Cuomo Taps Bill Gates as NY’s New Education Consultant. Sadly, the Times Are Not a Changing
Bill Gates seems to have become this spring’s go-to gazillionaire. Over the years his foundation has undertaken to fund medical work in Africa and public school policy and governance experiments across the United States. And so… soon after the coronavirus pandemic reached American shores, Judy Woodruff had Bill Gates on the PBS NewsHour as an expert on world health. And now New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo has announced a partnership with Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to “reimagine” New York state’s public schools after the pandemic.
Fortunately, for covering the medical issues in the pandemic, Woodruff quickly replaced Gates with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Ashish Jha from Harvard University’ Global Health Institute, and a host of other epidemiologists who really are experts. Big foundation people do fund work by experts, but they are not themselves usually the experts.
Isn’t it ironic? These days we are honoring nurses, ambulance drivers, foodbank workers, and teachers as heroes, but when we want advice we feel compelled to seek the guidance of celebrities like Bill Gates, especially if they have made billions of dollars in the tech industry. We like to assume that extremely successful people know how to be successful. And we admire billionaire philanthropists as successes. They have, after all, made a lot of money.
But the Gates Foundation’s record in public education exposes Gates and the so-called experts at his foundation as not really expert at all. What we have instead is a list of failed experiments. The record of Gates and Gates Foundation investment in education is dismal.
- In 2007, the Gates Foundation funded The Turnaround Challenge, a guide for “quickly and dramatically” improving test cores in America’s “worst performing schools.” The report and its guidance focused school reformers obsessively on test scores and promoted the idea that schools can be rapidly turned around with the help of consultants and experts. But rapid school turnaround didn’t work; very few struggling schools on their own, it turns out, have been able rapidly to raise students’ test scores. Unfortunately, we now know that schools alone are unlikely to overcome the ravages of concentrated family poverty. Other reforms such as Community Schools with CONTINUE READING: Cuomo Taps Bill Gates as NY’s New Education Consultant. Sadly, the Times Are Not a Changing | janresseger