During one of his recent daily press briefings, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that his state will work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to “reimagine” its school system. Cuomo presented this as a grand opportunity to transform learning through technology and significantly alter “the old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom and the teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class . . . in all these physical classrooms.”
While there is a place for educational technology in U.S. schools and classrooms, Governor Cuomo’s announcement, including a call for greater reliance on virtual classrooms, reflects the power of foundations to propose technical solutions to high-stakes political debates on educational equity and quality. As a nation, we must be wary of foundations capitalizing on political opportunities created by crises such as Covid-19 to assert their influence over public education.
In this case, the health crisis is being used as an excuse to radically reshape public education without public deliberation or accountability. In any other moment, rethinking classrooms and the entire nature of schooling would be a highly contested solution to the challenge of educating the nation’s children. This undemocratic process leaves marginalized people particularly vulnerable to negative consequences from philanthropic actions.
Powerful foundations like the Gates Foundation do not simply impose policies on governments like New York State, according to research by Megan Tompkins-Stange, public-policy assistant professor at the University of Michigan, and Sarah Reckhow, a political scientist at Michigan State University. Rather, they influence state officials’ consensus about which policies to adopt by positioning themselves as experts on education, garnering widespread support for their policy proposals, and offering economic and organizational support to put those policies into effect. In our research, we refer to this as a process of “philanthropizing consent” for highly controversial policy solutions. On the surface, this educational policy game may seem fair, but the Gates Foundation’s role in shaping public policy stems from its tremendous economic clout, including its vast networks and ability to draw media attention.
Yet the Gates Foundation’s past experiments have failed to improve public education despite spending billions of dollars. As Bill Gates admitted in his 2009 annual letter, the foundation’s expensive push to break up large high schools into small ones in places like New York City and Oakland, Calif., “did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way . . . in most cases, we fell short.” And a report by RAND found that the Gates Foundation’s more recent effort to improve teaching effectiveness “did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation, particularly for low-income minority students.” After each failure, the Gates Foundation moved on, often leaving in its wake deleterious consequences for “other people’s children.”
Exposing Disparities
Much is at stake in public education as states struggle to imagine when and how schools will reopen. Covid-19 brought our educational system to its knees. Overnight, teachers and administrators had the unthinkable task of shutting down face-to-face instruction and rebooting educational instruction through virtual learning. Teachers brought students virtually into their living rooms, working with minimal resources and training in stressful teaching conditions, often while caring for their own children at home.
The crisis of public education certainly did not begin with Covid-19, but the virus has further unmasked the stark disparities in our country’s educational system. Our nation’s racial and class fault lines predetermined who had the technological access to continue learning and who was left offline.
While reimagining and redistributing educational resources and opportunities is imperative, research shows that philanthropic experts often work to find technical solutions to systemic inequities without addressing their underlying causes. If we are to truly transform our nation’s inequitable educational system, turning to philanthropists with a track record of failing to improve public education is not the answer.
Many teachers are already engaged in collective discussions about their working conditions and student learning during and after the pandemic. In response to Governor Cuomo’s announcement, a group of New York City teachers organized an #ImagineSchools Facebook campaign, which calls for small class sizes, culturally relevant instruction, and black and ethnic studies. Educators, students, families, and communities are the ones with the most to lose, and they must determine how to develop our shared future after the pandemic. At the very least, they deserve to be at the table to choose who leads these efforts rather than hearing about it in a daily briefing after the deal has been closed.
