The Chronicle of Higher Education screwed its courage to the sticking place recently, producing a series of articles and infographics expressing mild criticism of the Gates Foundation. (This happens every so often — less mildly in global health, where global lives are on the line — and usually the Foundation makes noises about listening.)
“The Gates Effect” discusses the way that the massive outflow of strategic philanthropy from the Foundation has created a monocultural discourse, where higher education is framed in engineering terms, challenges of inputs and outputs, challenges to be met with technological tools wielded of course by technocrats.
Troublingly, found the Chronicle, “off-message” perspectives were being crowded out or dismissed, thanks to the Foundation’s strategic work in communications: Cash-strapped researchers and journals can do well by generating data points on behalf of Foundation-backed initiatives, and that research tends quickly to make its way into the hands of reform-minded policy-makers. Authors Marc Parry, Kelly Field, and Beckie Supiano write:
Gates’s rise occurs as an unusual consensus has formed among the Obama White House, other private foundations, state lawmakers, and a range of policy advocates, all of whom have coalesced around the goal of graduating more students, more quickly, and at a lower cost, with little discussion of the alternatives. Gates hasn’t just jumped on the bandwagon; it has worked to build that bandwagon, in ways that are not always obvious.
As if to prove their point for them, Daniel Greenstein, the Foundation’s director of postsecondary success, decided to reply with what is, in this context, a withering put-down: “The alternative — graduating fewer students at a higher cost over a longer period of time — is not serving the needs of most students,” he told the Seattle Times by email. (It’s almost never a good sign when your correspondent in a debate recasts your position as “I’m hearing you’d like to shoot yourself, and others, in the face.”)
But note, too, how Greenstein’s response perfectly captures what people are complaining about: “little discussion of the alternatives.” In Greenstein’s formulation there is but a single alternative, crudely caricatured. This is rhetorical bullying from an Oxford PhD meant to shut down conversation — in a story about that precise dynamic: “Yet few of those critics speak out in public, and some higher-education leaders, researchers, and lobbyists were reluctant to talk on the record for this article.”
The Seattle Times, by the way, mentions that some of their recent stories on “the vexing issues of educational reform in K-12 and higher education” were funded by a grant from Solutions Journalism Network, generously supported by the Gates Foundation. Since 2009, the newspaper has printed a number of stories based on the importance of college-completion rates, a key metric for the Gates Foundation. In today’s paper, a story reports on the surprise global interest in an online course in public speaking at the University of Washington: more than 112,000 have signed up for the MOOC.
Apparently the students are supposed to post videos of their speaking performances, which emphasizes the Achilles’ heel of online education: asymmetry. At the very end of the story, the lecturer says that he likes to have students in class practice concepts as they discuss them but online “I…can’t check to make sure students are actually doing it.”
Living in Seattle, you feel the weight of the Gates Foundation everywhere. You can’t swing a dead cat in this town and not hit one of their “ed reform” astro-turf groups.
That key point is worth repeating – it’s not so much that the Gates Foundation has a point of view of how things should go but they act like it’s the ONLY one that matters, could work or has research to back it. In education, the Gates Foundation has mostly had failures as they see education is far more complicated than they thought. But they exist in an echo chamber and only listen to each other (rarely to parents or teachers).