How Bill Gates hijacked US education [Script]

Intro

Bill Gates is a billionaire darling of mainstream media. Google his name and most you will find is puff piece pseudo journalism. He is the most generous billionaire, a selfless idol, a saint even. Almost as if Gates was physically incapable of doing anything wrong.

But every so often, you'll find a rare piece of investigative journalism, diving deep into Gates' true influence, power and wealth. And in those stories you'll see that nothing good exists without condition. Or that there is nothing good about one man having more power than entire nations.

Bill Gates is most well known for his philanthropic endeavors in poverty and health care. But another one of his major agendas is education. It's public education where Bill Gates was able to quietly manifest his power without restraints. He became the main architect of US public school policy, setting education agendas in the whole nation for more than the past two decades.

I analyzed the Gates Foundation grant database and found that in donations alone, Bill Gates has so far invested at least around $5.5 billion. This money bankrolled research, deployment and lobbying campaigns that pushed for a reform after reform according to the whims of the world's most influential elite.

If $5.5 billion doesn't sound like much to you, Gates donations were enough to decide the fate of trillions of tax payers money that followed his investments. With such an immense wealth, Gates was able to create an illusion around his ideas that duped politicians, educators and institutions into supporting his projects, all of which would eventually fail to make education better.

I want to show you how Bill Gates influenced and set the US education agenda over more than two decades and explain why his philanthropy has been laser focused on dictating policy of public schools none of his children attended.

Small Schools

When Bill Gates founded his charity, education was high among its priorities. In his very first attempt, Gates thought the real problem of poor education is when schools were too big. According to some scarce evidence, smaller schools performed better than large institutions. At least for the merits that Bill Gates deemed important. So the Gates Foundation invested 650 million in pre-Great-recession dollars and began breaking up schools into smaller units with lower student-to-teacher ratio.

The goal was to improve student achievement, which according to the Gateses, was when the rates of college-ready graduates significantly increased. This had to happen without increases in operational costs per student. Efficiency was a key metric for a former Microsoft CEO.

But Gates' efforts went contrary to the well established and experience-based approach - that large schools are more efficient at delivering quality education at a low cost per student. Year after year, the Gates Foundation kept pouring more money and resources to make this project work. But they couldn't. Nine years into the initiative, small schools didn't see any improvement in student performance nor efficiency.

Students in smaller schools didn't achieve better results than their peers in larger schools. In some cases they scored even worse. All the while the costs per student increased and the total budget the Foundation ended up spending ballooned into $2 billion.

This was a precious moment for Bill Gates to pause for a bit, reflect and take the L. But instead of admitting failure of its own pet project, Gates took to blame teachers, education standards and the curriculum.

And he was ready to go thermonuclear on this.

Common Core

In summer of 2008, when the Gateses already knew their small school initiative was a failure, the ultra wealthy couple had a secret meeting. In their Seattle headquarters, they sat down with Gene Wilhoit and David Coleman, two advocates for a national education policy called Common Core.

So what was it about? Look at what they viewed as the biggest problem of the current education system. They saw it in the teaching standards. More specifically, in how the standards varied between states, districts and schools. This fragmentation lead to unequal access to educational materials and teaching excellence and it's what they said rendered high school diplomas useless.

So they came with Common Core - this new set of standards that was proposed to unify what merits schools should prioritize - in their idea, it was supposed to be reading and math. English classes should emphasize non-fiction and students must use evidence to back up their claims. In math, students should demonstrate the ability to solve problems in multiple ways and provide explanation of how they found their answers. The standards would be managed from the top, rather than leaving it to schools and states.

To ensure the success of Common Core, the new standards would be accompanied by a considerable data mining operation. Detailed information on everything that happens in the classroom, from student behavior, through grades, to reports on mental health should be collected and analyzed. And let's not worry about parental consent while doing that.

