In the Gates Foundation’s annual letter, dreamily entitled “What If…,” CEO Sue Desmond-Hellman writes of past progress and future goals. The foundation aims to save the world from what Bill and Melinda Gates consider its greatest problems: namely, infectious diseases, cigarette smoking and the American education system. This year’s letter reveals that of the big three, it’s the education overhaul—throwing money at Common Core to bring it live coast-to-coast—that’s presented the most unforeseen challenges.
This acknowledgement of the bumpy execution echoes a criticism of the broad-scale curricular reset many teachers have voiced since its implementation across more than 40 states started in 2010. That is, that rebuilding every lesson or designing years of original curricula to meet stifling new test-driven standards requires more time and attention than any classroom teacher has to spare, and more guidance and preparation than have been provided. That’s not to mention controversial requirements that math and science teachers instruct students in unfamiliar methods—at an ultimate disservice to their test scores: In the spring of 2015, public high school seniors, who had been exposed to Common Core math since fourth grade, showed a decline in their scores over the last two years.
Harsher critics of the foundation’s push for Common Core will read a belated confession of arrogance in the pledge to “hear from educators.” (Arrogance may seem like an understatement, considering a tech-billionaire philanthropist—and a college dropout to boot—directing every public school classroom in the country should be the premise of a dystopian novel.) Of course the standards and frameworks governing Common Core curricula are not of Gates’s own design. But, without the Gates foundation’s funding and lobbying, Common Core would not have come to so many schools so soon—admittedly, now, too soon—and, thus, would not persist in its present hobbled state.
Hearing from teachers, the foundation has learned what anyone aware of the amount of BS classroom teachers encounter daily already knew: They’ll find a way do their jobs. Between parents, administrators and all those goofy kids, there’s already quite a lot of chaff to cut through to get to the actual work of teaching. So, when it comes to federally ordained curriculum design shoved into conception by Bill Gates’s vast fortune, it’s no surprise teachers have worked around the prohibitive paperwork and planning requirements. How? By sharing lessons online.
Online lesson-sharing and lesson-review platforms offer up free teacher-reviewed plans, while others allow enterprising educators to charge a small fee to download lessons. The letter praises teachers’ problem solving, “Digital content and tools that provide support for lesson planning … providing millions of teachers with an increasingly attractive alternative to traditional textbooks.”
And then it plugs the Gates-funded nonprofit EdReports.org—its central review board assesses officially sanctioned common-core-standard curricula with none of the personal appeal of teachers’ homegrown platforms. Indeed, true to its fiscal origins in tech mercantilism, the Gates Foundation’s “hearing from educators” means studying their self-made solutions … and investing in a competing platform.
