Bill Gates made billions and billions of dollars in the field of computer technology, helping to transform the world in the process. He’s an innovator. He’s a disrupter. He’s the savviest of savvy businessmen. He’s been successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams of success or avarice.
So Gates thought, why not put his entrepreneurial genius and hundreds of millions of dollars a year to work innovating and disrupting and transforming the field of education? How hard can it be?
Pretty hard, he discovered.
Gates has been pouring money into his educational experiments in this country since 2000. Overall, I’d give his efforts a grade of C. Not much help, no grave harm. I’d give what he’s learned about education a B. He now understands he doesn’t know as much about education as he thought he did.
Bill and Melinda Gates released their annual letter answering The 10 Toughest Questions We Get. Question #2 is, “What do you have to show for the billions you’ve spent on U.S. education?” Their answer employs the couple’s usual upbeat tone, but the efforts they describe are less than encouraging, especially given that, “Our foundation spends about $500 million a year in the United States, most of it on education.”
A few telling excerpts from their answer:
“One thing we learned is that it’s extremely hard to transform low-performing schools.”
“We have also worked with districts across the country to help them improve the quality of teaching. . . . But we haven’t seen the large impact we had hoped for.”
“How did our teacher effectiveness work do on these three tests? Its effect on students’ learning was mixed.”
Some progressive educators question Gates’ motives. I don’t, or not as much as others do, anyway. I don’t think Gates has a political agenda along the line of, say, the Walton family or the Koch brothers or the DeVoses. I believe Gates honestly wants to improve the country’s education system, without a whole lot of preconceived, ideological notions about what that means. That’s why he’s been reasonably honest about his failures, while others like the Waltons and the Kochs and the DeVoses happily lie through their teeth about how successful their efforts have been.
Gates thought small schools were the answer. In 2009, he admitted, “Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way.” He was sure Common Core, which he backed with hundreds of millions of dollars, would improve achievement. He doesn’t talk much about it anymore. And as he said in his recent letter, his success at transforming existing schools, improving instruction and increasing student learning have been minimal.
We’re up to our necks in recently minted billionaires in the high tech and investing fields, Gates among them, who think their monetary success make them geniuses who know how to fix anything, and K-12 education looks to many of them like the lowest hanging fruit. Many of them think if they pluck the fruit from what they see as the rotting tree of government and replant its seeds in the fertile fields of private enterprise, it will grow and flourish, nurtured by the invisible hand of the marketplace. They demonstrated their own success in the marketplace, so they figure they can employ the same magic to turn schools into the educational equivalent of successful tech companies and hedge funds. Most of them are far more interested in charter schools and private school vouchers than in public education. Gates is a charter school supporter as well, but because he’s less of a free market ideologue than many of the others, he puts a great deal of effort into district-based public education a well.
An objective look at the work of what Diane Ravitch calls “the billionaire boys club” doesn’t show they’ve gotten much educational bang for their bucks. Charter schools are better than district schools, except when they’re not. Voucher students do better than similar students in public schools, except when they don’t. When you get rid of the cherry picking and look at the big picture, the educational effects of the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the “education reform”/privatization movement from the billionaires’ pockets are pretty much a wash.
Teaching children and improving schools are much tougher propositions than most people outside the field of education understand. And another thing a lot of people fail to understand, including many educators: education is not an effective way to fix the country’s problems related to poverty when it’s working by itself. But lessening the burdens of poverty is the best way there is to improve student achievement, and it’s even more effective when schools improve as well.
When it comes to the study of poverty, I’m going to give Bill Gates a B+ on his midterm exam, though I don’t know what his final grade will be. For the first time, he and Melinda are taking a close look at poverty in this country. They still believe in the importance of education in helping low income students improve their lives, and they’re right about that in many instances, though not, unfortunately, as a general rule. But when the Gateses recently took a first-hand look at poverty, here’s what they concluded.
“The visit also made us think through other ways we could help people get out of poverty. The issues of economic mobility in America are deeply intertwined: education, employment, race, housing, mental health, incarceration, substance abuse.”
What will they do with their new-found understanding that education is just one component of helping people rise out of poverty? They’re not sure.
“We haven’t decided how what we’ve been learning might affect our giving, but it has certainly had an effect on us. We will share more about our approach when we have settled on a strategy.”
This teacher hopes the Gateses’ educations move them to work on some of the core problems of poverty in this country and open them to using more enlightened strategies in helping schools improve students’ lives.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2018.
Too bad we don’t have the economic capacity as a nation to provide every citizen with the highly educational experience the Gates family has had: “Here are several billion dollars. Hire a bunch of highly educated people and invest it in K-12 education for several decades. Draw your own conclusions.”
Regarding your own policy preferences, David, I’m curious to know if they are experientially or ideologically drive. You write, “lessening the burdens of poverty is the best way there is to improve student achievement.” How, specifically, do you know that? Have you actually observed, in your own direct experience, over the course of a decade or more, differences between families that receive increases in income and families that remain at the same income level, but transfer their children to schools with better teachers and curricula? Have you observed, in your own direct experience, the effect of public funds applied in public district schools versus the effect of the same amounts applied in (non-profit) charter and (non-profit) private settings? If so, I would love to read those stories in lengthy, narrative-form blog posts.
Some of us who HAVE had direct experience in Arizona as teachers and parents in public district, non-profit charter, and non-profit private schools find ourselves uncertain, based on what you have written to date, that you know with certainty and in a universally applicable way what the “best way to improve student achievement” is. We also have about as hard a time believing in the advisability of your education funding policy preferences as Bill Gates has these days believing in the ideas that motivated some of his earlier philanthropic endeavors.
Lessen poverty? Redistribution right? Throw it on the scrap heap with confiscation of guns. Can’t trust public schools or the FBI, or the mainstream media. We will solve the problems ourselves.
Thinking further about your statement that “Lessening the burdens of poverty is the best way to improve student achievement.”
“Lessening the burdens of poverty” is something we do (or should do) because it is morally the RIGHT thing to do, not because doing it “is the best way to improve student achievement.” If you make that ideologically driven and unverifiable statement to the public in promoting the policies you favor, and the policies, when implemented, do not have the achievement-heightening effects you promise for them (which is very likely, if the implementation of these policies is not accompanied by improvements to services in schools serving low income communities) you will lose public support for good policies you have chosen to justify with the wrong (unverifiable and inappropriately utilitarian) assertions.
But more importantly, when you continually assert, as you have, year in, year out, that income levels are the largest factor in determining achievement as measured by test scores, one collateral effect is that some potential pressure is taken off of institutions serving lower income families to make changes that absolutely will give the kids they serve, regardless of their income levels, improved chances of learning and achieving. Staffing schools with experienced, fully qualified teachers helps. Good curricula help. Avoiding the mis-use of testing (as much as possible within the framework of requirements set at the state and federal level) helps. Textbooks available when needed help. Sane disciplinary policies uniformly enforced and teachers who have been trained in effective disciplinary methods help.
School districts that do not have these things in place reliably and uniformly in every school (and we have plenty of them in Tucson) have no business marketing themselves to the public…
http://tucson.com/news/local/tusd-requests-for-student-info-raise-privacy-concerns-at-charter/article_af9dcf42-278a-57b1-85f7-093e084c2073.html
…especially when they have consistently made choices that undermine their ability to recruit and retain qualified staff.
http://tucson.com/news/local/long-rumored-tusd-blacklist-revealed-many-on-it-for-little/article_5d49cd2b-5c32-54a8-a287-01ee62c82371.html
http://tucson.com/news/local/columnists/steller/tim-steller-tusd-teachers-money-balanced-district-s-books/article_89ba1255-1cde-51a2-9e24-f05bd0464df0.html
I don’t know any policy program on the right or the left that could be applied in every locality in the U.S. to have uniformly good effects, but I do know this: in a city that has a school district serving more than 40,000 students that has the kind of inexcusable, ongoing mismanagement TUSD does, the “Democratic” Party has no business pushing public policy that undermines underserved constituents’ ability to access alternative schools.
http://tucson.com/news/local/group-submits-petitions-to-halt-expanded-school-voucher-program/article_a4b77b7d-0606-5fde-850e-c1a8ba317bd1.html
Common Core education is pure socialism at work. The State imposes “standards” that treat all students equal and ignore and discard parental rights. Here are 9 more reasons why Common Core is bad for children.
https://www.tfpstudentaction.org/blog/9-reasons-why-common-core-is-bad-for-education
Keep America free. Fight Common Core’s socialist encroachment.
For better or for worse, billions of dollars can have less power and influence than teachers’ unions and local laws which protect incompetent teachers.
Steve Jobs revolutionized six different industries by thinking “outside of the box.” Bill Gates showed that he is incapable of getting out of the box until it’s on fire by ridiculing Jobs ideas on a number of occasions and ridiculing the whole idea of the internet.
Gates is doing the same thing in education. The verdict is in on Common Core. Common Core was fully implemented by 2011 and from 2011 to 2015, U.S. combined math and reading scores fell for the first time ever- ever. Yet, Gates sticks to the notion that having classrooms teach to one point on the academic spectrum is healthy despite a ton of research showing much higher gains for differentiated classrooms.
This “in the box” thinking permeates everything about the Gates Foundation and its projects. Think about it, research shows that children at the tenth percentile read only 2 minutes a day and at the 90th percentile, only 20 minutes a day at 5th grade.
How hard would it be to create a school where every child reads at least 40 minutes a day? Pretty hard, but Gates isn’t even trying. No other variable is more correlated with outcomes than reading. $26 billion and he isn’t even trying.
Gates dropped out of college and became wealthy because free enterprise allows for the freedom to create. That doesn’t lessen educations value. And to say that the Walton’s, Devos, and Koch clans have an agenda is true; they want kids to get and education and rise from poverty. You skin color doesn’t determine weather you will be poor or rich, but the family structure and culture does. We can pour more money into education, but until we reach into the soul we won’t be effective. It is a moral crisis where the absence of faith and fathers are filled with drugs, gangs, violence and poverty.
“The Burden of Poverty.” The phrase is in many ways correct, but is far short of defining the burden to be lifted. If the burden were straw, which straw was it that broke the camel’s back?
In discussion with my son, now a professor at an eastern university, he pointed to differences in how, in or close to poverty, my three sons were raised, equating the acquisition of cash and raise in economic status, to how each was educated. All have different and useful adult lives, but getting there was not easy, and HOW their public education system schooling was accepted was directly proportional to family time invested in learning and the attitudes toward teaching at home.
I do not mean home education — but how we viewed, aided and added to the teaching presented in public schools while at home. For my PhD son before school age, he daily was read to and was basically reading a-systematically when he got to school. Time was well spent at home with my wife not working. We had little furniture, ate regularly and made bills, but little else.
By the time my second son arrived wifey had a part-time job and only read to the boys on occasion, but second son’s brilliance let him pick up and surpass reading expectations well beyond even gifted program expectations. By the time third son arrived my spouse and I were working full time and reading to the kids at home stopped, as did follow-up to public education at home in uncoordinated off hours. Third son was not reading up to snuff until 8th grade.
Their later life careers are, to me at least, evidence of the burden of poverty being lack of time and skill in how family adults MUST add to the picture of how a complete education is obtained. This is not a call for a one parent working home — but a realization that means need to be met in aiding HOW adults in family settings can support and augment what is going on in pubic schools in addition to increasing their economic standing.
Very true CH. But over time the definition of poverty has evolved into something that 20 years ago would have been called middle class. health care expenses have contributed greatly to income erosion, maybe even more so after the Affordable Care Act proved to be even less affordable than the system we had.
Parents being involved really doesn’t cost anything and so many refuse to do it.