Bill and Melinda Gates’s 2019 letter “We Didn’t See This Coming,” is filled with their concerns and optimism about everything from commodes to climate change. Always eager to discuss their global initiatives to help the poor, and a variety of other endeavors, they say little about the aggressive ways they are remaking public education to their liking.
Almost every nonprofit created to disparage public schools or the teaching profession has the Gates Foundation as a major donor.
Maybe they don’t notice, or didn’t see coming, how they promoted charters at the expense of public schools. Perhaps they didn’t mean to criticize the teaching profession by meddling with their teacher effectiveness initiative, and supporting Teach for America types. Didn’t they realize the hubbub they’d create wanting to collect massive amounts of data on children?
They don’t seem to understand that public ownership of public schools is critical to a democracy. That’s what is at stake here.
Many educators and parents, however, insist that Bill and Melinda Gates are about privatizing public schools, making the workers they want for the future economy, and replacing teachers with technology.
Yet the dynamic duo dodge discussion about how they’re dismantling public education. They focus on agreeable altruistic ideas and endeavors, helping girls in Africa get an education, looking at anger in boys and its relationship to poverty and incarceration. It’s hard not to like the couple while you watch them chatting on CBS this Morning or Stephen Colbert.
Their work to transform schools is given much less attention considering all that they do. They’ve even taken over the curriculum through Common Core State Standards!
Even if you disagreed with them, there was a time when Bill Gates and friends were more upfront about their beliefs that public schools were failing. Remember Waiting for Superman?
Perhaps their quietness is due to Mr. Gates’s 2014 interview about education with Washington Post reporter Lyndsey Layton. Layton asked the right questions. It didn’t go well for him.
But the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with their corporate pals, continue to seize control of democratic public schooling, in big and small ways.
In the 2019 letter, Mr. Gates claims we won’t need textbooks anymore.
By the looks of a recent tweet of an elementary school library, posted by AFT President Randi Weingarten, children have been losing more books than textbooks for years! Yet it’s common knowledge that students in schools with great libraries and qualified librarians excel academically!
Both Bill and Melinda Gates like to read. Why aren’t they helping to improve school libraries with computers and books? There’s so much good they could really do for schools.
Instead, Gates highlights software he thinks will better replace books. He says:
When I told you about this type of software in previous letters, it was mostly speculative. But now I can report that these tools have been adopted in thousands of U.S. classrooms from kindergarten through high school. Zearn, i-Ready, and LearnZillion are examples of digital curricula used by students and teachers throughout the U.S.
Ask parents what they think of iReady, or read Thomas Tultican’s “iReady Magnificent Marketing Terrible Teaching.”
If you’re interested in the Gates’s involvement in K-12 schools, jump over on their website to Networks for School Improvement (NSI) portfolio. They invest in partnerships. This is the new wave of privatization.
Transform public schools by working within the school district.
Glance at their list of partners. Many are nonprofits that promote charter schools and anti-teacher groups.
- Achieve, Inc.
- Achieve Atlanta, Inc. (Atlanta, GA)
- Baltimore City Public Schools (Baltimore, MD)
- Bank Street College of Education (Yonkers, NY)
- California Education Partners (California)
- Center for Leadership and Educational Equity (Rhode Island)
- City Year (Milwaukee, WI)
- Communities Foundation of Texas, Inc. (North Texas)
- Community Center for Education Results (Washington)
- CORE Districts (California)
- High Tech High Graduate School of Education (California)
- Institute for Learning (Dallas, TX)
- KIPP Foundation (Multiple states)
- LA Promise Fund
- Network for College Success (Chicago, IL)
- New Visions for Public Schools (New York, NY)
- Northwest Regional Education Service District (Oregon)
- Partners in School Innovation (Philadelphia, PA)
- Seeding Success (Memphis, TN)
- Southern Regional Education Board (Jefferson County, AL)
- Strive
- Teach Plus, Incorporated (Chicago, IL and Los Angeles, CA)
Bill and Melinda Gates continue to showcase their global helpfulness to the applause of many, and perhaps they believe they know what’s best for children to learn in America.
But neither they, nor anyone else, should be given the right to control our public schools!
I hear people ask Mr. Gates whether he will run for president. He doesn’t have to. If he owns America’s children and their futures there’s nothing, I repeat nothing, more important than that.
In the meantime, which school district and city will be the next to go on strike, so teachers can march for better wages and working conditions to better serve students? This may be America’s only hope.
These two edu-meddlers would have done a lot more good if they had used their money to air condition the city schools that become brick ovens during the late spring and early fall months; Classroom environments that become inhumane to all who work there need modern cooling technology more than lousy standards and piss poor tests.
Thank you, Rick. Did you read about the heating problems Baltimore’s schools had last year? I taught in a crummy portable for several years and am especially sensitive about school facility issues. So thank you for your comment.
Gates starts with the classroom to privatize schools from the inside out.
This may be what happens when we in education get to the point of accepting, with great thanks, the crumbs from the 1%, who have helped in their own way to undermine our work, schools, and communities. Charters should be illegal in this nation. And the communities that are losing students to them should be not just deeply embarrassed by that, but also ready and willing to fight against tax abatements everywhere. Particularly to those who have so much more than anyone really needs. Period.
I remember when charters were supposed to be for teachers to run. The old Ray Budde idea. I agree with you now. Any good charter should be pulled under the umbrella of the local school district. No more business-run charters.
Thanks, Stephen!
Thank your for this report. I get the education letters and other notices from the Gates Foundation. Gates could do nothing without his hired hands, all too willing and well-paid to cater to his whims and to his vision of all tech all the time from infancy to the grave. Enablers of his projects are just as much a problem as he is. It is also clear that Bill is the one in charge of education initiatives, with Melinda more engaged in other issues. Now and there is a pretend “request for information” call–a signal that you may get applause for an idea that needs some financial backing. After those ideas have gone through a triage, the foundation will put out a “request for proposals..” These requests show the level of micromanaging Gates funding will demand if your proposal is selected. HIs latest networks initiative is, by design, intended to bypass district authority and the necessity of school board approval of projects..
This is enlightening. Thanks, Laura.
Excellent article Nancy! As usual! It is absolutely despicable what Gates has done and continues to do. I have followed the money from the day CCSS was deployed in FL. It is astounding the amounts of money Gates and the other billionaires continue to rake in of.f the backs of our kids. Of course he will not discuss or publicize his failures. I wish Lyndsay Layton would do another interview with him so the truth can be told of the massive harm and damage he has caused. i-Ready is THE biggest scam. But who needs to bother with validation and reliabilty when you can buy it. and pay people to look the other way. Anything tied to the unvalidated, unreliable, age inappropriate CCSS is a scam including the SAT. We all KNOW David Coleman is a fraud. He was the lead architect for the CCSS and was then given the cushy, non-deserving job at The College Board. Despicable.
Hi Deb, Thank you! You hit all the important points! My guess is he will stay far away from Lyndsay Layton!
I’m not from the USA. I’m from India, but now living in Mexico. Up until a few days ago, I thought that most billionaires are evil, but some are genuinely working to make the world a better place. Bill Gates was on the top of that list, even though I’d known that he was very shady during the ’90s and early ’00s when Microsoft was experiencing rapid growth. I’d somehow internalized that he had changed course, retired, and is now doing the best he can.
After watching an episode debunking charitable activities of billionaires on Patriot Act (on Netflix, which ironically also released a PR series for Gates just recently), my views were shattered. One of the episode’s guest speakers, Anand Giridharadas, author of the book Winners Take All, talks about this very issue. And I had to search it to find what’s it all about.
Turns out, even the episode was bigly charitable about what Gates is doing. He’s actively destroying public education to make himself richer, all the while donning the persona of an uber do-gooder. I don’t know whether he actually believes in the things he’s doing, or he’s just delusional, but the results are the same.
We can’t depend on billionaires to pull us out of the very systems they benefit from.
Thank you, Salman, for your thoughtful comment. I can’t say what’s in the minds of billionaires when they do charitable work, but the results of the meddling by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in public schools has been awful. But he continues to impose his ideas, and many believe the ultimate goal is an end to democratic public schools and career teaching. They will be replaced by charter schools where students learn only through technology and facilitators who monitor student behavior. It will be a sad day for our country and the world if that happens.
I have not purchased Anand Giridharadas’s book yet, but look forward to reading it. Oddly, I heard that Bill Gates says something positive about the book on the back cover. I find that confusing.
I also agree that we can’t depend on billionaires. Nor should they have control of our public schools. So I totally agree with you. Take care.
Betsy DeVos Isn’t helping matters. She is pro charters and vouchers. We need our government to fully fund public education and research. The government isn’t helping so others are “helping”. In San Francisco we have passed many local bonds/ propositions to help funding. We have full time librarians w stocked books in a variety of languages needed. We have PE, arts , computer science, counselors, social workers , nurses and sports programs bc the local people are funding not our federal government. We are looking at bringing back some trades classes. We need more, of course, especially mental health and family support programs. Our national education system needs a revamp- new leadership!
I agree. Well said, Chris! Thank you for commenting! I enjoyed reading this.
Good article, just want to add this.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140829224044/http://honestpracticum.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/How-Bill-Gates-Bought-the-Common-Core-image1.jpg