Bill and Melinda Gates's Foundation Helps ALEC Undercut Public Education
Bill Berkowitz
December 13, 2011
Gates Foundation Enables ALEC's Project to Privatize Public Education
In the war being fought over the very survival of public education, the privatizers are forging the future. Is the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation aiding and abetting them?
I don't know how you feel about Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and one of the world's richest men. Many people
appreciate what he's accomplished. Many think that Gates' wife, Melinda, is doing wonderful work aiding the poor in
underdeveloped countries. Gates' dad, who has taken the lead in advocating higher taxes for the wealthy, has always
seemed really likable.
In philanthropic circles, the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives some $3 billion annually, especially in fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and mother-child deaths in
underdeveloped countries around the world, is highly regarded.
However, there are critics concerned about what Edward Skloot, director of Duke University's Center for Strategic
Philanthropy and Civil Society, recently characterized as the foundation's "brass-knuckle philanthropy." (It should also
be noted that Skloot has indicated he thinks the foundation's methodology was "pretty close to the ideal.")
At a recent Hudson Institute-sponsored panel titled "Living with the Gates Foundation", Tim Ogden, editor of Philanthropy Action, said that Gates is "creating the ball, building the team, hiring the
referees," and "funding the instant replay." According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy's Caroline Preston's report,
Laura Freschi, of New York University's Development Research Institute, "said it's not out of the question that one day
a reader might devour an article about a Gates-supported health project, printed on the pages of a newspaper that gets
Gates money, reported by a journalist who received media training paid for by Gates, citing research by scientists
financed by Gates."
Gates recently told Christiane Amanpour, the host of ABC's "This Week With Christiane Amanpour," that while he favored
raising taxes on the wealthy, he didn't think that would solve the "deficit gap." He also said that he didn't think
President Obama was waging class warfare on the rich, joking that as far as knows, there are no barricades in the
streets being manned by the wealthy.
Gates does have a legion of critics. In his new biography of the late Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson reported that
Jobs told him that Gates is "basically unimaginative, has never invented anything ... he just shamelessly ripped off
other people's ideas."
Last year, I wrote a piece about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's relationship to the chemical company Monsanto and the agribusiness giant
Cargill. The gist of the story was that the Foundation had bought 500,000 Monsanto shares worth around $23 million in
the second quarter of 2010. Critics pointed out that amongst other things, Monsanto has for years had a negative impact
on small farmers, especially in Africa.
And some critics are highly skeptical about some of the Gates Foundation's choices, particularly as it relates to
education in the United States. According to the Gates Foundation website, their education mission in the U.S. is pretty
straightforward: "... to dramatically improve education so that all young people have the opportunity to reach their
full potential. We seek to ensure that all students graduate from high school ready for college and career and prepared
to complete a postsecondary degree or certificate with value in the workplace."
Would it surprise you to learn that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave more than $300,000 to the
American Legislative Exchange Council, a shadowy right-wing organization that has inordinate power in state legislatures
across the country.
In November, the foundation announced that it has awarded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) a grant of $376,635 earmarked for ALEC's work on an assortment of education projects, over a 22-month period. The Gates
Foundation's official description of the grant reads: "to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state
budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain,
evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement."
Robin Rogers is an associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of
New York (CUNY), and the author of "Why Philanthro-policymaking Matters" in The Politics of Philanthrocapitalism,
Society 2011, The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation (Stanford University Press, 2004). In a recent
piece at The Education Optimists titled "Billionaire Education Policy," Rogers pointed out that the Gates Foundation's
grant to ALEC was aimed at "influenc[ing] state budget making - where the rubber hits the road on education policy."
Rogers noted that after the grant's announcement, "Twitter was buzzing with the news" and the debate revolved around
"whether this constituted a Republican takeover of the state budget process, a Gates Foundation takeover of ALEC or
both. No one suggested it was a victory for democracy."
Since its founding nearly 40 years ago, the raison d'etre of the American Legislative Exchange Council has been to influence state legislatures on behalf of corporations and
so-called family values advocates, but mostly corporations. As The Center for Media and Democracy's "ALEC Exposed" project points out, the organization is "not a lobby" and "not a front group": "It is much more powerful than that."
Primarily funded by corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations," and populated mainly by Republican
office holders, ALEC is a non-profit organization made up primarily of a "who's who' of the extreme right."
As I reported in late March of this year, "while the Washington, D.C.-based ALEC may not be responsible for all of the
mayhem going on in such states as Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana, Florida, and Michigan (with more states certain
to follow), it has historically played an extraordinary role in shaping pro-corporate legislation in a number of
states."
According to ALEC Exposed, ALEC-sponsored "bills would privatize public education, crush teacher's unions, and push
American universities to the right. Among other things, these bills make education a private commodity rather than a
public good, and reverse America's modern innovation of promoting learning and civic virtue through public schools
staffed with professional teachers for children from all backgrounds."
As Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, pointed out
in a piece in The Nation, ALEC's mission is "to defund and redesign public schools." Underwood detailed how ALEC has been promoting "choice" and
"vouchers" for more than 20 years.
However, Underwood wrote: "ALEC's most ambitious and strategic push toward privatizing education came in 2007, through a
publication called School Choice and State Constitutions, which proposed a list of programs tailored to each state."
Several states, including Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Indiana enacted ALEC-suggested legislation.
"ALEC's 2010 Report Card on American Education called on members and allies to ‘Transform the system, don't tweak it,'
likening the group's current legislative strategy to a game of whack-a-mole: introduce so many pieces of model
legislation that there is "no way the person with the mallet [teachers' unions] can get them all." Underwood wrote.
According to Underwood, "ALEC's agenda includes":
• "Introducing market factors into teaching, through bills like the National Teacher Certification Fairness Act."
• "Privatizing education through vouchers, charters and tax incentives, especially through the Parental Choice
Scholarship Program Act and Special Needs Scholarship Program Act, whose many spinoffs encourage the creation of private
schools for specific populations: children with autism, children in military families, etc."
• "Increasing student testing and reporting, through more "accountability," as seen in the Education
Accountability Act, Longitudinal Student Growth Act, One-to-One Reading Improvement Act and the Resolution Supporting
the Principles of No Child Left Behind."
• "Chipping away at local school districts and school boards, through its 2009 Innovation Schools and School
Districts Act and more. Proposals like the Public School Financial Transparency Act and School Board Freedom to Contract
Act would allow school districts to outsource auxiliary services."
Admittedly, the $376,635 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is just a drop from the foundation's bucket,
and it will not guarantee ALEC's success in achieving its goals. It certainly will help. As Underwood pointed out,
"ALEC's real motivation for dismantling the public education system is ideological-creating a system where schools do
not provide for everyone - and profit-driven."
What the foundation's grant might contribute to is another in a series of ginned-up reports produced by ALEC's education
team. Robin Rogers wrote recently that there's a danger to extrapolate conclusions from education experiments - as it
was in welfare reform: "Our measurements are imprecise at best and meaningless and misleading at worst. Most educators,
advocates, researchers, philanthropists, and policymakers are well aware of the problem of measuring complex outcomes.
That awareness disappears when we talk about policy experiments. We act as if testing these programs will lead to some
empirical, objective truth about what works best."
Rogers added: "Policy experiments are supposed to tell us empirically how good a program or approach is. They don't do
this very well. Randomized experiments are expensive, difficult, and rare. Most policy ‘experiments' aren't really
experiments. They are a trial run of a program with data collection. Even then, the data is often collected haphazardly
or to highlight program success and minimize failures. Politics and research also operate in different time frames -
solid evaluations often take years. In short, well-funded policy evaluations take too long to actually affect policy,
and ad hoc evaluations don't produce reliable findings."
In the final analysis, ALEC will take Gates money. It will likely come up with another report touting the success of
charter schools and voucher programs, and more reasons to bust teachers unions. It will design sample legislation for
its members to introduce in state houses across the country. The privatization of public education will move forward.
This is not a project that Bill or Melinda Gates should be proud of.
ENDS