Gates Foundation. Good Charity or Bad Charity? Part 1
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My wife and I had a great discussion after my last postabout the Gates Foundation’s instance that U.S. poverty could be overcome by better schools and teachers instead of a broad-based approach (like the Foundation uses overseas). She led off by saying, “Isn’t Gates a good guy? He’s giving away his money trying to help people.” My response was that putting money into bad ideas doesn’t necessarily help people. With all the publicity about philanthropy lately this has been a topic of discussion (see the New York Times Op-Ed piece “Good Charity, Bad Charity“). To be fair, I really couldn’t tell my wife if all the K-12 education projects the Gates Foundation funds are good or bad ideas.
To their credit, the Gates Foundation maintains a list of all the projects they have funded on their website. I cut and pasted information about the 128 “College Ready” (K-12 education) projects they funded in 2014 into a spreadsheet (ironically a MicroSoft product). Note: K-12 education projects are not limited to public schools, as will be discussed in Part 2.
So to start with, Wow! $93.3 million was given out in support of K-12 education projects in one year. That’s a lot of money but let’s look at it in context. According to Wikipedia the Gates Foundation has a $42.3 billion endowment ($28 billion from Gates Foundation. Good Charity or Bad Charity? Part 1 | Education Under Attack:
