Everything You Wanted to Know About Bill Gates, But Didn’t Ask | Diane Ravitch's blog

Everything You Wanted to Know About Bill Gates, But Didn’t Ask | Diane Ravitch's blog

Everything You Wanted to Know About Bill Gates, But Didn’t Ask

Walter Isaccson, author of best-selling biographies and former editor of TIME, wrote this awestruck article about Bill Gates in 1997. At the time, Bill was the richest man in the world, his marriage to Melinda was new, and he hadn’t yet decided that he was the smartest man in the world and knew everything better than those who had worked in their profession for years. This is Bill Gates before he decided to reinvent American education. It’s also a fascinating peek into the lifestyle of zthe then richest man in the world (he’s #3 now, behind Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk). And it includes a curious detail about Bill’s personal life: once a year, he spends a weekend with a woman friend, where they commune and discuss weighty things.

Several news outlets reported that Melinda Gates began to meet with divorce lawyers in 2019 because of Bill’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, convicted pedophile. Melinda thought he was repulsive, Bill did not. Bill said he had neither a business relationship nor a friendship with CONTINUE READING: Everything You Wanted to Know About Bill Gates, But Didn’t Ask | Diane Ravitch's blog

Bill Gates acknowledges an affair with an employee, which Microsoft investigated - The Washington Post

Bill Gates acknowledges an affair with an employee, which Microsoft investigated - The Washington Post

Bill Gates acknowledges an affair with an employee, which Microsoft investigated

The confirmation of the affair and investigation comes two weeks after Gates and Melinda French Gates announced plans to divorce

SEATTLE — Bill Gates acknowledged through a spokeswoman that he had an extramarital affair with a Microsoft employee, which Microsoft said led its board to investigate the “intimate relationship” shortly before he resigned from the board last year.

It is not clear what role the investigation or the affair, which took place two decades ago, played in the decision the Microsoft co-founder and his wife, Melinda French Gates, made to divorce after 27 years of marriage. When they announced their divorce earlier this month, the couple posted identical and simultaneous tweets saying that “after a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage.”

In a divorce filing that day, French Gates called the marriage “irretrievably broken.”

“There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably,” Gates’s spokeswoman, Bridgitt Arnold, said in an emailed statement.

French Gates’s divorce lawyer, Robert Cohen, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Members of Microsoft’s board in 2019 looked into a Microsoft engineer’s allegations that she had a sexual relationship with Gates, according to Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw.

“Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000,” Shaw said in an emailed statement. “A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm to conduct a thorough investigation. Throughout the investigation, Microsoft provided extensive support to the employee who raised the concern.” CONTINUE READING: Bill Gates acknowledges an affair with an employee, which Microsoft investigated - The Washington Post

Bill and Melinda Will Divorce, but the Gates Brand of Venture Philanthropy Will Continue On | janresseger

Bill and Melinda Will Divorce, but the Gates Brand of Venture Philanthropy Will Continue On | janresseger

Bill and Melinda Will Divorce, but the Gates Brand of Venture Philanthropy Will Continue On

A month ago, this blog suggested that hubris is at the heart of today’s billionaire philanthropy but noted that Bill and Melinda Gates have so much power that, despite the tragic blindness of their privilege, there will be no tragic fall and no consequences. Now, with Bill and Melinda announcing their divorce, we continue to learn even more about how privilege in an unequal America insulates the super-rich who have the power to drive the public policy that shapes the institutions on which we all depend

The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss seized the occasion of the Gates’ pending divorce as an opportunity to review the ways Bill and Melinda have used their influence and their money to shape public education policy at the federal level and across the states: “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars on numerous education projects—such as creating small high schools, writing and implementing the Common Core State Standards, evaluating teachers by standardized test scores—and the couple has had enormous influence on what happened in classrooms across the country. Their philanthropy, especially in the school reform area, has been at the center of a national debate about whether it serves democracy when wealthy people can use their own money to drive public policy and fund their pet education projects. The foundation’s financial backing of some of the controversial priorities of the Obama administration’s Education Department put the couple at the center of this national conversation. Critics have said that many of the foundation’s key education CONTINUE READING: Bill and Melinda Will Divorce, but the Gates Brand of Venture Philanthropy Will Continue On | janresseger

What the divorcing Bill and Melinda Gates did to public education - The Washington Post

What the divorcing Bill and Melinda Gates did to public education - The Washington Post

Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education

Now that the philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates have announced they are divorcing after 27 years of marriage, let’s look at the controversial investments they made together to reform K-12 public education — and how well those worked out.

Together, the two have been among the most generous philanthropists on the planet, spending more over the past few decades on global health than many countries do and more on U.S. education reform than any of the other wealthy Americans who have tried to impact K-12 education with their personal fortunes.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars on numerous education projections — such as creating small high schools, writing and implementing the Common Core State Standards, evaluating teachers by standardized test scores — and the couple has had enormous influence on what happened in classrooms across the country.

Their philanthropy, especially in the school reform area, has been at the center of a national debate about whether it serves democracy when wealthy people can use their own money to drive public policy and fund their pet education projects. The foundation’s financial backing of some controversial priorities of the Obama administration’s Education Department put the couple at the center of this national conversation.

Critics have said that many of the foundation’s key education projects have harmed public schools because they were unworkable from the start and consumed resources that could have been better spent.

But you don’t have to go any further than the Gateses themselves to learn that some of the billions of dollars they put into public education reform efforts did not go as well as they liked.

In 2013, Bill Gates said, “It would be great if our education stuff worked. But that we won’t know for probably a decade.”

It didn’t take 10 years for them and their foundation to acknowledge that key education investments didn’t turn out as well as they hoped.

In the foundation’s 2020 annual letter, Melinda Gates said: “The fact that progress has been harder to achieve than we hoped is no reason to give up, though. Just the opposite.”

That same annual letter had a rather remarkable statement from Melinda Gates about the role of the wealthy in education policy, given her and husband’s role in it:

We certainly understand why many people are skeptical about the idea of billionaire philanthropists designing classroom innovations or setting education policy. Frankly, we are, too. Bill and I have always been clear that our role isn’t to generate ideas ourselves; it’s to support innovation driven by people who have spent their careers working in education: teachers, administrators, researchers, and community leaders.

Bill and Melinda Gates have spent billions to shape education policy. Now, they say, they’re ‘skeptical’ of ‘billionaires’ trying to do just that.

The Gates Foundation began its first big effort in education reform about two decades ago with what it said was a $650 million investment to break large, failing high schools into smaller schools. CONTINUE READING: What the divorcing Bill and Melinda Gates did to public education - The Washington Post

CURMUDGUCATION: Mrs. Gates Still Doesn't Get It, Still.

CURMUDGUCATION: Mrs. Gates Still Doesn't Get It, Still.

Mrs. Gates Still Doesn't Get It, Still

Last week the New York Times decided to offer one more glowing portrait of Melinda Gates, unintentionally underlining the work of rich folk critic Anand Giridharadas and explaining, again, that she doesn't get the problem of Gates riches in education.

She opens with an Emerson quote from her valedictory high school graduation speech about success being the knowledge that one person has breathed easier because you have lived. That quote, writes David Gelles, "is still ringing in her ears." 

“That’s been my definition of success since high school,” she said. “So if I have an extra dollar, or a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, or in my case, which is absurd, a billion dollars to plow back into making the world better for other people, that’s what I’m going to do.”

This is such a Giridharadian quote-- note that she gets her vast wealth is absurd, but her thought is that she should "plow back" the money rather than contemplate, critique, and act to change the system that allowed her top extract that much money in the first place. These are our modern philanthropists--they can grasp that they have a shit ton of money, and even consider that they ought to do something useful for it, but they can't question that they deserve to have it in the first place, that it is, in fact, theirs theirs all theirs. Philanthropy is swell, but philanthropy set up so that they control their money and remain the arbiters of what should and should not be done with it.

The interview focuses primarily on the medical stuff, and there are plenty of reasons to question CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Mrs. Gates Still Doesn't Get It, Still.