Poor Bill Gates. Not exactly.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spending over $10 billion on public education, a mind-boggling amount and unprecedented in history. Bill and Melinda have a generous personal dedication to school reform.
Still, the results were modest.
Don't just take my word for it. Melinda wrote in 2020: “If you had asked us 20 years ago, we would have guessed that global health was our foundation's most dangerous work and that U.S. education work was our surest bet. In fact, it is It turned out to be quite the opposite.'' Melinda expressed skepticism about “the idea that billionaire philanthropists would design classroom innovations or create education policy.''
Bill and Melinda are definitely the strongest, but they're not alone. Mark Zuckenberg and Netflix founder Reed Hastings are among them. But, as one writer reported, “Billionaires are spending their fortunes reforming America's schools. It's not working.”
That's bad news. If the super rich and super smart philanthropists who made their fortunes as innovators can't find a way to reform public schools, who can?
I have my own theories as to what went wrong, but first I'd like to talk about a matter of personal privilege. For me, it's difficult to evaluate billionaires' generosity towards education without keeping in mind the downside of their overall philanthropy.
Critics, especially Tim Schwab, an investigative journalist and author of the deeply researched book The Bill Gates Problem: Reconsidering the Myth of the Benevolent Billionaire, have argued that Gates and other mega-philanthropists are politically He claims to be a political bully. They exercise undue influence over public policy, crowding out other reform ideas and circumventing democratic decision-making.
They may even promote their own for-profit philanthropy. It's all part of what a former Wall Street banker describes as “how vocal billionaires turn wealth into power.”
I also generally agree with the views of these critics. Plus, there's a twist here. I think Gates' education philanthropy through initiatives like national standards for student performance, teacher evaluations, and charter schools deserves praise, even if he doesn't live up to the reform hype. Still, most pet projects by other billionaires have little upside and upside potential.
So what's my theory as to why education philanthropy has slumped? The answer is rooted in the fact that many billionaires brought Silicon Valley thinking to school reform. They despise educators and bureaucracy, are destructive, and overconfident that high technology can solve everything.
There is no doubt that technologies such as AI, online instruction, and digital learning will help. However, these advances overlook the least understood and most essential path to school reform, particularly the effective implementation of research-based best practices and “continuous improvement” in the classroom.
We already know far more about how to improve schools than we realize. As the late Robert Slavin, a Johns Hopkins University expert on research-based best practices, said: “The problem with education reform is not a lack of good ideas, but a lack of good ideas that are implemented wisely.” One education analyst said, “The problem with education reform is not a lack of good ideas, but a lack of good ideas that are implemented wisely.” It would be helpful to remove it from the lexicon entirely and instead adopt a what-works mindset, where clearer evidence and better implementation are given a higher premium.”
This problem is not entirely new. According to the classic history of American public education, we have been “groping toward utopia” without focusing on what matters most: the “everyday interactions between teachers and students.” You can see. For example, today's research shows the best ways to teach children to read and to recruit and retain teachers. And yet, we are not doing these things as they are supposed to be done.
The key question is why school systems across the country have been so slow to implement what we know works, with or without philanthropy.
The main culprit is a weak management system, driven primarily by political polarization and myths about “local control” and “professional autonomy.”
Polarization primarily involves the endless education wars between liberals and conservatives over pedagogy and accountability (not to mention the current heated culture wars over books and diversity). There is no such thing).
Local control and professional autonomy go hand in hand and embody what I mean. individualistic professional culture. From teachers and principals to central administrators, educators want to do things their own way. In medicine, when you don't use evidence-based best practices, it's called medical malpractice. In education, it is called professional autonomy.
Apply that thinking to nearly 13,000 public school districts and 100,000 schools in 50 states across the country. This is a fragmented accountability design to the point of confusing management.
Can education philanthropists help turn the Titanic around? Here are some startup ideas.
The first is to suppress your ego. Educational reform will not be achieved by discovering the next big technology. As the saying goes, this is a marathon, not a sprint (in Silicon Valley).
The second is to study the factual evidence that is already known about best practices in instruction and commit your talents and resources to the successful implementation of these practices.
Third, improve the management capacity of the school system. Contribute funds to management systems and training that include planning, clear boundaries of organizational authority and accountability, data collection, monitoring, and setting tough priorities. Maryland's Interim Superintendent Carrie Wright wisely (and courageously, given the concentration of conflicts) said, “If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.”
Fourth, be a team player. Bureaucracy may be frustrating, but working together will bring you more benefits.
Let's hope billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates learn their lesson and give school reform another try. They have to do a makeup job.