The Gateses were sold. And not just a little bit. They went all in! Right of the bat, the Gates Foundation dedicated $233 million to bankroll research, development and implementation of the Common Core Standards. The Gates lobbying machine got to work and began pouring additional millions into political campaigns across the spectrum, convincing state and federal educational authorities, districts and schools to begin adoption as quickly as possible. Political groups that wouldn't talk to each other on virtually any other issue suddenly found themselves allied on the educational front. In the most Machiavellian way, the newly appointed Obama administration was stuffed with former staffers and associates of the Gates Foundation. They lobbied extensively to make the federal government use its levers to push for the new educational agenda on the state level. And so the President dangled federal funds over states to coerce them into accepting Common Core. What followed was one of the most dramatic policy changes in the history of the United States. In two short years since the Seattle meeting, without a single vote taken by an elected representative, 45 states and DC fully adopted the Common Core State Standards. What one billionaire thought should be the merit of achievement now de facto took the force of a national curriculum. Even though neither Gates' nor Obama's children attended schools that used Common Core standards. Common Core was adopted so quickly, there was little public debate and virtually no criticism. But as time passed, some began noticing problems. And those problems lead to opposition.

At first, the criticism was mostly coming from the conservative wing of the political spectrum, mainly as part of the broader opposition to the Obama administration. But in a few years, criticism spilled over to all political circles. Experts and authorities were looking for evidence of improvement. But they didn't get it. In spite of the high expectations, there was no evidence that common core standards boosted graduation rates nor student achievement.

Teachers unions, while initially supportive, slowly began criticizing the standards for being a "market-based education reform". Privacy advocates raised concerns about data collection practices - troves of sensitive information on students was being collected without parental consent. Data mining companies boasted they had more information on students than Google. One private surveillance program, bankrolled and lobbied for by Gates, was forced to shut down due its children privacy violations.

Then critics began to question Bill Gates' true motives. As part of the Common Core reform, schools had to open up to digitalization of classrooms and teaching. Skeptics argued Microsoft, as one of the software developers, stood to benefit from such an embrace of technology and data. Gates vehemently rejected notions that his efforts were motivated by self-interest. But in February of 2014, Microsoft announced a joined collaboration with Pearson, the world's largest educational publisher. They launched a brand new set of materials for Common Core that was platformed on the Microsoft Surface tablet. This deal would open up the doors to an unrestrained access to student data for the Microsoft corporation where at the time Bill Gates was the largest individual shareholder and wouldn't leave the board until 2020.

Whether Bill Gates was motivated by personal gain or not can be debated. But what is clear from his own speeches is that Gates is motivated by competition and market-based solutions. He wanted teachers that achieved his definition of success to be rewarded. And those that didn't adhere to Gates' standards should be re-trained or sacked.

In the end, the United States government and state and local educational bodies ended up spending trillions of tax payers money on an education reform that didn't work. All because one billionaire was able to staff a presidential administration and state educational institutions with his loyal lieutenants and because he bankrolled research, development, political lobbying and media coverage favorable to his little pet project.

And once again, as soon as the results didn't meet the billionaire's expectations, Bill Gates abandoned the project and moved on to something else.

Teacher Evaluation

While the discourse on US education was falling apart under the weight of Common Core, Bill Gates was busy managing another one of his reforms. Over the years, Gates grew irritated with the way teachers were paid for their work. He complained about increased pay for teachers with master's degrees, when in his view that didn't improve student achievement. He also complained about rewarding teachers for seniority, which he thought also had no effect on student achievement. And he also complained about teachers who "can't do the job" and suggested they should rather find another one.

Gates' answer to this problem was to introduce competition among teachers. Make them chase higher pay or risk get booted. So, with his billionaire charity, he created and funded a new teacher evaluation system that was meant to use standardized test scores to assess teaching performance. The thinking was that to give the poor access to quality education, the system would select the most effective teachers transfer them into low-income and high-need schools.

Gates Foundation flooded the teacher evaluation project with $215 million and partnered with seven schools that funded the rest, for a total cost of $575 million.

So what did this project achieve 6 years and half a billion dollars later? It flopped.

The idea of using student test scores to assess teachers was flawed from the get go. Assessment experts warned that standardized tests were only designed to evaluate student performance. They weren't designed to measure teacher performance and there were no valid statistics to back up such methodology. Then unions thought it was unfair to rate teachers based on their student scores.

But there was another problem. What about that whole thing of transferring teachers with high rating to low-income schools? Well, that didn't work as expected at all. High-need and low-income schools are also correlated with poorer student scores. So when teachers who ranked high according to Gates' metric were transferred into schools with lower scored students, their rating would suffer as well and teachers would be reluctant to go to or stay in those schools.

So instead of eliminating the educational gap between the high-income and low-income schools, the gap grew even wider. Low-income and high-need schools got newer and less experienced teachers, while high-income and already well performing schools got the best teachers.

In 2015, a 500-page-long report by Rand Corporation concluded the project failed to reach any of its own objectives. No participating school improved student achievement or graduation and drop out rates didn't get measurably lower either. Costs quickly skyrocketed beyond local budgets and the rewarding mechanism became unsustainable. Higher rewards failed to motivate teachers to stay teaching for longer. The project only succeeded in making lower-rated teachers leave sooner.

When the costs inflated and the results only proved failure, one buy one, schools began ditching this teacher evaluation in favor of non-judgmental colleague feedback, and Bill Gates admitted the whole project was a fiasco.

Curriculum

You would think after 15 years of implosions, private billions wasted, and trillions of public funds burned, Bill Gates would have learned his lesson and accept that maybe philanthropists shouldn't be setting public school agendas. But you'd be wrong. Because Bill Gates is far from being done. According to the former cutthroat CEO, it was time to spend even more money, time and public resources. This time, the focus will be on the curriculum.

See, Bill Gates is not very good at introspection. So when Common Core failed to bring consistent results, the blame was, of course, on the teachers not using a more effective curriculum.

So once again Gates promised to have an answer.

First, we need to use the data we collected on unwitting students and teachers to identify "high-quality" teaching materials. The Foundation will finance a rating system that will select the most effective materials. The lobbying arm of the philanthropy will then push decision-makers to adopt these materials. And finally, Gates will fund organizations that will provide teacher training to make sure the new curriculum is followed loyally. "Implemented with fidelity" became the hot new buzzword and an insult to teachers' sovereignty.

You see, Bill Gates didn't trust teachers to do their job. In his view, they were either underpaid, overpaid, couldn't be trusted to follow guidelines, or shouldn't be teachers at all. When he was crafting his new reform, he rarely if ever asked teachers what they wanted or gave them the freedom to decide on their own. Instead, he pulled on his levers to get what he wanted with as little friction as possible.

The new curriculum project cost the Gates Foundation $1.7 billion over five years. Most of the money went to development of new materials and supporting schools that adopted them. Implementation was then accompanied by data mining and analysis because Gates believes in only that success which can be measured on a graph.

Why

Now what remains unanswered is one question: Why? Why is Bill Gates so heavily invested in changing education? He tried it several times and never succeeded. Why can't he let the teachers and schools make the decision based on the relationships they've built with students and parents?

We could speculate about his true motives and self-interest. But I think the answer is in the clear. If you listen to Bill Gates, he'll tell you that education is a focal point of his philanthropy because of inequality. He tells us that by making quality education more accessible, there would be less poverty and less inequality in the world.

This could be true. But another thing is also true. As much as Bill Gates talks about inequality, he currently is one of the biggest causes of it. Gates built his billionaire empire off of Microsoft, but his philanthropic and investment ventures involve profiting off of the over-exploited countries in the Global South. Investments in big pharma, big agro, GMOs and energy companies bring in billions in profits every year. Bill Gates is not fixing inequality. He is participating in it.

So when Gates spends his billions to change an education policy, it doesn't matter if it fails or succeeds. What matters is that that becomes what we are talking about. Gates wants the public to look at solving problems through his lens - that is through seeking market-based solutions that can have a profitable business model. If one market-based approach doesn't work, we should be looking for another one. But we shouldn't stray away from that narrow profit-seeking perspective.

By talking about education reform as a solution to inequality, we are not talking about Bill Gates as a source of that inequality. We are wasting trillions on reforms that don't work instead of taxing the billionaires on their excessive wealth and giving it to teachers and schools that need it the most.

So when you hear a story about how Bill Gates is spending a billion dollars to improve math teaching, he isn't spending a billion dollars to improve math teaching. He is spending a billion dollars to make the Congress, the Department of Education and local authorities pour trillions into another one of his projects, so that we don't talk about how many calories there are in an average billionaire.

Education is for children and adults who want to pursue knowledge and skills. It isn't for billionaires to raise obedient servants.

Thank you so much for watching this essay. I did this whole video by myself, including research, scripting and all the editing you just saw. I take no sponsors because I believe in the true independence of journalistic and educational content. If you like the fact that my content is not tainted by sponsor interest, please donate to my Patreon. Thank you.