Bill Gates and Education

Obama and Gates Are Planning a Corporate Takeover of Public Education: The Public Money Will Continue But Public Voice and Public Oversight Will Be a Thing of the Past

"The Obama administration and Gates Foundation are orchestrating an effort to get every state to adopt a set of national standards for public elementary and secondary schools. These standards describe what students should learn in each subject in each grade. Eventually these standards can be used to develop national high-stakes tests, which will shape the curriculum in every school. National standards are a seductive but dangerous idea. People tend to support national standards because they imagine that they will be the ones deciding what everyone else should learn. Dictatorship always sounds more appealing when you fantasize that you will be the dictator." —Jay P. Greene, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, April 11, 2010

Bill Gates had the good fortune to attend private school, and he sends his children there, too. Yet the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist has a passion to fix America's public schools. Gates has been on a road show this year to promote the education documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,'" talking it up at its January premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere, including the Toronto International Film Festival... Directed by Davis Guggenheim, an Academy Award winner for his Al Gore global-warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," "Waiting for `Superman'" catalogs the ills of public schools, particularly in inner-city areas: Bloated bureaucracies, high dropout rates, low percentages of graduates going on to college, teachers unions that can put the interests of adults ahead of the needs of children. - The Associated Press, Microsoft's Gates joins 'Superman' school mission, September 22, 2010

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Eli Broad (and the Business and Governors' crew) feel qualified to dictate what we teachers should be doing with the children in our classrooms (none of whom any of the corporate-politicos have ever even seen). We are doomed if we allow this to happen. Shame on the media for not presenting a balanced view of the issue. People are fed the corporate line, and believe it since there exists a long history of denigrating teachers and the teaching profession in this country (just look at the pay scales!). I find it especially disturbing that Obama, whom I supported, is promoting what GW Bush began -- an attempt to dismantle the public system of education. - Sue Monaco, The Obama Version of Meritocracy, Huffington Post, February 23, 2010

What Arne Duncan prefers is revisionist history and this is useful to those in power, for they can often count on those who raise families and work for a living not to have a detailed historical understanding necessary to spot erroneous public-policy claims. With TV and corporate media devoted to celebrities and shallow commercial coverage of political and economic issues, those in power more than often get away with skillfully manipulating the public. Due to the lack of diverse voices and dissent, they are able to present historical reality from their myopic and self-serving perspectives as if their analysis was truth to be built on, when in fact it is an assemblage of rusty facts and pernicious assumptions cobbled together to present a counterfeit historical and contemporary reality they can then sell to the public while conjuring up solutions in the form of their own market-driven ideological agendas. - Danny Weil, Arne Duncan’s History Lesson to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT): Elevating the Teaching Profession?, Dissident Voice, January 3, 2010



July 13, 2010

The Perimeter Primate - If the teachers at the ATF convention on July 10, 2010, had any idea how much money Gates has put into developing non-unionized charter schools, and that his vision includes an extreme reduction in the membership -- and power -- of their union, they might not have been so willing to cheer for him. It appears to me that Weingarten is aiding and abetting Gates' undemocratic ways.

But like most Americans who aren't studying what is really going on, I'm sure 99.9% of the teachers were uninformed and clueless. They behaved like the people they are: typical Americans who were super-excited to see a famous celebrity. Seeing Bill Gates in person was the thrilling part of the convention that they later told their families about.

As an urban public school parent, supporter of teachers, and pro-public school activist, I believe that the larger concerns the resisters have are perfectly valid and deserve to be acknowledged and discussed -- at a venue other than in blogs. The opponents of today's "ed reform" desire to be heard but are constantly being ignored and shut out. They aren't wealthy enough to pay Charlie Rose to do a five-part series on their side of the story, like Eli Broad can.

Bill Gates is an unelected individual who has been manipulating public policy from behind the scenes by making use of his extreme wealth. His lack of willingness to engage in a transparent, public debate with people who oppose what he is doing -- and who do have legitimate opinions and concerns, as well as data and historical accounts to present -- is what makes it necessary for the resisters to react in a loud and angry way.

If Bill Gates is truly interested in doing what's best for America's public school future, he should purchase one hour of prime-time airtime and present a show featuring himself debate Diane Ravitch.

The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools

Originally Published on March 5, 2008

Jack Gerson and Steven Miller - The summary of "The Corporate Surge . . ."

It’s more than a year since we wrote “Exterminating Public Education" in response to the "Tough Choices or Tough Times" report of the National Commission on Skills in the Workplace.

That report, funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents, called for a series of measures including:

1. Replacing public schools with what the report called "contract schools," which would be charter schools writ large;
2. Eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards—their role would be to write and sign the authorizing agreements for the “contract schools;
3. Eliminating teacher pensions and slashing health benefits; and
4. Forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed (i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16).

These measures, taken together, would effectively cripple public control of public education. They would dangerously weaken the power of teacher unions, thus facilitating still further attacks on the public sector. They would leave education policy in the hands of a network of entrepreneurial think tanks, corporate entrepreneurs, and armies of lobbyists whose priorities are profiting from the already huge education market while cutting back on public funding for schools and students.

Indeed, their measures would mean privatization of education, effectively terminating the right to a public education, as we have known it. Many of the most powerful forces in the country want the US, the first country to guarantee public education, to be the first country to end it.

For the last fifty years, public education was one of only two public mandates guaranteed by the government that was accessible to every person, regardless of income. Social Security is the other. Now both systems are threatened with privatization schemes. The government today openly defines its mission as protecting the rights of corporations above everything. Thus public education is a rare public space that is under attack.

The same scenario is being implemented with most of the services that governments used to provide for free or at little cost: electricity, national parks, health care and water. In every case, the methodology is the same: underfund public services, create an uproar and declare a crisis, claim that privatization can do the job better, deregulate or break public control, divert public money to corporations and then raise prices.

In the past year, it’s become evident that the corporate surge against public schools is only part of a much broader assault against the public sector, against unions, and indeed against the public’s rights and public control of public institutions.

This has been evident for some time now in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina’s devastation is used as an excuse for permanently privatizing the infrastructure of a major American city: razing public housing and turning land over to developers; replacing the city’s public school system with a combination of charter schools and state-run schools; letting the notorious Blackwater private army loose on the civilian population; and, in the end, forcing tens of thousands of families out of the city permanently. The citizens of New Orleans have had their civil rights forcibly expropriated.

Just as the shock of the hurricane was the excuse for the shock therapy applied to New Orleans, so the economic downturn triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis is now the excuse for a national assault on the public sector and the public’s rights.

In California, where we live, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has convened an emergency session of the legislature, demanding that the state’s $14.5 billion “budget deficit" be closed by slashing vital services including housing, health care, and education. He has proposed lopping $4.8 billion off next year’s K-14 education budget. That the deficit exists largely as a result of the Governors corporate friendly tax policies is not considered part of the debate.

In public education, the corporate surge has grown both qualitatively and quantitatively. Where two years ago the corporate education change agents were mainly operating in a relatively small number of large urban areas, they have now surfaced everywhere. The corporatization of public education is the leading edge of privatization. This has the effect of silencing the public voice on every aspect of the situation.

Across the US, public schools are not yet privatized, though private services are increasingly benefiting from this market. However, increasing corporate control of programs – a different mix in every locale – is having a chilling influence on the very things that people (though not corporations) want from teachers: the ability to relate to and teach each child, a nurturing approach that nudges every child to move ahead, human assessments that put people before performance on standardized tests.

Perhaps the single most dramatic development of the corporate approach was the launching of the $60 million Strong American Schools / Ed in ’08 initiative, funded by billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad. This is a naked effort to purchase the nation’s education policy, no matter who is elected President, by buying their way into every electoral forum.

Ed in ’08 has a three-point program: merit pay (basing teachers’ compensation on students’ scores on high stakes test); national education standards (enforcing conformity and rote learning); and longer school day and school year (still more time for rote learning, less time for kids to be kids). The chairman of Ed in ‘08/Strong American Schools program is Roy Romer: former governor of Colorado; former chair of the Democratic National Committee; most recently superintendent of schools in Los Angeles (he was persuaded to take that job by Eli Broad). Its executive director is Mark Lampkin, a Republican lobbyist and former deputy campaign manager for George Bush.

Other steering committee members include Eli Broad; Louis Gerstner (former CEO of IBM); Allan Golston (head of the Gates Foundation’s U.S. programs); and John Engler (president of the National Association of Manufacturers and former Governor of Michigan [where he gutted the state’s welfare program]). A truly stunning array of corporate wealth and bipartisan political power in the service of privatization.

Where two years ago charter schools were still viewed as experiments affecting a relatively small number of students, in 2007 the corporate privatizers—led by Broad and Gates—grossly expanded their funding to the point where they now loom as a major presence.

In March, the Gates Foundation announced a $100 million donation to KIPP charter schools, which would enable them to expand their Houston operation to 42 schools (from eight)—effectively, KIPP will be a full-fledged alternative school system in Houston. Also in the past year, Eli Broad and Gates have given in the neighborhood of $50 million to KIPP and Green Dot charter schools in Los Angeles, with the aim of doubling the percentage of LA students enrolled in charter schools. Oakland, another Broad/Gates targets, now has more than 30 charter schools out of 92. And, as we shall see below, the same trend holds across the country.

NCLB in 2008 is still a major issue. It continues to have a corrosive effect on public schools. It is designed an unfunded mandate, which means that schools must meet ever rigid standards every year, though no more money is appropriated to support this effort. This means that schools must take ever-more money out of the class room to meet federal requirements when schools with low test scores are in “Program Improvement." Once schools are in PI for 5 years they can be forced into privatization.

NCLB is a driving force that decimates the “publicness" in public schools. In California, more than 2000 schools are now in “Program-Improvement." This means that they have to meet certain specific, and mostly impossible standards, or they must divert increasingly greater amounts of money out of the classroom and into private programs.

For example, schools in 3rd year PI must take money out of programs that helped schools with a high proportion of low achieving schools and make it available to private tutors.

The struggles of the Civil Rights Era made people realize that quality education was a right that everyone deserves. Education today, whether public or private, is a social policy. We make choices about how far it is extended, what the purpose is, what quality is offered, and to whom. Now that wealth is polarizing in this country, corporate forces are determined to create a social system that benefits the “Haves" while excluding the “Have-Nots."

Privatizing public schools inevitable leads to massive increase in social inequality. Private corporations have never been required to recognize civil rights, because, by definition, these are public rights. If the corporate privatizers succeed in taking over our schools, there will be neither quality education nor civil rights.

The system of public education in the United States is deeply flawed. While suburban schools are among the best in the world, public education in cities has been deliberately underfunded and is in a shambles. The solution is not to fight backwards to maintain the old system. Rather it is to fight forward to a new system that will truly guarantee quality education as a civil right for everyone.

Central to this is to challenge the idea that everything in human society should be run by corporations, that only corporations and their political hacks have the right or the power to discuss what public policy should be. As Naomi Klein stated so well in The Shock Doctrine, privatization “will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged." (p 14)

The real direction is to increase the role and power of the public in every way, not eliminate it. If we can spend $2.5 billion a week for war in Iraq, we can certainly build quality schools. It’s not a matter of money. The issue is who will benefit and who will control. Should schools be organized to benefit the super-rich, or should they be organized to benefit everyone?