Gates Foundation pours millions more into Common Core
Bill Gates famously spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, implement and promote the now controversial Common Core State Standards. He hasn’t stopped giving.
In the last seven months, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured more than $10 million into implementation and parent support for the Core, according to grant details on the foundation website (see below). That includes $3.7 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to support the Core at a time when it has come under increasing attack across the country, for both educational and political reasons.
Gates is the leader of education philanthropy in the United States, spending a few billion dollars over more than a decade to promote school reforms that he championed, including the Common Core, a small-schools initiative in New York City that he abandoned after deciding it wasn’t working, and efforts to create new teacher evaluation systems that in part use a controversial method of assessment that uses student standardized test scores to determine the “effectiveness” of educators.
Such philanthropy has sparked a debate about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people who pour part of their fortunes into their pet projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — to such a degree that public policy and funding follow.
The Common Core State Standards several years ago were fully adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia with unusual bipartisan support. But support began to wane when critics from all sides of the political spectrum began to emerge with concerns on a variety of fronts, including problems with the content of the standards and the developmental inappropriateness of those for the earliest grades, the design of the new tests, how the new exams were written and by whom, and the federal government’s funding of new standardized tests aligned to the Core.
Opposition to the Core has grown stronger this year with the rise of the opt-out movement, in which hundreds of thousands of parents around the country are opting their children out of Core-aligned standardized testing. The attacks on the Core — which include moves by some states to repeal them and create new standards — have alarmed supporters, some of whom have been pushing back against the criticism. That explains a letter that a nonprofit group called Children Now just released, disseminated via e-mail that had a subject line that says, “At critical juncture 500 California organizations affirm support for Common Core.” Not so incidentally, Children Now has received at least $2 million from the Gates Foundation since 2011.
Even with the growing opposition, however, most states are still implementing the standards or similar standards.
Here are the grants directly related to Common Core from last November through April as shown on the foundation website:
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West Ed
Date: April 2015
Purpose: RFP for teacher networks, designed to deepen the implementation of the Common Core by leveraging effective tools and strategies; teacher leaders capable of scaling them to teachers in national and local networks; Gates Foundation pours millions more into Common Core - The Washington Post:
Purpose: RFP for teacher networks, designed to deepen the implementation of the Common Core by leveraging effective tools and strategies; teacher leaders capable of scaling them to teachers in national and local networks; Gates Foundation pours millions more into Common Core - The Washington Post:
