Good Intentions
Bill Gates is here to change the world—will he make money doing it?
n March of 2013, I watched Bill Gates give the keynote lecture at SXSWedu, an annual education technology-themed offshoot of the Austin mega-festival. Addressing several thousand entrepreneurs who hoped to sell apps to schools, Gates celebrated education technology as “potentially a large-sized market” of about $9 billion. The attendees were rapt. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s philanthropic investment in data-driven teacher evaluation and the Common Core national curriculum standards would, they hoped, make U.S. public education more uniform from state to state and city to city—a standardization that would in turn help ed-tech startups sell their products at scale. Gates dangled before the audience the promise of an enormous payday. “Innovators who win in the most demanding markets,” he said, “will have opportunities on a very global basis, just as we’ve seen in the horizontal software market. So there should be an opportunity for some, of course, very big successes.”
Would all this profit-making help children learn? In his speech, Gates promoted the idea of the “flipped classroom,” in which students watch online video lectures at home and then come to school the next day to do what is currently thought of as homework, with the teacher acting as a sort of tutor. “At a very deep level, software is able to create this interactive, connected experience for the student in a way that simply isn’t economic in a public school context,” Gates said.
If you are at all skeptical of the richest person on earth, a software titan, arguing that software is the key to improving U.S. public education, you are not alone. Since the Gates Foundation launched in 2000, it has become the most influential philanthropic body in the world: The Obama administration has adopted many of its favored education reforms, and the foundation provides 10 percent of the World Health Organization’s revenue (only the U.S. government provides a comparable amount). The foundation’s trustees are Bill Gates, his wife, Melinda, and Warren Buffett. Its self-described missionis to “unlock the possibility inside every individual. … From the education of students in Chicago, to the health of a young mother in Nigeria, we are catalysts of human promise everywhere.” These giant ambitions have recently attracted increased scrutiny. Education historian and activist Diane Ravitch has emerged as the leading American critic of the foundation’s enthusiasm for standardized testing, which she sees as athreat to traditional, locally controlled public schools. On global health, the editorial board of The Lancet has criticized the foundation’s lack of transparency and relatively narrow set of priorities.
Bill and Melinda Gates hold heavy sway over public policy, yet no one elected them to any office. It is crucial that they, and other large donors, be held accountable as philanthropists. This is the worthy goal of an impassioned new book by Linsey McGoey, a sociologist at the University of Good Intentions | The New Republic:
