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".

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 real Common Core curriculum decision makers

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (NASDAQ:HMHC) is a global learning company dedicated to changing people’s lives by fostering passionate, curious learners. -- Business Wire

If you are wondering about how Common Core curriculum decisions are made and how agendas are set, this news might interest you.

From Edweek:

A major portion of Scholastic Corp.'s educational technology and services business will be purchased by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for $575 million in cash, in an agreement Scholastic announced today.

Scholastic's ed-tech business has been operating at a loss. In the last quarter reported, the company's ed-tech revenue declined 4 percent, to $34.3 million, while Scholastic's overall sales increased 2 percent in that quarter, according to results announced by the company on March 26. The ed-tech segment's operating loss increased by $1.7 million to a loss of $12.4 million, compared to an operating loss of $10.7 million in the prior year. 

The company attributed the decline mostly to lower math product sales and lower consulting revenues in its International Center for Leadership in Education unit. Sales of core literacy publishing product were essentially flat compared to the prior year; however, both new business and expansion sales of READ 180® stages, along with technology support services, were higher in the current quarter as compared to the prior year period, the company said.

Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is buying up- everything in sight related to Common Core. They've already acquired Channel One and Curiosityville. HMH is one of the biggest text/testing publishers cashing in on the booming Common Core market, along with Pearson and McGraw-Hill.

Perarson, a British conglomerate, continues to tout itself on its website as the world’s leading education company that operates in 80 countries, employs 40,000 people and generates 60 percent of its sales in North America.

Scholastic Inc., which bought the Weekly Reader from Readers Digest in 2012 only to end its publication a short time later, has been on the ropes the past few years. 

Pearson's Power Philanthropy

An investigation by POLITICO finds that testing giant, Pearson Foundation’s charitable work repeatedly has been intertwined with the Pearson corporation’s business interests, potentially in violation of tax laws. Pearson now says it will shut down the foundation, permanently and move all of its philanthropic giving in-house. This after having to pay millions in fines stemming from their unethical and illegal funding practices in New York.

The Pearson Charitable Foundation was set up as an independent nonprofit with a mission to improve teaching and learning around the globe. But it has depended almost entirely on tens of millions in contributions from its parent, global publishing giant Pearson.

According to POLITICO's Stephanie Simon, Pearson foundation has worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop online courses aligned with the Common Core with the intent of letting Pearson sell most of them nationwide.

Does Pearson's foundation gambit sound a bit familiar? A little like Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, maybe? Or Walmart and the Walton Fund? It should. Increasingly these mega-corporations are using their foundations, not only to hide profits from the tax man, but to push a political agenda that benefits their ideological pursuits as well as their bottom line. Who pays for all of this? We do.

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.” 

digedu rides the Common Core Express with Tullman's connections

Glenn Tullman and Rahm

When it comes to cashing in, there's nothing common about the Common Core.

digedu is a three-year-old company that's trying to ride the Common Core wave. The company uses tablets to "help schools customize courses" to students who often are at different academic levels. digedu is now used by 5,000 students in more than 40 schools in 12 states. About half the users are in Chicago, where the largest customer is Lane Tech Academic Center, a middle school on the North Side. Among digedu's biggest customers are charter schools like the misnamed Cesar Chavez Charter in D.C.

The company is run by Matthew Tullman, the 25-year-old nephew of  former Allscripts Inc. exec Glen Tullman who now runs tech venture fund 7wire and who in turn, has put more than $2.5 million into digedu. The company has 17 employees, a number Mr. Tullman plans to nearly double this year. He expects customers will grow slightly faster, fueled by the push toward “Common Core” education standards that he says will entice educators to consider new curriculum tools, such as digedu which claims to share more than 3,000 Common Core-aligned lessons

But how did this upstart company manage to pull down those Chicago contracts?

Well for one thing, rich Uncle Glenn is connected. He's a big-time contributor to the Democratic Party machine. As things go these days, that also makes him a patron of Republican candidate for governor, Bruce Rauner.

According to the Sun-Times:

Millionaire businessman Bruce Rauner, whose self-funding has meant his competitors are free to tap into unlimited money, was himself the beneficiary of a $250,000 contribution. It came from Glen Tullman, the former CEO of Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, according to a newly filed campaign report.

But wait, it gets better:

 Tullman’s donation, however, flags a different potential Republican primary issue for Rauner, who already has been criticized for being too chummy with Democrats. Records show Tullman has contributed to Democrats — including Gov. Pat Quinn. Tullman is the brother of major Democratic donor and Democratic National Committee Trustee Howard Tullman, who has donated to former President Bill Clinton and who is friends with — and was briefly the landlord of — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Wow! These Tullman's get around, don't they? You bet, it's good for business.

Common Core has turned into a testing fiasco

The education world is scrambling to avoid its own version of a full-scale HealthCare.gov meltdown when millions of students pilot new digital Common Core tests this spring, writes Caitlin Emma at Politico. 

The tests will be given on a massive scale: Roughly 4.2 million third through eighth graders will test the exams in math and English this spring, and 29 million students nationwide will use them starting next school year.

CTB/McGraw-Hill apologized last spring for interruptions after its digital testing service disrupted exams in Indiana and Oklahoma. About 3,000 students in Oklahoma lost their connections to the testing provider’s servers. And nearly 80,000 out of a half million Indiana students who took the company’s tests in the spring had their testing postponed and about 30,000 were kicked off of the testing platform on a single day of testing. One Indiana charter school has said the errors are to blame for its F grade from the state.

“There will be bumps in the first couple years,” said Jeff Livingston, senior vice president of education policy and strategic alliances at McGraw-Hill. “There’s no question in my mind about that … It’s an engineering problem and a policy problem.”

Yes, "bumps". But as Emma points out, those bumps will influence teachers’ and principals’ evaluations and other decisions about their jobs. Schools will be rated on the results. Students’ promotion to the next grade or graduation from high school may hinge on their scores.

Techies vie with ed conglomerates for a piece of the Common Core market

It's ed tech start-up companies vs. the oligopoly at Stanford conference.

Silicon Valley tech companies, conferencing at Stanford, are trying to become the "Facebook of education," writes Lauren Hepler in the Silicon Valley Business Journal ("Online kindergarten? Tech bets on K-12 disruption"). The potential for superprofits has Valley heads spinning.

Hepler points out that, overall, the market for education is massive. She says the $1.5 trillion US education industry accounts for roughly 10 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, or the second-biggest sector after healthcare,

After meeting with power philanthropist Bill Gates, tech entrepreneur Mick Hewitt, co-founder and CEO of MasteryConnect, sees the looming implementation of government “Common Core” standards for reading and math in elementary, middle and high schools as an unparalleled opportunity for startups in the field.

“I believe we are truly at an inflection point,” Hewitt said at last weeks K-12 education technology event hosted by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, or VLAB. “I would be wrong if I said the Common Core and the dollars around it haven’t driven a lot of the activity for us.”

But these techie startups are up against corporate conglomerates that continue to dominate the K-12 market, writes Hepler.

“There was one word that kept me and my co-founders up at night,” Hewitt said at the VLAB event Thursday as he clicked to a presentation slide emblazoned with a Monopoly-style logo that read “Oligopoly”

He explained that a “marriage to textbooks” sold to schools by companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill has for years blocked new entrants from providing educational alternatives.

But, Scott Drossos, the senior vice president of one-on-one learning for Pearson, said that although his company “has been accused of being acquisitive” — or buying up promising startups in the field — he sees monetization as a fundamental question not to be ignored.

Yes, monetization -- a keyword in the new lexicon of "public" education.

Gates on Common Core back in 2009

In his speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures, on July 21, 2009,  Bill Gates outlined a plan of action for legislators to adopt common education standards, which he claimed would help jump-start a sagging economy. “Difficult times can spark great reforms,” he stated, and the stimulus package funds present a great opportunity. With clear, consistent standards and robust data systems to evaluate teacher effectiveness, more students will have the chance to make the most of their lives.

When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.

Bill Gate$ buys into Common Core

Valerie Strauss writes in the Washington Post:

For an initiative billed as being publicly driven, the Common Core States Initiative has benefited enormously from the generosity of the private philanthropy of Bill and Melinda Gates. How much? About $150 million worth. Take a look at this list of grants, obtained from their foundation’s Web site. Note not only the amounts but the wide range of organizations receiving money. Universities. Unions. State education departments. Nonprofits. Think tanks. 

AFT got $4.4 million. NEA, only a million.

Hedge-fund vultures circling public ed

"This is a new frontier. The private equity guys and the hedge fund guys are circling public education." -- Diane Ravitch 

Stephanie Simon at Reuters reveals profiteers waiting in the wings to cash in on Common Core Standards. About 100 of gathered in a meeting last week at the University Club in Manhattan, billed as a how-to on "private equity investing in for-profit education companies." 

If they're as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They'll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it. 

"You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up," said Lytle, a partner at The Parthenon Group, a BostoThe conference last week at the University Club, billed as a how-to on "private equity investing in for-profit education companies," drew a full house of about 100.n consulting firm. "It could get really, really big."

In the venture capital world, transactions in the K-12 education sector soared to a record $389 million last year, up from $13 million in 2005. That includes major investments from some of the most respected venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, according to GSV Advisors, an investment firm in Chicago that specializes in education.

Education entrepreneur John Katzman urged investors to look for companies developing software that can replace teachers for segments of the school day, driving down labor costs.

"How do we use technology so that we require fewer highly qualified teachers?" asked Katzman, who founded the Princeton Review test-prep company and now focuses on online learning.

Common Core architect tied up with Rhee's group

Common Core has made for some strange bedfellows. Most Democrats support it. Lots of good educators, unions and civil rights organizations currently back  the idea of Common Core State Standards as an equity measure and alternative to current state standards. Others like Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier oppose their imposition by the DOE while others see it as another boondoggle for private curriculum contractors.

Things get really dicey when it comes to the high-stakes, standardized testing regimen that comes with CCSS. Even more so when you throw voucher supporters, anti-union and charter lobbyists into the mix,

Coleman

Now we learn some new things about Common Core architect and newly appointed president of the powerful College Board, David Coleman. For one thing, Coleman has been closely tied up with Michelle Rhee. He is listed as a director on the board of StudentsFirst, the anti-teacher, anti-union, school-privatization advocacy group begun by Rhee. Coleman is a former McKinsey consultant who was hired by the Gates Foundation.

"I helped the organization get started and have discussed with them that a new board will be beginning in June," Coleman told Edweek's Stephen Sawchuck.  Sawchuck goes on to quote StudentsFirst spokeswoman, Nancy Zuckerbrod, who said that the organization had planned for Coleman and the others to step down this summer.

Why pick Coleman initially?, I asked. "He's a really impressive guy," Zuckerbrod said. "Michelle is totally on board with the common core. She's a big fan."

Other groups that initially helped Rhee raise millions of dollars for StudentsFirst include the Broad Foundation, which gave about half a million in start-up funding, and  Education Reform Now, which is affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform.  DFER President Joe Williams told Sawchuck, that was done in the haste to get the StudentsFirst group set up before Rhee appeared on "Oprah" to formally announce its launch. 

Writes Sawchuck: 

Coleman, who was recently tapped to lead the College Board, has not weighed in on StudentsFirst's policy agenda, which includes such things as revamped teacher-evaluation systems, opening more charter schools, and supporting a limited number of school vouchers.

The take-away here -- the future of Common Core is certain to be a contentious one, as well it should be. 

Yong Zhao: Common Core = Uncommon Profits

University of Oregon professor Yong Zhao is an author and critic of current corporate reform policies in education. His new book, World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, will released by Corwin Press in August. The book includes three elements of an excellent education: personalized learning/student autonomy, product-oriented learning, and the globe as the campus.

Anthony Cody interviews Yong on his Living in Dialogue Blog, about the latest reform fad, Common Core standards. Yong says,

The Common Core Standards Initiative is having a great time, much like NCLB in its early days, with lots of money and lots of political power behind it. And of course there are many who would stand to make some money off and perhaps earn some political points from it as well and for these organizations and individuals the Common Core must continue. 

Read the complete interview here.