Must Read: How Bill Gates’ Power Drives Education Policy
The Common Core Standards are the culmination of the wave of accountability-based school reform that has swept the country since the A Nation At Risk report in 1983. Like the other test-and-punish reforms, the Common Core Standards fail to address the deep and seemingly intractable problems in American public schooling—inequality—shocking and immoral opportunity gaps in a society that supposedly believes in equality of opportunity—high dropout rates among the poorest and most vulnerable adolescents. This blog focuses on these deeper issues, and you can read recent posts here on opportunity gaps, and here on reducing the dropout rate.
But Lindsey Layton’s recent blockbuster piece in the Washington Post, How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Common Core Revolution, is a Common Core story that relates to all the deeper issues, because Layton addresses the issue of power and money in policy-making these days. How is it that the school “reformers” can get programs established that lack a research base? And how can it be done in a way that skirts the checks and balances of our democratic system and that even rearranges the prescribed roles of the federal government and the states in school policy? What is the role of today’s mega-philanthropy, especially these days when, ironically, relatively low taxes for the wealthiest Americans allow them to amass fortunes they can spend to impact policy in an underfunded public sector.
Diane Ravitch answers these questions theoretically in her 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. “It is worth reflecting on the wisdom of allowing education policy to be directed or, one might say, captured by private foundations. There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people…. These foundations, no matter how worthy and high-minded, are after all, not public agencies. They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state. If voters don’t like the foundations’ reform agenda, they can’t vote them out of office… If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.” (pp. 200-201)
In her blockbuster article this past weekend, Layton provides an example of the power of venture philanthropy—the real-life story of how Bill Gates, the most powerful member of Must Read: How Bill Gates’ Power Drives Education Policy | janresseger: