Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a second article today that critically examines the higher education policy approaches of the Gates Foundation, specifically, with regard to college completion, remediation and training for job skills.   For example:

“… the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has financed studies that argue for broad-scale changes aimed at pushing more students, more quickly, toward graduation. Working alongside the Lumina Foundation through intermediaries like Complete College America and another nonprofit, Jobs for the Future, the Gates foundation has helped influence higher-education policy at the state level to a degree that may be unprecedented for a private foundation.

At a time when college budgets are strained from decades of cuts in state support, Gates grantees have urged lawmakers to allocate spending more efficiently, emphasizing the need for more students to graduate and presenting evidence that remedial courses hold them back…

Only about 58 percent of first-time, full-time students who start at a four-year college receive a bachelor’s degree from that college within six years. Most higher-education experts agree that that’s a problem.

But some object to the way Gates and legislators have gone about tackling the issue. The influence of a major foundation and its grantees in state policy discussions makes some experts uncomfortable, since as a private entity Gates is not accountable to voters. They contend that the strategy bypasses colleges themselves and imposes top-down solutions, seeking quick fixes for complicated problems.

“You create this whole hyped-up, get-it-done-fast mentality,” says Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Association officials have argued that the completion agenda being pushed by the Gates foundation doesn’t pay enough attention to educational quality, and that it focuses too narrowly on getting students through as quickly as possible.

Gates officials say they’re merely making sure states get the data they need to make smart policy decisions. Working at a state level allows the foundation to reach more students than they could with a small pilot program, they point out. And they say that rather than bypassing academic experts, they are shining a national spotlight on those with workable solutions that can be broadly applied.”

This article goes on to provide other examples and is a good companion piece to another Chronicle article  on The Gates Effect. Both articles are important contributions to the discussion of venture philanthropy’s influence on education policy..  The articles could have explored more the attitude of Gates, its corporate, political and media partners toward faculty and teachers.  For the most part, Gates and its collaborators have a clandestine war going on against anything to do with shared governance and collective bargaining.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a feature article today on the Gates Foundation.  It establishes the fact that Gates has become a major player in higher education policy by funding projects, by infiltrating the U.S. Department of Education with former employees, and by influencing political, media, and other officials at various levels.

“Since 2006, Gates has spent $472-million to remake U.S. higher education, according to a Chronicle analysis—$343-million of that since January 2008, the year Gates announced a new focus on helping low-income young people earn credentials. The Lumina Foundation, another key player in the college-reform movement and the largest private foundation devoted solely to higher education, spent a little more than half that amount over the same period on a similar agenda.

Five years into an ambitious postsecondary program that is expected to last two decades, the avalanche of Gates cash has elevated the Seattle-based foundation to a central role in the national debate about reforming college, raising questions about the extent of its influence.

Gates’s rise occurs as an unusual consensus has formed among the Obama White House, other private foundations, state lawmakers, and a range of policy advocates, all of whom have coalesced around the goal of graduating more students, more quickly, and at a lower cost, with little discussion of the alternatives. Gates hasn’t just jumped on the bandwagon; it has worked to build that bandwagon, in ways that are not always obvious. To keep its reform goals on the national agenda, Gates has also supported news-media organizations that cover higher education. (Disclosure: The Chronicle has received money from the Gates foundation.)…

The effect is an echo chamber of like-minded ideas, arising from research commissioned by Gates and advocated by staff members who move between the government and the foundation world.

Higher-education analysts who aren’t on board, forced to compete with the din of Gates-financed advocacy and journalism, find themselves shut out of the conversation. Academic researchers who have spent years studying higher education see their expertise bypassed as Gates moves aggressively to develop strategies for reform.

Some experts have complained that the Gates foundation approaches higher education as an engineering problem to be solved.

Most important, some leaders and analysts are uneasy about the future that Gates is buying: a system of education designed for maximum measurability, delivered increasingly through technology, and—these critics say—narrowly focused on equipping students for short-term employability.

Private foundations have shaped academe for decades. But Gates and its philanthropic partners, the Lumina and Kresge Foundations, are pioneering an activist approach to higher-education reform, one that emphasizes systemic change and demands quick, measurable results. This new approach has earned praise from some observers, who maintain that strategic, focused grant making is exactly what foundations should be doing.”

The mega-question is:  But what if the focus of these grants and strategies are  misguided?

There is little in our checks and balances to prevent Gates and others like it to operate as venture (some would say “vulture”) philanthropy looking to control and manipulate enterprises to their own view of the world.  As a private philanthropy, Gates (like Lumina, Broad, Walton) are answerable to no one.  They do not want to answer to anyone and instead look to control as much of the playing field as possible – similar to the way monopolists control markets, the production of raw materials and the means of production.   Th article covers good ground  but could also have explored more the corporate, for-profit connections of Gates and others like it.

In sum, the American education-industrial complex continues to grow and function well through Gates and his philanthropic, political,  and corporate collaborators.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The nation reacted to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin in loud and visible ways.  As the New York Times reported:

…[the verdict] reverberated from church pulpits to street protests across the country on Sunday in a renewed debate about race, crime and how the American justice system handled a racially polarizing killing of a young black man walking in a quiet neighborhood in Florida.

Lawmakers, members of the clergy and demonstrators who assembled in parks and squares on a hot July day described the verdict by the six-person jury as evidence of a persistent racism that afflicts the nation five years after it elected its first African-American president.

“Trayvon Benjamin Martin is dead because he and other black boys and men like him are seen not as a person but a problem,” the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, told a congregation once led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Warnock noted that the verdict came less than a month after the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to void a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “The last few weeks have been pivotal to the consciousness of black America,” he said in an interview after services. “Black men have been stigmatized.”

Mr. Zimmerman, 29, a neighborhood watch volunteer, had faced charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter — and the prospect of decades in jail, if convicted — stemming from his fatal shooting of Mr. Martin, 17, on the night of Feb. 26, 2012, in Sanford, a modest Central Florida city. Late Saturday, he was acquitted of all charges by the jurors, all of them women and none black, who had deliberated more than 16 hours over two days.

President Obama, calling Mr. Martin’s death a tragedy, urged Americans on Sunday to respect the rule of law, and the Justice Department said it would review the case to determine if it should consider a federal prosecution.

As dusk fell in New York, a modest rally that had begun hours earlier in Union Square grew to a crowd of thousands that snaked through Midtown Manhattan toward Times Square in an unplanned parade. .. Hundreds of bystanders left the sidewalks to join the peaceful demonstration, which brought traffic to a standstill.

In Sanford, the Rev. Valarie J. Houston drew shouts of support and outrage at Allen Chapel A.M.E. as she denounced “the racism and the injustice that pollute the air in America.”

“Lord, I thank you for sending Trayvon to reveal the injustices, God, that live in Sanford,” she said.

 “The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. ”Not just for his family, or for any one community, but for America. I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, one of the country’s leading advocates of gun control, said the death of Mr. Martin would continue to drive his efforts. “Sadly, all the facts in this tragic case will probably never be known,” he said. “But one fact has long been crystal clear: ‘Shoot first’ laws like those in Florida can inspire dangerous vigilantism and protect those who act recklessly with guns.”

Michael Bloomberg has it right – guns in the wrong hands can inspire dangerous vigilantism and in this case resulted is the death of a young black man.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over the past several months, the media have been following closely New York City’s mayoral candidates in what is shaping up to be a hotly contested election for the office that Michael Bloomberg has held for twelve years.  Bill Keller takes a look at Bloomberg’s legacy in his New York Times column today.

Keller admits that he favored Bloomberg for mayor when he first ran in 2001. However, he also comments that:

“The mayor’s third term, which began with a broken term-limits promise that many New Yorkers have not forgiven, was less successful than his first two, and it felt less successful than it actually was because the city has developed a bit of Bloomberg fatigue. By now, many New Yorkers are ready for a little more consensus, a little less lecturing, a little more attention to those at the bottom.”

Regardless Keller’s position it that the positives have outweighed the negatives.  He [Bloomberg] understands that cities have overtaken national governments as engines of growth and innovation, and that New York competes for talent and investment not just with other American metropolises but with London and Singapore. He has made the city a world leader in sustainability with his devotion to green development and a campaign to get New out of their cars.  To bolster New York’s claim on the future:

“…he has invested in our intellectual infrastructure, too. The planned Cornell applied sciences and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island should strengthen New York’s appeal to the tech industry.

Bloomberg’s father-knows-best approach has paid off with saved lives in the realm of public health. We take for granted now that our restaurants and bars and parks are smoke-free, but at one time Bloomberg was demonized as the Smoke Nazi who was going to put every saloon out of business…

…The city made it through a brutal recession thanks in large part to federal aid after 9/11 and Sandy, the bailout of the financial industries and a surging stock market. But any fair judge would say that Bloomberg played a significant part in the rebound. A believer in the wisdom of balancing revenue sources, he raised property taxes early on; when the recession shrank income-tax revenues, property taxes kept us afloat. He has bequeathed his successor a potential fiscal crisis in the surging cost of public-sector benefits, but he has also left a city better positioned to cope than, say, Los Angeles or Chicago.”

While much of the above is true, there have also been several scandalous no-bid and runaway contracts that have cost the city billions of dollars.  Regardless:

“He was a very prudent custodian of the city’s finances,” said John Mollenkopf, director of the CUNY Center for Urban Research. “He didn’t just luck out.”

On education, Keller serves up a softball for Bloomberg and cops out by stating that:

“Bloomberg’s most consequential and controversial unfinished business is the public school system. He set the schools on a hopeful course: stabilizing the system under mayoral control, raising and enforcing standards, giving parents more options, among them charter schools that actually work. There is much more to do. Schools are the work of a generation, not an administration. Bloomberg’s great achievement was taking on the prevailing defeatist view that urban schools were unfixable.”

Those looking at the schools with a more critical eye paint a different picture.  Student achievement has barely budged in twelve years so while the school system may be better managed, it has not improved education very much at all for those who matter most – the students and their families.  Bloomberg’s greatest failings were his chancellor appointments of Joel Klein who polarized everyone and accomplished nothing and then Kathy Black who had never been inside a public school and was completely unqualified for the position.

We will see more of these Bloomberg legacy articles in the three-plus months left in this election year.  Keller has started the ball rolling.

Tony