just in the way it portrays the school community simply as consumers of reform, but also in the way they see themselves as reform's progenitors. 

Like Donald Trump, for whom he's expressed affinity,  Bill Gates is a great believer in strong-man, autocratic leadership and finds democratic processes too messy, expensive and time consuming for someone with his economic leverage.

It seems like every couple of years faced with stinging criticism from those most affected by their reform interventions, Gates Foundation leaders go through similar "self-adjustments" with no public accountability, while sticking to their same wrong-headed theory of change.They tweak their top-down reform funding strategies, admit (or not) they've bet on the wrong horse, leave old projects hanging, and promise next time, to be "better listeners". But how real is their self-crit? It's usually limited being "too impatient" or "too naive" about great amount of time it takes to bring the uninsightful, unwashed masses to buy into their interventions.

Back in 2012, the line under the Obama administration and with Arne Duncan running the DOE, was that bad teachers were the problem, Gates shifted its focus to discovering who these thousands of bad teacher were and how to replace them with "good teachers".

This from Chalfbeat:

Bad teachers were the problem; good teachers were the solution. It was a simplified binary, but the idea and the research it drew on had spurred policy changes across the country, including a spate of laws establishing new evaluation systems designed to reward top teachers and help weed out low performers.

Behind that effort was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which backed research and advocacy that ultimately shaped these changes.

Remember when they ditched their $2B investment in high-school reform and small schools, claiming that their pet projects didn't produce fast enough results (standardized test scores)? Bill Gates' 2009 letter, which was posed as a self-critical evaluation, actually blamed the Gates-funded schools themselves for not being "radical" enough and indirectly, the teacher unions for not being faithful to his top-down model.

While it's become the poster child for top-down reform, the problem goes way beyond the Gates Foundation. It goes to the very nature of power philanthropies, who use their concentrated wealth to erode public space and public decision making.

From Davos to DeVos

As the world's super-wealthy and super-powerful gather this week in Davos for the World Economic Forum, the spotlight is once again on the widening chasm of wealth inequality. It's virtually impossible to talk meaningfully about education reform, privatization, charter schools, testing, deseg, etc... without taking the growing wealth gap into consideration.

Oxfam reports that the gap between the super-rich and the poorest half of the global population is starker than previously thought, with just eight men, from Bill Gates to Michael Bloomberg, owning as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, or half the world.
Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, says:

“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when 1 in 10 people survive on less than $2 a day.  Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty; it is fracturing our societies and undermining democracy.  

“Across the world, people are being left behind. Their wages are stagnating yet corporate bosses take home million dollar bonuses; their health and education services are cut while corporations and the super-rich dodge their taxes; their voices are ignored as governments sing to the tune of big business and a wealthy elite.”

Public anger with inequality is already creating political shockwaves across the globe. Inequality has been cited as a significant factor in the election of neo-fascists and populists like Donald Trump in the US, President Duterte in the Philippines, and Brexit in the UK.

The world’s 8 richest people are, in order of net worth:    

1. Bill Gates: America founder of Microsoft (net worth $75 billion)
2. Amancio Ortega: Spanish founder of Inditex which owns the Zara fashion chain (net worth $67 billion)
3. Warren Buffett: American CEO and largest shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway (net worth $60.8 billion)
4. Carlos Slim Helu: Mexican owner of Grupo Carso (net worth: $50 billion)
5. Jeff Bezos: American founder, chairman and chief executive of Amazon (net worth: $45.2 billion)
6. Mark Zuckerberg: American chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Facebook (net worth $44.6 billion)
7. Larry Ellison: American co-founder and CEO of Oracle (net worth $43.6 billion)
8. Michael Bloomberg: American founder, owner and CEO of Bloomberg LP (net worth: $40 billion)

To make the point about wealth inequality and public education, consider this. Except for the Spaniard Ortega and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, all are directly or indirectly involved in U.S. corporate-style school reform, charter schools, and in various projects and in policy setting. All have graced the pages of this blog. 

Ironically, one of the strongest voices on education at Davos, comes not from the mighty 8, but from singer Shakira, suggesting an antidote for violent conflict and divisive populism: Get more kids in pre-school.

The Colombian singer is using her distinctive voice to lobby the world's rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum for more spending on early childhood education.

Asked if she had a message for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, she urged solid education policies that instill "inclusiveness and tolerance" for future generations.

Recalling a childhood in Colombia marred by war, she said: "If we really want peace, we need to invest in education."

While the high and mighty gather in Davos, the Senate is holding hearings to consider the appointment of billionaire Betsy DeVos.

If you're confused about DeVos and Davos, this, from brother Fred, might help...

Bill Gates is the perfect partner for Trump. No billionaire left behind.

“But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that... whether it’s education or stopping epidemics … [or] in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that [Trump’s] administration [is] going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation.” -- Bill Gates

Okay, so now that Bill Gates has jumped aboard the Trump train, that means no billionaire is left behind. Right? (Bloomberg??).  Gates' comparison of Trump to JFK may sound like a stretch to some. To me too. But Gates claims it's all about innovation. JFK did champion the Cold War space race with the Russians while Trump seems to have joined the other side. But maybe Gates means they both pushed war with Cuba. I don't know. The world's a much different place now. I'm pretty sure Gates wants no part of a trade war with China.

What I do know is that Trump is a perfect fit for the world's richest man and his muscle-foundation. For one thing, Gates is all for deregulation of industry, a promoter of nukes and is one of the world's great all-time polluters. The Gates Foundation's record in Africa (no Virginia, he wasn't just about vaccines) is criminal and the foundation was also one of the biggest stockholders in BP Oil when the great Gulf oil spill happened.

For another, like Trump he's a great believer in strong-man, autocratic leadership and finds democratic processes messy and too expensive and time consuming for someone with his economic leverage.

As an example, Gates was forced to spend millions on a referendum in Washington State authorizing charter schools. It failed three times before winning in 2012 by 1 percent of the vote. Voting is much to stressful and expensive a process for the world's richest man.

As for the rest of the Gates Foundation's education reform initiatives, they won't have to change much under Trump rule. I doubt the Gates' will be dumping any more funds into Common Core Standards, even though Betsy DeVos has been a supporter of CCSS in the past. Gates was already starting to back away from the standards back in August and DeVos is not likely to pursue them given the influence of the anti-common core Alt-right's influence in the regime. On the campaign trail, Trump referred to Common Core as a “disaster” and Trump voters are generally wildly anti-Common Core as well as anything even faintly federal.

Bill and Melinda will likely embrace Betsy DeVos' choice (charter and voucher) mania as they always have. As for DeVos' penchant for blurring the lines between public and private, and between state and religion, Gates has never had a problem with either. I remember the foundation once giving millions to the Discovery Institute, a group pushing the teaching of Intelligent Design.

Gates is big on using student test results as a basis for evaluating teachers. We'll have to wait and see how DeVos falls out on that.

Another 'shift' at the Gates Foundation. More mea culpas.

“I want the foundation to be the neutral broker...” -- Melinda Gates

I suppose this means that the power philanthropists are now projecting themselves as disinterested reform partners rather than who they are -- the most powerful, top-down, non-governmental (unelected) shapers of global social/economic policies in history. Not to mention, being a shell for tax avoidance for the world's richest man. 

Melinda's quote comes from yesterday's Washington Post, supposedly signaling some introspection and a strategic adjustment of Gates Foundation investments in Common Core. The changes come in the face of mounting criticisms of corporate-style school reform and of the foundation itself. Much of that criticism is coming from black community organizations, the opt-out movement, and from within oppositional forces within the Democratic Party as election time draws near.  

Some are anticipating a shift away from current reform policies with the election of Hillary Clinton. I'm not counting on it. 

It seems like every five years or so, faced with stinging criticism from those most affected by their reform interventions, Gates Foundation leaders go through similar self-adjustments while sticking to their same overall theory of change.They tweak their top-down reform funding strategies, admit they've bet on the wrong horse, leave old projects hanging, and promise next time, to be "better listeners". But how real is their self-crit? It's usually limited being "too impatient" or "too naive" about great amount of time it takes to bring the uninsightful, unwashed masses to buy into their interventions. 

And here's the latest:

CHICAGO — Melinda Gates said she and her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, learned an important lesson from the fierce pushback against the Common Core State Standards in recent years. Not that they made the wrong bet when they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting the education standards, but that such a massive initiative will not be successful unless teachers and parents believe in it.

“Community buy-in is huge,” Melinda Gates said in an interview here on Wednesday, adding that cultivating such support for big cultural shifts in education takes time. “It means that in some ways, you have to go more slowly.”

 That does not mean the foundation has any plans to back off the Common Core or its other priorities, including its long-held belief that improving teacher quality is the key to transforming public education. “I would say stay the course. We’re not even close to finished,” Gates said.

In the past, some within the philanthropy community have charged that Gates has effectively bought the silence of would-be critics. 

Seattle Times addressed the issue in 2008:

“The danger isn’t in what people do tell you—it’s in what they don’t,” departing foundation CEO Patty Stonesifer warned in the 2007 annual report.

In other words, Stonesifer says, the Gates Foundation needs honest feedback and criticism to help it figure out how best to improve the health of the world’s poor, boost food production in Africa and improve schools in the U.S.

Honesty can be hard to come by, though, when you’re handing out staggering amounts of cash. And some question how sincere the foundation is about listening to critics.

“They’re not really fostering tough debate,” said Pablo Eisenberg, a columnist for The Chronicle of Philanthropy and senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. “They have not solicited and gone after people who will tell them the truth.”

Last year, Bill Gates himself acknowledged the foundation’s struggles in a speech at an event in Seattle, marking the 20th anniversary of its Global Health initiative. He said, that on the measure of “which of these inventions would go on over time to actually save lives, I have to say at the time I was pretty naive about how long that process would take”. 

Gates pushing Common Core in Honduras.

Faced with increasing criticism of their health investments in third-world countries, Gates copped to "underestimating the effort required to implement new technologies in countries without basic services, including clean water and reasonable medical care".

But that hasn't stopped the foundation from pushing Common Core in underdeveloped countries like Honduras. 

Naive? Really?

Remember when they ditched their $2B investment in high-school reform and small schools, claiming that their pet projects didn't produce fast enough results (standardized test scores)? Bill Gates' 2009 letter, which was posed as a self-critical evaluation, actually blamed the Gates-funded schools themselves for not being "radical" enough and indirectly, the teacher unions for not being faithful to his top-down model. 

These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.

The letter marked the foundation's shift away from public school reform to a one-track strategy of underwriting privately-run charters and the management organizations that run them. It's a strategy that ultimately helped widened educational inequality and accelerated school re-segregation.

After that it was on to "teacher quality" and the pushing teacher evals based mainly on test scores. But then...

The foundation... publicly acknowledged pitfalls in overemphasizing test scores and argues that while test scores should play a role in teacher evaluations, those evaluations must also give teachers the feedback they need to improve through classroom observations, student surveys or other subjective methods.

It seems that now the foundation is trying to adapt it's investment strategies to the new reform environment under the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) which shifts more decision-making power from the federal level, back to the states. Now, along with pouring dollars into national Common Core efforts and placing foundation people inside the D.O.E., Gates will have to push reform interventions state by state making it that much tougher to gain quick results.

Gates said the foundation also will work to persuade states to invest in databases that gather information about students, tracking their backgrounds, experiences and performance from preschool to college and career.

But Gates self-critique misses the mark. It's not about you going more slowly so that school community folks can finally get it. It's not about teachers and parents "believing" in Gates' initiatives. Gates-ism is not a religion. Neither is it about getting a "buy-in" for reform products -- in this case the aforementioned "big cultural shift". BTW, the term buy-in should be banished forever from reform lexicon along with every other cliche that sees reform as a commodity.

But are they betting on the right horse?

Not buying-in is Black Lives Matter

This from EdWeek:

Organized under the Movement for Black Lives, the agenda also targets some of the most powerful philanthropic backers of the charter school sector—the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—for bankrolling what it calls "an international education privatization agenda".

According to WaPo:

Last week, the Movement for Black Lives — a coalition of dozens of black-led organizations, including the Black Lives Matter Network — released a policy platform that decried the Gates Foundation as part of a “systematic attack” on public schools that “strips Black people of the right to self-determine the kind of education their children receive.” It called for an effort to invest in, not close, struggling schools serving black children, and it accused education policymakers of listening to unelected philanthropists instead of students, teachers and parents.

That critique will be a tough one for Gates to tweak.

For more background, take a look at this WaPo piece by Lindsey Layton from 2014: "How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution." Here my favorite line from Layton's piece...

Gates grew irritated in the interview when the political backlash against the standards was mentioned. “These are not political things,” he said. “These are where people are trying to apply expertise to say, ‘Is this a way of making education better?’ ”

The one thing you don't want to do is get this man "irritated".

What is the BIA and what the hell are they doing in Uganda?

Shannon May

Some might see it as the great white hope coming to save and fix the poor in Africa. I see it as cultural imperialism -- taking the worst aspects of American corporate-style school reform and spreading, with the might and power of power-philanthropy and the World Bank, to countries that can least afford to resist.

Bridge International Academies (BIA) is a for-profit organization active in privatizing public education in several African countries including Liberia, Kenya and Uganda. They have already built 412 for-profit schools in Kenya in six years. BIA co-founders, Shannon May and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, have raised more than $100 million from Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the  Omidyar Network (eBay founder Pierre Omidyar) to push their "Education in a Box" model in Africa.

According to the Washington Post:

BIA — which is supported by the World Bank; Pearson, the world’s largest for-profit education company; and billionaire education philanthropists Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, among others — operates a chain of for-profit schools in a few African countries, charging what it says is an average of $5 a month to families for high-quality nursery and primary education in places where public education is poor or nonexistent.

Curtis Riep, a Canadian doctoral student, doing research about BIA, on behalf of Education International (a federation of 396 associations and unions) was recently arrested by Ugandan authorities. Riep was arrested on charges of "impersonating a BIA officer" and trespassing, but was cleared of all charges and released two days later. But the episode put a spotlight on BIA and how the company works.

According to Education International, the whole affair was a set-up by BIA in order to intimidate Riep and any other researchers from shining a light the group's operations.

The Bridge formula is designed to be replicable. Its 5,000 trained teachers read scripted lessons from e-reader tablets. Parents pay an average of $6 per pupil, and have access to a 24-hour hotline.

May, who earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from UC Berkeley, explains the formula, referred to here as "Academies in a box" or "McDonaldization".

Instead of hiring expensive teachers with degrees, Bridge contracts experts to develop scripted lessons that instructors follow on computer tablets. Lessons are identical for each grade, down to the words of encouragement instructors give their pupils. It’s so streamlined that all the gears in the institution—lessons, attendance, time sheets, tuition payments, and teacher oversight—can be conducted with cheap mobile phones, cutting human administration to a bare minimum.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it. Not wonder Gates is enthralled.

Power Philanthropy -- The NRA of WA charter schools

Billionaire charter school power-philanthropists Bill Gates, Reed Hastings (left), Alice Walton, Paul Allen.

Joanne Barkan's power-structure research has been cited on the pages of this blog on several occasions. Now she's written another scathing expose of power philanthropy, "Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State, and the Nuisance of Democracy" in NPQ,

Barkan takes a deeper look in how Gates and fellow philanthro-billionaires leveraged their tax-exempt foundation money to force privately-run charters down the throats of Washingtonians after the leadership of both houses of the WA legislature opposed the 2012 charter bill. When it died in committee, the activist billionaires stepped in, with Gates in the lead, to finance yet another charter school ballot initiative—the state’s fourth.

According to the Washington Times, their lobbying campaign to save Washington’s charters spent nearly $1.9 million to influence the public and state lawmakers.

Writes Barkan:

Call it charitable plutocracy—a peculiarly American phenomenon, increasingly problematic and in need of greater scrutiny. Like all forms of plutocracy, this one conflicts with democracy, and exactly how these philanthropists coordinate tax-exempt grantmaking with political funding for maximum effect remains largely obscure. 

The Washington charter saga highlights the workings of charitable plutocracy. Multibillionaire philanthropists use their personal wealth, their tax-exempt private foundations, and their high-profile identities as philanthropists to mold public policy to a degree not possible for other citizens.

Among the biggest funders of the WA charter school push were, Gates ($1 million), Alice Walton (from Arkansas, $600,000), Mike and Jackie Bezos (parents of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, $500,000), venture capitalist Nicolas Hanauer ($450,000), Katherine Binder (chair of EMFCO Holdings, $200,000), Paul Allen’s Vulcan, Inc. ($100,000), and Reed Hastings, from California (Netflix cofounder and KIPP charter schools board member, $100,000).

These guys are not "do-gooders".

Educator tells climate criminal Exxon: 'Hands off our kids and our schools'

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.” -- Fortune Magazine

Rex Tillerson is chief executive of ExxonMobil, possibly the world's worst climate criminal and catalyst for war and social/economic instability in the Middle East and around the globe. It's a corporation that spends millions each year to run climate denial campaigns.

New York State's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is currently investigating Exxon to determine whether the corporation lied to the public about climate change, or to investors about the risks to the oil industry.

Yet somehow, Tillerson and Exxon still feel qualified and on moral enough ground to bash public schools and debase students as a way of promoting corporate-style reform, and particularly, Common Core and its testing regimen. 

To Tillerson and several other of the wealthiest corporate execs including Bill Gates, public schools are little more than a publicly-financed training ground for the corporate labor pool. Putting schools at the service of the global corporate race to the top, has also been the mantra of Arne Duncan and the D.O.E. for the past seven years. To them, schools are a business, preparing and marketing students to the corporations -- and, according to Tillerson, turning out an inferior product. This, even though Exxon and the 12 other giant petro-corps contribute little in the way of taxes to support public ed.

Exxon gets $600 million in annual federal tax breaks. Every effort to eliminate these breaks—recently pushed by Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Robert Menendez of New Jersey—can't get through Congress. Surprise, surprise. Exxon pays an effective corporate income tax rate of about 13 percent, just over a third of the nominal rate of 35 percent. (Daily Kos)

Tillerson's remarks have drawn a sharp rebuke from parents and educators. Ed activists are joining environmentalists in calling for a boycott of Exxon products. They make the point that the job of public schools is not to supply a workforce for Big Business, but rather to educate young people to participate fully in American democratic society.

Effects from 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill still being felt.

Leading the counter-attack and defending public education is veteran educator and director of the Network for Public Education, Carol Burris.

In a sharply-worded letter to Tillerson, Burris writes:

Please leave our children alone. We do not need you to develop them as products. They are neither kerogen nor shale.

Your Dickensian thinking has been “outed” and this holiday season, you are as welcome as the ghost of Christmas past. The common-folk for whom the Core you adore was designed, do not like it—only 24 percent of public school parents want it used in their school. And they certainly do not like to hear their children referred to as “defective products.” Mr. Tillerson, you have made the mommies and daddies mad.

I understand their reaction must confound you. In a world in which your corporation has been declared a person, one might mistake human children for products to consume.

When we humanize the inanimate, it is easy for the humanity of the animate to slip away.
But let me make this clear — our children are not products for your purchase. You, and the captains of industry (or whatever you call yourselves this century), are not “the customers.” School is not a training camp to work on oilrigs, to pump gas or design lubricants. There is just enough democracy left to make students know they have choices, and more than enough parental commonsense left to know that community control of schools is slipping away.

We are so sorry to disappoint.

The story line is not as simple as the one told by Peter Elkind. The resistance against the Common Core is far more than a push from the right. Come visit New York. Parents don’t like it because their kids are frustrated and confused—it has been, from start to finish, a mess. Business and colleges cannot define their own desired academic outcome and then use it to map learning backwards. Kids do not grow backwards; they grow forwards. Learning progress is uneven. It intersects with social, developmental and biological factors, none of which can be ignored. Those who don’t know sludge from shinola when it comes to teaching kids sold you junk science.

I do thank you for your candid remarks, however. The curtain has once again been pulled back to expose Oz, and the resistance to the corporate reform agenda will grow. Like Arne Duncan’s awful “white suburban mom” comment, your reasoning on why we need the Common Core will surely be repeated again, and again, and again.

Mommies and daddies don’t forget.

You can read Peter Elkind's Fortune Magazine piece in its entirety here. 

The real force behind D.C. school 'reform'

She's the wife of a media mogul, a friend of the Washington Post’s Graham family. She’s a philanthropist, adviser to public officials, and conduit to private foundations and investors in what has become her life’s work. In D.C., likely no private citizen is more involved in public education than Katherine Bradley.

City Paper's Jeffrey Anderson has written a feature story on D.C. socialite Bradley, calling her a "force multiplier" when it comes to the district's corporate-style school reform.

To me, she sounds a lot like D.C.'s version of New York's charter maven Eva Moskowitz who uses her clout to build her personal charter school empire and assail public schools and teacher unions.

Bradley’s primary advocacy vehicle is CityBridge Foundation, a nonprofit that distributed nearly $25 million in grants, scholarships, and donations from 2004 to 2013—mostly to charter schools and groups like Teach for America, which received $2.5 million according to tax filings.

Writes Anderson:

Like Bradley herself, the foundation is at the center of a constellation of private interests that are promoting charter schools in D.C. and around the country. The organization partners with TFA, Friends of Choice in Urban Education, and Charter Board Partners, and counts among its “Thought Partners” the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Two of the most politically challenging education initiatives in recent years have been public school closures and the effort to secure chartering authority for Supt. Kaya Henderson (Michelle Rhee's former deputy).

Rhee’s departure in 2011 did not faze Bradley. She embraced Rhee’s protege Kaya Henderson and co-chaired the education committee of the transition team for Fenty’s successor, Vincent Gray, who embraced Henderson as well. Bradley’s alliance with Graham, a fellow philanthropist and low-key civic force, provided a sounding board in the Post, which has heavily endorsed gains in math, reading, and science through charter schools such as KIPP D.C. Graham and Bradley sit on the KIPP board. 

GREAT QUOTE... Former Wilson High School teacher and activist Erich Martel says such coziness among philanthropists, the private sector, and public officials reminds him of Plato’s “Cave,” an allegory in which captives view shadows on a wall as reality, because it’s all they see. For your average parent, Martel says, in an interview last year for this story, it’s often impossible to tell how change comes about: “How does one determine who influences whom? It’s the same people talking to each other.”

Making the case against power philanthropy

This is the second time I've posted excerpts from this 2013 article which originally appeared in Dissent Magazine.

Joanne Barkan is on the case of the new breed of muscle philanthropists who hide their obscene wealth in tax-sheltered foundations and use it to exercise unaccountable displays of power over public education and all aspects of public life. She makes the case that the super-rich don’t need billions of dollars in tax relief annually to exert their will in the public sphere.

Writes Barkan:

One hundred years later, big philanthropy still aims to solve the world’s problems—with foundation trustees deciding what is a problem and how to fix it. They may act with good intentions, but they define “good.” The arrangement remains thoroughly plutocratic: it is the exercise of wealth-derived power in the public sphere with minimal democratic controls and civic obligations.

Power philanthropists exercise greater control than ever over public ed. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have taken the lead, but, says Barkan, other mega-foundations have joined in to underwrite the self-proclaimed “education reform movement.” Some of them are the Laura and John Arnold, Anschutz, Annie E. Casey, Michael and Susan Dell, William and Flora Hewlett, and Joyce foundations.

The so-called reforms include: privately-operated charter schools; "Parent Trigger" laws; using students’ scores on standardized tests to evaluate teachers and award bonuses; abolishing teacher tenure; and ending seniority as a criterion for salary increases, layoffs, and transfers.

Barkan proposes a list of reforms that would rein in the excesses of the giant foundations reduce their leverage in civil society and public policymaking while increasing government revenue.

Read her entire article, Plutocrats at Work: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy, in the latest issue of Dissent.

Mayoral control of schools? Consider Kevin Johnson.

K.J. with pals Arne Duncan and Arnold Schwarzenegger at a 2009 rally in Sacramento. Photo via AP

The rising star, it seems, set up a fake government—and some people are starting to notice.

If any city is still contemplating turning their schools over to mayoral one-man rule, this portrait of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson should provide the cure.

Dave McKenna writes in Deadspin about K.J.'s attempt to set up "a fake government".

According to McKenna, the mayor is replacing civil servants with cronies funded by the Wal-Mart empire and tasked with "the twin purposes of working to abolish public education and bring in piles of cash for Kevin Johnson".

McKenna writes:

Johnson is husband to Michelle Rhee, the controversial school-privatization activist, and there is considerable evidence that their shared desire to turn public schools into engines of profit for private actors is what has driven much, if not most, of Johnson’s more recent wrongdoing. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, he’s enjoyed the profile and appointments of a national figure on the make: public appearances with President Barack Obama, portrayal as a latter-day Metternich by The New York Times, and the patronage of serious players like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates.

 McKenna has been on the trail of K.J. and Rhee for a while. Here's his piece from a year ago.
Kevin Johnson's Grifter Wife Returns To The Scene Of A Scandal

Rhee left her Stand For Children organization a year ago to go to work for a fertilizer company.  No Shit!

Wall St. public school strategy: Loot, pillage, burn...

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va). - Reuters

The Senate has passed an amendment to new proposed federal legislation, which would steer hundreds of millions of dollars intended for impoverished school districts and classrooms, into the pockets of Wall Street consultants. The legislation, authored by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) was tucked into the Senate version of a massive K-12 education funding bill currently up for congressional reauthorization.

Among the chief proponents of the congressional bill was the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington, D.C., think tank that is closely associated with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Bank of America, which made fees off of school district swap deals made in Chicago and Denver, has donated at least $50,000 to the Center for American Progress. Other major donors to the Center for American Progress include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given at least $500,000, and the Walton Family Foundation (of the Walmart fortune), which has also given at least $500,000 to the think tank. Both the Walton and Gates foundations have partnered with the Boston Consulting Group.

David Sirota at IBT is hot on the trail. He writes;

As budget-strapped Chicago follows a mass school closure with a new plan to layoff more than 1,400 teachers, one set of transactions sticks out: the city’s moves to refinance $1 billion in debt through complex financial instruments called swaps. The deals were spearheaded over the last few years by financial advisory firms brought in by the city to help find money saving efficiencies. Instead of saving money, though, the Windy City took a big hit: The school system has lost more than $100 million on the transactions and has paid millions in fees to its financial consultants.

 Chicago is not alone. School districts across the country have been increasingly relying on high-priced consultants and Wall Street firms for financial and management advice. While proponents say many of the ensuing consultant-driven initiatives have resulted in cost savings, critics note that other initiatives have resulted in investment losses, layoffs and school closures. What is clear is that school districts’ reliance on outside advisers has created business opportunities for the financial industry. And now, thanks to an amendment to federal education legislation moving through Congress, that lucrative market for financial and consulting could become even more flush with cash -- specifically, with federal money meant for impoverished school districts.

The amounts that consulting firms can earn for work on public school policy can be eye-popping. In Philadelphia, the Boston Consulting Group was reportedly paid $230,000 per week for its work pushing for privatized education services and closures of up to 88 schools in the city. 

No wall left between corporate world and venture philanthropy

“There’s a reason why corporate America exists, and there’s a reason why philanthropic organizations exist,” said David Cornfield, a professor of pediatric pulmonary medicine at Stanford University. “When that distinction becomes invisible, it becomes very difficult to know where philanthropy ends and venture capital begins.” -- Washington Post

Cornfield was responding to the rise of venture philanthropy in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals where non-profits like the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation have earned billions through their investments in drug companies. While such investments have sometimes led to research breakthroughs, the trade-offs raise serious question about the power and politics of big philanthropic organizations.

Robert Beall, now in his fourth decade at the CF Foundation and one of the top-earning chief executives in the nonprofit world (Beal makes more than $1 million/year), says he is aware of the concerns and criticism prompted by his $3.3 billion Kalydeco deal last fall. Among them: that such a financial bonanza might discourage future contributions from supporters; that the foundation should be sharing its billions more directly with patients; that the group should have pushed harder to lower the price of Kalydeco and subsequent drugs.

There's no bigger player in the field of venture philanthropy that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has used its public investments to unduly influence public education policies. But it's the foundation's' profitable private investments in giant global corporations, many of which have done great harm in the world, that have drawn the greatest scrutiny.

HERE'S THE LATEST... The Gates Foundation is under investigation in a 2014 India Supreme Court case for funding Merck’s HPV vaccine trials of Gardasil, despite knowing the serious adverse reactions, injuries and deaths caused by treatment. According to a report by published by Narayana Kumar in The Economic Times of India, several tests had been conducted in 2009 on 16,000 school girls between the ages of 9 and 15 in Andhra Radish, India. Through the vaccine trials, 120 girls became seriously ill and seven died. Those who fell ill suffered from adverse reactions to the vaccination and experienced symptoms including seizures, severe stomachaches, headaches and mood swings. Consent forms to oversee the HPV vaccination were illegally signed by wardens from the hostels where the young girls resided or by illiterate parents via their thumbprint. Many young girls and their parents did not understand the tests or the risks entailed until they were significantly involved in the trial.

Gates $2.3B driving Common Core as a 'de facto and de jure national school curriculum'

The new curriculum driven into law by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Common Core Standards, is a product of massive spending on an unprecedented historical level by Bill Gates.

Guerin Lee Green at the North Denver News reports that Gates has spent $2.3 billion pushing the Common Core. More than 1800 grants to organizations running from  teachers unions to state departments of education to political groups like the National Governor’s Association have pushed the Common Core into 45 states, with little transparency and next to no public review.

The Common Core now represents a de facto and de jure national school curriculum, something theoretically prohibited by federal law. But the Common Core comes with common high-stakes tests and common textbooks, making the standards far more than standards.

The Gates involvement, profiteering by testing publishers like Pearson and the heavy-hand of federal coercion in the Common Core has aroused political opposition from right and left, as well as from education experts who have called the standards inappropriate developmentally, pushing young children into material they aren’t ready for.

According to NDN, private groups like the Aspen Institute, the Colorado Legacy Foundation, Colorado Children’s Campaign, and Stand for Children received millions in Gates grants at a time when Colorado schools were facing massive budget cuts.

The Colorado Department of Education is one of the largest Gates recipients in the nation, receiving more than $22 million to push the new standards, text books, PARCC testing and charter schools.

*Also see Lyndsey Layton's Washington Post piece: How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

The Man from Gates navigates across the edu-corporate complex.

Shelton

One of the key players in the Gates Foundation's Common Core drive was Jim Shelton. It was Bill Gates who placed Shelton as Arne Duncan's deputy at the D.O.E. in 2009. He followed a well-trod path from the foundation to the Obama administration.

Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from Gates; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; and general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee

But now Shelton's off to the corporate world, using his connections to sell technology to higher ed. He's been hired as 2U, Inc's (NASDAQ: TWOU) "chief impact officer" (whatever that is).

Pres.Obama had pledged to prohibit government employees from doing business with former employers. However, Shelton was granted a waiver to deal with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for which he worked for more than five years prior to joining the Obama administration.

At the D.O.E., Shelton led the Investing in Innovation Fund and a number of other grant programs. Before that, he was education program director at the Gates Foundation where he oversaw a portfolio worth between $2 billion and $3 billion. He also previously worked for the NewSchools Venture Fund and co-founded LearnNow, a school management company that later was acquired by Edison Schools. Before entering the education world, he worked at McKinsey & Company advising corporate CEOs.

Shelton's departure is just the latest in a wave of high-profile exits from the department as the Obama administration takes its final lap. Weiss, Ann Whalen, Carmel Martin, all of whom had a significant impact on the administration's education agenda, have moved in within the last year.

Whalen is off to join another Duncan deputy, Peter Cunningham at the Broad-funded Education Post. Weiss, who also came out of the NewSchools Venture Fund, was Duncan's Chief of Staff and directed his Race to the Top program. Now she calls herself, "an independent consultant". And Martin now serves as Executive Vice President for Policy at American Progress.

It's Gates' company Microsoft that needs a good "turnaround"

Bill Gates is fond of blaming the schools for failing to produce enough highly-skilled workers to grow the economy or enough properly-trained workers for his company. As if that is truly the purpose of PUBLIC education. Gates claims it's easier to find cures for malaria and other diseases than to “fix” American education.

Now that the economy is growing and recovering from the global financial collapse of the passed decade, shouldn't Gates be crediting the schools for the upswing? Instead, we get the news today that Gates' company Microsoft, despite its huge profits and its spending of billions on new acquisitions, is preparing to fire 18,000 workers in order for the company to "become more agile and move faster." 

About 12,500 professional and factory jobs will be cut. FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said the cuts were about double what Wall Street was expecting. But he said they were necessary to streamline operations and clean up a "bloated management structure".

"Under the Ballmer era, there were many layers of management and a plethora of expensive initiatives being funded that has thus hurt the strategic and financial position the company is in, especially in light of digesting the Nokia acquisition," says Ives

That's right, it's Gates' company -- not the schools -- that's in need of a turnaround. There's plenty of talent coming out of the public schools. Maybe Bill should give Microsoft a Gates grant to restructure itself. 

How world's richest man bought school reform

WaPo reporter Lyndsey Layton tells the story of how Bill Gates bought and paid for so-called school "reform".  He even got NEA and AFT leaders to buy-in to Common Core. 

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality...What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

Best quote in Layton's article ironically comes from right-wing Univ. of Arkansas prof Jay Greene:

“Really rich guys can come up with ideas that they think are great, but there is a danger that everyone will tell them they’re great, even if they’re not.” 

Ownership Society gathering at the Phoenician

At the Phoenician

Thanks to Gary Stager for the heads-up on the upcoming GSV Education Innovation summit, which he describes as a corporate takeover of public education being plotted in the open, is held at The Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale.

Stager writes:

The Phoenician is a monument to its builder, Charles Keating, a criminal who helped destroy the United States economy during the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1990s. Surrendering the future of public education to Jeb Bush and the greedy cynics partying with him in Arizona is as vulgar and misguided as trusting Charles Keating with government backed banks.

The sponsors list reads like an Ownership Society who's who list, including Gates, Pearson, Kaplan, McGraw... Well, you get the picture.

Speakers include: Jeb Bush, Chris Cerf, Reed Hastings, Penny Pritzker, Cami Anderson, Margaret Spellings, Tom VanderArk... Yuck!  Kind of a rogues gallery of privateers, charter hustlers, union busters and Bush bureaucrats.

Spears must be checked at the door.

I can almost hear Bill Gates saying, "What do you mean you don't want our money?"

Vicki Phillips, who runs the Gates Foundation’s education division, said her team is “disappointed by Randi’s decision.” -- Politico

Our big investment in school reform. "hasn't led to significant improvements." --Bill Gates

I'm still learning on this one, but I have some idea what it was that prompted Randi Weingarten and the AFT leadership to turn their back on millions of dollars in Gates funding. Politico's Caitlin Emma with help from Stephanie Simon report that the break came "after rank-and-file union members expressed deep distrust of the foundation’s approach to education reform." But that rank-and-file anger has been simmering in the union for years, ever since 2009 when the so-called Innovation Fund partnership was first sealed with a $2 million kiss from Bill and Melinda. So why now?

Of course, the revolt has grown louder these days, especially in N.Y. where thousands of union members are ready to go to the barricades in Albany over Common Core testing and teacher evaluation. Not to mention the  inner-Democratic Party battle is raging between Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio over charter school expansion which could spill out into the upcoming national elections.

