Trillions Of Dollars Later, The Hubris Is Illuminated

I don't think it comes as a big surprise that I've not been a big fan of the Common Core standards.  The standards in math are not clearly written, and they're not as good as the 1997 California math standards they replaced.  I won't speak to the English standards, but the math standards are definitely a stop down.  California's 1997 math standards were benchmarked against Singapore's, as well as those of other countries whose students routinely outperform US students.  The Common Core standards were piloted and benchmarked against...someone's idea.  And the cost has been astronomically high, both in dollars and in failed education:

Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K-12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a “pivot” to another that is not likely to go any better.

“Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy,” Gates wrote on his blog as a preface to a speech he gave last week in Cleveland. He followed this by detailing how U.S. education has essentially made little improvement in the years since he and his foundation — working so closely with the Obama administration that federal officials regularly consulted foundation employees and waived ethics laws to hire several — began redirecting trillions of public dollars towards programs he now admits haven’t accomplished much.

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates says in concluding his speech, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.” If this statement encompasses his Common Core debacle, Gates could have at least the humility to recall that Common Core had no pilot before he took it national. There wasn’t even a draft available to the public before the Obama administration hooked states into contracts, many of which were ghostwritten with Gates funds, pledging they’d buy that pig in a poke.

But it looks like this is as close to an apology or admission of failure as we’re going to get, folks. Sorry about that $4 trillion and mangled years of education for American K-12 kids and teachers. Failing with your kids and money for eight years is slowly getting billionaire visionaries to “evolve” and pledge to respect the hoi polloi a little more, though, so be grateful.

Gates and his foundation were also ardent supporters of the "small school movement", which failed so bad that any mention of it was at one time completely erased from the foundation's web site.  At least no students were harmed by the failures of DOS 4.0 and Windows 8.