Gates: typical clueless ed reform.

Previously, we reviewed how the Gates Foundation was destroying Africa and the many ways in which it fails to understand education, but here’s quick pictorial illustrating why ed reform is mostly garbage. Brought to you by the Gates Foundation.

There are many schools that have something like this in their Wiki entry or online school bio:

So, this was a 2007 program, and it’s 2021, so surely there’s some paper or results or commentary or something that helps us understand (1) what was attempted and (2) what — if anything — was accomplished.

Search on the Gates Foundation (using the silly program name) and you get one result: the initial 2006 press release. 1 of 1 result. That’s it. Of course, the press release is the most important part of any ed reform program, so at least they nailed that.

That’s the info at the Gates Foundation. $16M to the College Board. So let’s go over to the grantee and see if there’s any report there…

Hahaha of course there isn’t. They just took the money and ran. Hyped up 16 schools, spent a little of Bill’s money, then everyone pretended like nothing happened and moved onto the next ed scam.

Incidentally, here are Leto high school’s grades from the Florida Dept. of Ed.

Of course Gates will tell you that they’re “data driven” or “results driven” or nonsense driven, but they’re just as clueless as every other mediocre ed reformer. We all know that there’s a detailed program description and probably some data, various reports, etc. It’s possible that Gates and College Board are hiding those reports because it makes them look bad, but I think the real answer is that no one really cares. They aren’t actually interested in transparency or dialogue or improvement. If they bothered to learn anything from their efforts, they’d probably learn that they don’t know what they’re doing and close up shop.