Gates at 2010 AFT Convention

Resentment over Gates influence within the union has spread way beyond the small group of activists who first stormed out of the AFT convention in 2010, when Bill first unveiled his model for teacher development and his so-called Value-Added Model (VAM) of evaluation based largely on student test scores. In recent months, Gates has used that funding as a lever, threatening to pull it from districts who oppose VAM.

It was also at this convention where Gates expressed his disappointment with the small schools movement and explained why he had shifted funding away from creating smaller learning communities over the past decade, focusing instead on testing and teacher evaluation.

Our work in schools began with a focus on making high schools smaller, in the hope of improving relationships to drive down dropout rates and increase student achievement. Many of the schools we worked with made strong gains, but others were disappointing. The schools that made the biggest gains in achievement did more than make structural changes; they also improved teaching.

Bill & Randi at Dec. 2010 Newsweek interview

Soon after, Gates and Weingarten gave this joint interview to Newsweek which had the aura of a puppet show with Bill's hand operating Randi's mouth.

Weingarten: What we’re seeing is that the United States, instead of moving ahead, is actually stagnating. We’re basically in the same place we’ve been, and these countries have moved forward. They’ve spent a lot of time investing in the preparation and support of teachers. Many of them teach a common curriculum, very similar to the common standards that Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have been supporting. And they create the tools and conditions that teachers need to teach, and they have mutual respect and accountability.

Since then, Gates has handed over $11 million in AFT funding. Pocket change for Bill to be sure, but more than enough to influence union policy, despite Randi's denials. She still denies the obvious, saying she doesn't believe Gates funding influenced the Innovation Fund’s direction. Hopefully the rift with Gates will create space for her to move further on Common Core and other issues, as she appears to be slowly doing, if her appearance at last week's NPE Convention is any indication.

At the 2012 AFT Convention there were already indications of rank-and-file pressure on the leadership. First there was the presence of the Chicago delegation, led by CTU President Karen Lewis. Gates was nowhere in sight and Diane Ravitch gave the keynote.

Now Diane Ravitch blogs about the break:

[Randi] understands that many members of the AFT do not trust the Gates Foundation, do not like Bill Gates’ public statements such as encouraging larger class sizes, or his unwavering commitment to measuring teacher quality by student test scores, despite the lack of evidence for its efficacy. I welcome this change and thank Randi and the AFT for severing ties with the Gates Foundation. Gates and Pearson have bought most of American education. Those who represent teachers should be free of their influence.

That's a bit of an overstatement. The AFT hasn't actually severed its ties with the Gates Foundation, which, according to Politico, funds other union projects besides the Innovation Fund.

The AFT’s executive council hasn’t formally voted to reject Gates funding for other projects, but Weingarten said she would be very cautious about taking such grants. “I don’t want to say ‘never never ever ever,’” she said, but “this is a matter of making common bond with our members and really listening to the level of distrust they have in the philanthropies and the people on high who are not listening to them.”

We're still watching of course.

More from Davos

From Bloomberg

Filipino mogul Enrique Razon loathes rubbing shoulders with fellow billionaires in Davos. “It’s loaded with bloated self-importance,” the casino and cargo-terminal owner said in an interview today in the Swiss village, where he was wrapping up his second trip to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. “I’m here to do business, not save the world.” 

 Razon, who controls a $4.7 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is one of at least 80 billionaires in town. Most have spent their time attending panels on the state of the global economy, debating income inequality and attending parties with bankers.

Bill & Melinda are there

Gates insists the world's a better place than it used to be. For him and his 84 friends, maybe. The world’s 85 wealthiest people hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion, or half the world population, according to a new report from global anti-poverty group Oxfam.

The global economy has become so skewed in favour of the rich that economic growth in many countries today “amounts to little more than a ‘winner takes all’ windfall for the richest.” 

Telling the world's poorest that they are better off that they were 50 years ago, just won't cut it. As for Gates' own benevolence -- Injustice Facts Tweets, "100% of Bill Gates' donations are tax write-offs, 94% of his donations go to paying staff and corporate research, 4% goes to needy people."

See my note to Cong. Eric Cantor about his Davos junket.

Norway fund won't invest in Walmart because they breach 'human rights & labor rights'. Gates objects.

Report from Davos where the super-rich and powerful come to party and to strategize.

Norway has a population slightly larger than the state of South Carolina but its government-run wealth fund has $833 billion in assets, making it one of the largest investors in the world. It owns 1.25 percent of all the shares worldwide, 2.5 percent in Europe, and it has a unique ethical mandate. That sees it avoid companies such as Walmart, which Norway deemed to have breached "human rights and labour rights."

But Bill Gates wants to change all that. The world's richest man is pushing for a profits-only investment strategy for Norway's Government Pension Fund Global. What does he have to say about Norwegian investments? Plenty.

The Gates Foundation, the world's largest, has deep ties to the Walton Family Fund. Taken together, they make up the largest group of investors in corporate-style school reform, including privately-run charters schools. Neither will sign on to current moves to make foundations act in line with ethical standards of social equity or environmental protection.