The billionairess better half of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation came to the nation’s capital Friday to discuss the behemoth charity’s data-driven development projects. And yet, the one Gates project of pressing interest to the population of this country got barely more than lip service.
The foundation’s yearly progress letter focused, in part, on the failed design and implementation of national Common Core standards for public schools, which Gates’s funding forced to fruition with the organization’s largest domestic initiative to-date. In talking with the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks, however, Gates pivoted to the high points of her save-the-world public health agenda (to vaccinate the world’s poorest children; to enshroud malarial slums in mosquito nets; to bring up-to-date birth control to third-world women) when her host broached the subject of the American public education system.
Concerning the limitations of data-driven charity projects, Brooks asked, “It’s one thing to say how many women use contraceptives, how many people now are using bed nets. How about: How many people have different attitudes about education?” Gates responded with an anecdote about women “becoming empowered” in developing nations.
The short story is Common Core standards have failed in certain states where they should have brought improvements because of the overly ambitious pace and pressures that came with Gates funding. They’re unsurprising mistakes for a human-development initiative so inconsiderate of human wisdom.
After her talk, an usher over a loudspeaker asked the audience to remain in their seats, while Melinda shook hands with a small group of older women in the uniform of bright, modish suits.
“Billionaires? Foreign dignitaries?” the young woman seated next to me wondered aloud of the privileged few who stood in her presence. A couple other less-than-loving observations floated around among the seated masses: She sure does talk more like a businesswoman than a philanthropist—and, oh boy, did she dodge those education questions!
And she sort of gave a reason. Although she’s married to one, she’s troubled by the imbalanced influence of men in tech (think young guys in hoodies who become middle-aged men in sweaters), famously low on the human-quotient as they are. “When I think about where the future of tech is going and artificial intelligence,” she said, “and when I think about who’s programming those machines, and who those machines are learning from—at least from my perspective—I don’t want them all to be twenty-five year old men!”
She apparently feels no cultural imperative to buy into the prevailing ethos of the tech universe’s ruling class. Failure is a favorite virtue among tech titans, but the lady Gates doesn’t have to dwell on the lessons of her foundation’s most famous failure if she doesn’t want to!
When the question of the Gates Foundation’s “biggest failure” came up, she steered clear of the obvious answer and instead compared vaccine trials to venture capital. When billionaire philanthropists get to be alone together, though, as the signatories of the Giving Pledge get to be every year at billionaire philanthropist camp, then: “We talk about mistakes and failures in private, where people are comfortable.”
Hey, I understand. Here in D.C., it’s easier to talk about the pitfalls of vaccinating Bangladesh. Maybe in Dhaka she could have a comfortable conversation about Common Core.
