Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Common Core: Case Study in Hijacking Education Policy!

Dear Commons Community,

The Washington Post had a featured article yesterday on the Gates Foundation’s influence on the implementation of the Common Core curriculum standards. I blogged about Gates and the Common Core last March.  Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post article.

 
“The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

 
But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.
So they turned to the richest man in the world.

 
On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.
Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.

 
The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.
“Can you do this?” Wilhoit recalled being asked. “Is there any proof that states are serious about this, because they haven’t been in the past?”

 
Wilhoit responded that he and Coleman could make no guarantees but that “we were going to give it the best shot we could.”

 
After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in.

 
What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.

 
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

 
Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration.

 
The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

 
Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

 
One 2009 study, conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with a $959,116 Gates grant, described the proposed standards as being “very, very strong” and “clearly superior” to many existing state standards.

 
Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.

 
The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.
The math standards require students to learn multiple ways to solve problems and explain how they got their answers, while the English standards emphasize nonfiction and expect students to use evidence to back up oral and written arguments. The standards are not a curriculum but skills that students should acquire at each grade. How they are taught and materials used are decisions left to states and school districts.

 
And yet, because of the way education policy is generally decided, the Common Core was instituted in many states without a single vote taken by an elected lawmaker. Kentucky even adopted the standards before the final draft had been made public.

 
States were responding to a “common belief system supported by widespread investments,” according to one former Gates employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the foundation.

 
The movement grew so quickly and with so little public notice that opposition was initially almost nonexistent. That started to change last summer, when local tea party groups began protesting what they viewed as the latest intrusion by an overreaching federal government — even though the impetus had come from the states. In some circles, Common Core became known derisively as “Obamacore.”

 
Since then, anti-Common Core sentiment has intensified, to the extent that it has become a litmus test in the Republican Party ahead of the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination process. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, whose nonprofit Foundation for Excellence in Education has received about $5.2 million from the Gates Foundation since 2010, is one of the Common Core’s most vocal supporters. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who, like Bush, is a potential Republican presidential candidate, led a repeal of the standards in his state. In the past week, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), a former advocate of the standards, signed a law pulling her state out, days after South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, did the same.

 
Some liberals are angry, too, with a few teacher groups questioning Gates’s influence and motives. Critics say Microsoft stands to benefit from the Common Core’s embrace of technology and data — a charge Gates vehemently rejects.”

The article goes on with further details and is worth a read.  The bottom line is that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had a lot to offer education. Some of the initiatives it decided to fund make education sense but the ways it went about influencing decisions were more akin to monopolistic practices and hostile takeovers than democratic governance. It trampled the rights of parents and communities interested in their children’s education. And for that we say for shame on Bill and Melinda Gates!

 

Tony

 

3 comments

  1. Perhaps finding a way for local and state grassroot efforts to join forces would prove to be most effective. Power in numbers. Perhaps such groups already exist. If not, why not leverage the power of the internet in some way – maybe by joining teacher unions from across the country? I understand individual states and districts differ but the numbers are there and could be powerful. I do not claim to have the answers – I just see higher education students who would make fabulous teachers choosing other professions because of the state of our K-12 education system. I know there are no easy answers and it’s going to take time…

  2. Mary,

    Thank you for your post. It is well-stated. We got where are in part when the federal government got overly involved with education practice. You can say it started in 1983 when a very poorly done report, A Nation at Risk, was published that blamed all of America’s ills including a soso economy on our public education system. In subsequent years, “school reformers” in both political parties decided to hand over education policy and practice to corporate interests. While slow at first, this movement took off with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top federal programs. We are now in a morass of testing and assessment mania. The only way out of this is for “grassroots” action at the local schools, school districts, and state education departments where parents and teachers call for change in the testing/corporate agenda. Some of the recent actions in New York State on the Common Core directed at Education Commissioner John King were effective. Local boycotts by parents and schools that opt out of testing likewise are proving effective. However, we have had 31 years of corporate “school reform” and it will take a bit of time to take education back.

    Tony

  3. So where do you believe we should go from here? It seems all we do is go around in circles with little or no positive outcomes and stress out our students and teachers in the process. Why aren’t we sitting down with education representatives from countries that appear to be doing it correctly and figure out where we have failed our children? While financial support is greatly needed, and appreciated, qualified and experienced educators and researchers need to be assisting in the decision making process so that we can begin to move forward once again. How did we go from being the top in the world to where we are today?