More Feedback for the Gates Foundation: Yes, Housing Affects Education
By Anthony Cody.
We are getting decidedly mixed signals from the Gates Foundation these days. From Bill Gates himself, we get a sense of frustration that education has not welcomed his central thesis that the “tools of science” — namely common standards and high stakes tests aligned to them. He does not seem to understand the reasons his solutions have not worked, and it is unclear if he is even curious as to why. But Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellman, the new CEO of the Gates Foundation seems a bit more open, and just last month gave an interview in which she suggested that,
As a western academician, as a Gates Foundation person, the first thing you should be doing is listening and learning. And have a huge sense of humility about what you don’t know.
I wrote a post about this, and tweeted it to her, and she responded thanking me for the feedback. So I am hoping that there is some serious reflection taking place up in Seattle, and in the interest of helping that process along, I am going to re-post a series of blog entries I wrote back in 2012, when I was engaged in an active back and forth dialogue with representatives of the Gates Foundation’s education team. In this series, I sought to document the core issues where the Gates Foundation’s agenda was off base.
Since today’s news indicates there may be a growing awareness at the Gates Foundation of the connections between housing and education, I am starting with this, the third essay in the 2012 exchange, originally posted here. Housing is one of several poverty-related issues that are addressed here. I will share the other four essays over the next week. (And the entire series, plus more, is available in my recent book, The Educator and the Oligarch, a Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation.)
Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?
This post is the third round of a five-part exchange with the Gates Foundation. This post can also be viewed and commented on over at the Gates Foundation’s Impatient Optimist blog. This time I get to go first, and our topic is this:
What is the role of education reform in relation to the problem of family poverty? What is the best way to achieve greater equity in educational and life prospects for children of poverty?
The Gates Foundation’s central slogan is “All lives have equal value,” and the thrust of their work around education has been promoting institutional and political reform, based on the premise that this will increase equity, especially for the poor. The Gates Foundation has avoided systematic efforts to achieve equity of resources for schools and the children who attend them; instead, it asserts that teacher effectiveness is the best lever in this regard, and it has focused most of its research and advocacy on promoting public investment in systems that measure and promote teacher effectiveness.
In the name of reform, the Gates Foundation has wielded its political influence to effectively shift public funds, earmarked for the service of poor children, away from investment in those children’s direct education experience. Through the Race to the Top and NCLB waiver conditions, the US Department of Education has instead dedicated public resources to creating state and federal mandates for the Gates Foundation’s costly project — making sure every aspect of our educational system is “driven by data.” The future public More Feedback for the Gates Foundation: Yes, Housing Affects Education - Living in Dialogue:
