9 ms·

Bill Gates, Washington State, and the Nuisance of Democracy

61 points by chishaku 10y ago

clumsysmurf 10y ago
"Multibillionaire philanthropists use their personal wealth, their tax-exempt private foundations, and their high-profile identities as philanthropists to mold public policy to a degree not possible for other citizens. They exert this excessive influence without public input or accountability." "The New Prophets of Capital" by Nicole Aschoff explores these themes http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N6PCK4U http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N6PCK4U
ksdale 10y ago
I think this cuts both ways quite a lot more than the author admits. Bill Gates may not represent "the will of the people" but he also doesn't stand to benefit nearly as much from "winning" as say, teacher's unions. I'm not nearly informed enough to have an opinion on the issue of charter schools, but these horrible billionaires seem to be acting in good faith to improve educational outcomes for everyone and that doesn't seem like that bad of a thing to me... It's probably true that people will open up charter schools for the sole purpose of making money and they will run some crappy schools, but it seems disingenuous to speak as though the public school side doesn't have an interest beyond protecting the children.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  The problem with the charter school movement is that its effectiveness is questionable. Often the charter schools attract the self-motivated or only accept certain candidates while turning others away. So the student population of these schools is generally predisposed towards educational performance. Some of the supposedly "successful" charter schools are run at a loss, subsidized by some outside institution or special interest. Without that subsidy, their students would likely perform more poorly. I think if you compared excellent charter schools to excellent public schools, you wouldn't see much difference between the two.
  - brwnll 10y ago
    The specifics of charter school success isn't really the main concept of the article. I believe the grandparent is pointing out the writer attacks the "billionaire philanthropists" donations as an assault on democracy, without acknowledging that the main donors on the other side were all vested interest groups (Teachers Unions, etc)
    - r00fus 10y ago
      In this case, I think I trust vested interests (teachers unions) more than unaccountable external parties with billions of dollars. I also question whether it's "philanthropy" or just plain business - meaning these foundations see a way to make a profitable "omelet" by breaking the public education "eggs"?
      - barney54 10y ago
        But the vested interests(teacher's unions) aren't vested to protect educational outcomes, but the teachers. I don't see why we should trust them more than large donors to charter school campaigns.
    - bobwaycott 10y ago
      The article more than acknowledged the vested interests on the opposing side. The author even breaks down their actual campaign contributions and budgets. I'm not sure what you think it means to acknowledge both sides, but even despite the article's obvious biases, there was very clear delineation of both sides, their budgets, and their impacts.
  - darawk 10y ago
    You can't make the leap between "has subsidy" and "would likely perform more poorly without subsidy". In nearly all cases charter schools outperform public schools. It may be that this is partially or entirely explained by the factors that you mentioned, but to my knowledge, there is no actual evidence of that.
    - 10y ago
- muddi900 10y ago
  Charter schools' biggest failure is that they do not have the restrictions on religious indoctrination that public schools have. A lot of them are just public-subsidized religious schools, something that can be considered undemocratic, since the principals of American democracy are rooted in secularism. That being said, if you believe that the American academic paradigm is broken, and you have a lot of money, what are you supposed to do?
  - wmf 10y ago
    Maybe you're supposed to test your ideas at a scale smaller than a state first.
  - ansible 10y ago
    That being said, if you believe that the American academic paradigm is broken, and you have a lot of money, what are you supposed to do? Well, we could do actual science. We find a couple cities of at least 100K population, with roughly the same demographics, wealth, etc. and test out different policies. Of course, some of the people involved in the debate are already anti-science, so I don't think it will be politically feasible.
RodericDay 10y ago
https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/interview-with-bill-gates-almost-admitting-that-hes-fallible/ https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/interview-wit... > It’s interesting how Gates seems to give every excuse in the book for why he “failed” to drastically improve academic achievement despite the time and money spent on his mission. > His first excuse is that compared to the cumulative 600 billion dollars in government spending on public schools, he only had 5 billion to spend. Of course, he is talking as if that 5 billion was equally scattered among all the public schools in the United States. We know that his small school models had enough funding and opportunity to test whether his experiment would work, which by his own admission, did not meet his standards. > Then he and the writer of the article suggest that it was the powerful teacher unions that thwarted the success of Gates foundation initiatives. But later on, even Gates admits there seems to be no correlation between student achievement and the strength of unions in particular states. Although suprisingly, the two states he mentioned as being strong union states , Massachusetts and New York, are ranked # 2 and #5, respectively by NAEP results in student performance. > If it sounds like a man who is grabbing at straws, he is. He admits as much when talking about measuring teacher effectiveness. I was slightly embarassed for him, when he mentioned the movie, “To Sir, With Love” as an inspiration for his new initiative in taping teachers in real classroom settings. You don’t see the president of the United States saying,” I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan”, and then proceed to discuss how the war in Afganistan can be won. What presidents usually do is to talk with military experts, diplomatic advisers, academics, political advisers, etc. > But not this guy – he wants to watch hours and hours of tape on military engagements in the mountains of Afganistan and write a report on how soldier effectiveness can be rated. The thing is, if he were really a scientist, I’d say fine – but he isn’t one really. What he is – is a businessman. Unfortunately, what business knows about computer chips and factory output doesn’t translate into the complex lives of human beings. Plus an anonymous confessional from an actual student: > I attended a high school funded by the Gates Grant from 2003-2007, and let me tell you, it was a giant, flaming, trashcan fire of poor management, lack of consistency, and almost entirely unsupported beyond the initial investment in creating it. The original Principal bailed before the end of the first year (and isn't even in education anymore, if I hear correctly), about 2/3rds of the staff had been replaced by my second year. > At start, it was two grades of 160 kids, 9th and 10th; when the 10th graders, the folks who graduated one year before, finally graduated, their class consisted of 13 kids. My class, that original 9th grade, graduated 50 people. I almost didn't graduate, since we had no gym and no way to earn the appropriate PE credit until they introduced Yoga in my senior year. We also began with no "D's", only A, B, C, and Fail, but since they did an absolute shit job at explaining this to prospective students and their families, we ended up getting a lot of kids that wouldn't have cut it in the "normal" high school, and ended up a de-facto alternative, with D's introduced in the second year. > Other initiatives that sprung up from his "philanthropy" include the creation of separate "schools" at a lot of the local high schools; basically, it was kind of treated like in college, where if you wanted to, say, go into Medicine, you picked "Biomed Academy," and took a certain set of classes with that in mind. So, y'know, pick your future at the end of Junior High.
brwnll 10y ago
Love when people call something undemocratic just because they are against the goals of a group. Wealthy individuals and groups have power to publish advertisements and arguments for their ideas/proposals to try to change the mind of the voters. Attempting to convince the voters your right is not undemocratic, it's the core of democracy. Additionally, anyone who believes that the plutocracy has more power in America now than ever before is entirely ignorant of even general American history. It wasn't that long ago where there was so little regulation on business, political and police bribes so common, that the wealthy could ignore any law they wanted without any fear of reprisal.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  > the wealthy could ignore any law they wanted without any fear of reprisal. Oh, well. It was nice while it lasted. Guess now they'll just behave and go gently into the night. I love happy endings. So cosy. Sigh.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  The point of the article is that they didn't convince on the merits, they convinced by completely saturating all forms of media with a single point of view, losing repeatedly (still), until they eventually eked out a win. Then when that win was found to be unconstitutional, they paid politicians directly. If that's the core of democracy, I don't understand what was so bad about Pravda.
blackhole 10y ago
As a washingtonian who has been strongly in support of charter schools for years without any knowledge of Gates' involvement, this story seems to be choosing a very strange case-study for criticizing billionaire philanthropists. Perhaps it has not occurred to the author that many people support charter schools because they're actually a good idea? The fundamental problem with saying that this money should go to the public school system in order to make it better is that we don't know how to make the school system better. It doesn't matter how much money is thrown at anyone in education because everyone is doing it wrong. Throwing more money at the public educational system will simply result in schools that are exceedingly good at cranking out students that excel at taking tests and memorizing useless facts instead of actually being good at something. Every argument against Charter schools that I heard during the debate was focused almost universally on money. It was always about money. Teachers seem convinced that in order to make our school system work, they just need more money, when in fact the entire public educational system has already driven off a cliff. Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids. Nobody can fix the educational system until we find better ways to educate children. Until we can find a way to instill creative problem solving and encourage innovative thinking instead of violently shoving children's brains into boxes, nothing is going to change, no matter how much money is thrown at the problem. In a world where computers are better at following instructions than any human being ever will be, creativity is the one single advantage we have, and the regulations hovering over the public school system are doing their best to utterly destroy any creative spirit our children might have had. Our society is being shaped not by the kind of intelligence that is measured by a test, but by the innovative spirit of people who think outside the box. It's time the educational system started thinking outside the box, too.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  > Perhaps it has not occurred to the author that many people support charter schools because they're actually a good idea? No more than the opposite point of view, which wins with a fraction of the backing. > Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids. Or, they won't be better than public schools.
Bedon292 10y ago
"A substantial portion of every tax-exempt foundation’s wealth—39.6 percent at the top tax bracket for filing in 2016—is diverted each year from the public treasury, where voters would have determined its use." Is this really true? Did Bill Gates actually have any 'Income' last year at all? Sure he has capital gains, and dividends, but none of that is going to be taxed at 39.6%. Which is a completely different topic. But it seems completely misleading to say that taxpayers are funding the philanthropy. Also, did Bill not fund the foundation with shares, rather than taking a tax break on cash income? Either way, it seems like that money that is funding the philanthropy would not have been entering the public coffers if it were not used for philanthropy.
- rlucas 10y ago
  The main problem with this bit is that is reveals that the authors (and editors, if they bothered) are completely financially illiterate. We do not tax "wealth" in the US; we tax net income. This fundamental flub -- in an article ostensibly about money (!) -- tells me we can't take any of the numbers or financial mechanics it presents seriously.
bobwaycott 10y ago
This is bad citizenship, plain and simple, and a gross abuse of the political system rooted in the ability to abuse it in proportion to one's ability to pay for that abuse. We cannot hope to have local/state/national government by and for the People, and even hope to have a chance of it being above reproach, if we do not immediately take steps to actually prioritize and protect the People's will. I get that handling this on the national level is a much more difficult problem to find an amicable solution that appeals to everyone's ideological sensibilities. But, at the state and local level, the abuse that money brings to the equation should be--nay, is--much easier to solve. It requires but a few sensible rules that permit the greatest possible latitude for citizens to participate in, guide, and organize their local governments to their notions of what constitutes good government and social policy, while protecting their local and state governments from outside influence. That state legislatures do not enact these rules is, in my opinion, but a reflection of the corrosive and perverting effect of money--and the desire for it--on all political activity. - For all local and state-wide policies--especially coercive public policies--one must be a resident of the local/state entity to participate in any way, be that financial, putting one's boots on the ground, or having any other recognized part in the process. - Make it illegal to hire an out-of-state company who brings in out-of-state workers to collect signatures for your desired proposal. Need to collect signatures? You must only use residents of the state in which the proposed policy will take effect. Require that they must be unpaid volunteers. Interrogate the signature-collection process, and invalidate all signatures collected by anyone who is not a resident of the local/state entity that will be affected by the policy. - No more allowing wealthy citizens, who are not residents of the local/state entity affected by the proposed policy, to donate to the cause. Completely remove the ability for wealth to escape its local boundaries. There is no reason a wealthy resident of Oklahoma should be able to involve themselves in the local and state issues happening in New York. This requires a real, sensible definition of being a resident—not, say, owning a home in a place you do not actually spend your time living. Want to weigh in on a local issue? Better be a resident of the city limits. There are plenty of reasonable ways we could protect states and cities from being overwhelmed by the unbalanced competition for mind- and vote-share that comes from allowing moneyed interests stepping into local/state political and social issues. Perhaps once we tackle protecting government by and for the People at the local and state levels, we could then work together to tackle the same issues at the national level.
bobwaycott 10y ago
I think, in addition to the varied issues this article highlights, it also points out that we perhaps need to rethink what we call philanthropy, and strongly divorce it from being used as an automatic honorific because a wealthy individual starts a non-profit.
trashtoss 10y ago
College dropout has unrealistic ideas to improve education. I kid but only a little. If the man had directly funded a school and gotten unquestionably superior outcomes the conversation would be rather different. Instead, all he has to show are policy successes, often at great expense, but for such an ostensibly data-driven program where are the successful educational outcomes?

61 points by chishaku 10y ago

"Multibillionaire philanthropists use their personal wealth, their tax-exempt private foundations, and their high-profile identities as philanthropists to mold public policy to a degree not possible for other citizens. They exert this excessive influence without public input or accountability." "The New Prophets of Capital" by Nicole Aschoff explores these themes http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N6PCK4U http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N6PCK4U

ksdale 10y ago

I think this cuts both ways quite a lot more than the author admits. Bill Gates may not represent "the will of the people" but he also doesn't stand to benefit nearly as much from "winning" as say, teacher's unions. I'm not nearly informed enough to have an opinion on the issue of charter schools, but these horrible billionaires seem to be acting in good faith to improve educational outcomes for everyone and that doesn't seem like that bad of a thing to me... It's probably true that people will open up charter schools for the sole purpose of making money and they will run some crappy schools, but it seems disingenuous to speak as though the public school side doesn't have an interest beyond protecting the children.

wavefunction 10y ago
The problem with the charter school movement is that its effectiveness is questionable. Often the charter schools attract the self-motivated or only accept certain candidates while turning others away. So the student population of these schools is generally predisposed towards educational performance. Some of the supposedly "successful" charter schools are run at a loss, subsidized by some outside institution or special interest. Without that subsidy, their students would likely perform more poorly. I think if you compared excellent charter schools to excellent public schools, you wouldn't see much difference between the two.
- brwnll 10y ago
  The specifics of charter school success isn't really the main concept of the article. I believe the grandparent is pointing out the writer attacks the "billionaire philanthropists" donations as an assault on democracy, without acknowledging that the main donors on the other side were all vested interest groups (Teachers Unions, etc)
  - r00fus 10y ago
    In this case, I think I trust vested interests (teachers unions) more than unaccountable external parties with billions of dollars. I also question whether it's "philanthropy" or just plain business - meaning these foundations see a way to make a profitable "omelet" by breaking the public education "eggs"?
    - barney54 10y ago
      But the vested interests(teacher's unions) aren't vested to protect educational outcomes, but the teachers. I don't see why we should trust them more than large donors to charter school campaigns.
  - bobwaycott 10y ago
    The article more than acknowledged the vested interests on the opposing side. The author even breaks down their actual campaign contributions and budgets. I'm not sure what you think it means to acknowledge both sides, but even despite the article's obvious biases, there was very clear delineation of both sides, their budgets, and their impacts.
- darawk 10y ago
  You can't make the leap between "has subsidy" and "would likely perform more poorly without subsidy". In nearly all cases charter schools outperform public schools. It may be that this is partially or entirely explained by the factors that you mentioned, but to my knowledge, there is no actual evidence of that.
  - 10y ago
muddi900 10y ago
Charter schools' biggest failure is that they do not have the restrictions on religious indoctrination that public schools have. A lot of them are just public-subsidized religious schools, something that can be considered undemocratic, since the principals of American democracy are rooted in secularism. That being said, if you believe that the American academic paradigm is broken, and you have a lot of money, what are you supposed to do?
- wmf 10y ago
  Maybe you're supposed to test your ideas at a scale smaller than a state first.
- ansible 10y ago
  That being said, if you believe that the American academic paradigm is broken, and you have a lot of money, what are you supposed to do? Well, we could do actual science. We find a couple cities of at least 100K population, with roughly the same demographics, wealth, etc. and test out different policies. Of course, some of the people involved in the debate are already anti-science, so I don't think it will be politically feasible.

RodericDay 10y ago

https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/interview-with-bill-gates-almost-admitting-that-hes-fallible/ https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/interview-wit... > It’s interesting how Gates seems to give every excuse in the book for why he “failed” to drastically improve academic achievement despite the time and money spent on his mission. > His first excuse is that compared to the cumulative 600 billion dollars in government spending on public schools, he only had 5 billion to spend. Of course, he is talking as if that 5 billion was equally scattered among all the public schools in the United States. We know that his small school models had enough funding and opportunity to test whether his experiment would work, which by his own admission, did not meet his standards. > Then he and the writer of the article suggest that it was the powerful teacher unions that thwarted the success of Gates foundation initiatives. But later on, even Gates admits there seems to be no correlation between student achievement and the strength of unions in particular states. Although suprisingly, the two states he mentioned as being strong union states , Massachusetts and New York, are ranked # 2 and #5, respectively by NAEP results in student performance. > If it sounds like a man who is grabbing at straws, he is. He admits as much when talking about measuring teacher effectiveness. I was slightly embarassed for him, when he mentioned the movie, “To Sir, With Love” as an inspiration for his new initiative in taping teachers in real classroom settings. You don’t see the president of the United States saying,” I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan”, and then proceed to discuss how the war in Afganistan can be won. What presidents usually do is to talk with military experts, diplomatic advisers, academics, political advisers, etc. > But not this guy – he wants to watch hours and hours of tape on military engagements in the mountains of Afganistan and write a report on how soldier effectiveness can be rated. The thing is, if he were really a scientist, I’d say fine – but he isn’t one really. What he is – is a businessman. Unfortunately, what business knows about computer chips and factory output doesn’t translate into the complex lives of human beings. Plus an anonymous confessional from an actual student: > I attended a high school funded by the Gates Grant from 2003-2007, and let me tell you, it was a giant, flaming, trashcan fire of poor management, lack of consistency, and almost entirely unsupported beyond the initial investment in creating it. The original Principal bailed before the end of the first year (and isn't even in education anymore, if I hear correctly), about 2/3rds of the staff had been replaced by my second year. > At start, it was two grades of 160 kids, 9th and 10th; when the 10th graders, the folks who graduated one year before, finally graduated, their class consisted of 13 kids. My class, that original 9th grade, graduated 50 people. I almost didn't graduate, since we had no gym and no way to earn the appropriate PE credit until they introduced Yoga in my senior year. We also began with no "D's", only A, B, C, and Fail, but since they did an absolute shit job at explaining this to prospective students and their families, we ended up getting a lot of kids that wouldn't have cut it in the "normal" high school, and ended up a de-facto alternative, with D's introduced in the second year. > Other initiatives that sprung up from his "philanthropy" include the creation of separate "schools" at a lot of the local high schools; basically, it was kind of treated like in college, where if you wanted to, say, go into Medicine, you picked "Biomed Academy," and took a certain set of classes with that in mind. So, y'know, pick your future at the end of Junior High.

brwnll 10y ago

Love when people call something undemocratic just because they are against the goals of a group. Wealthy individuals and groups have power to publish advertisements and arguments for their ideas/proposals to try to change the mind of the voters. Attempting to convince the voters your right is not undemocratic, it's the core of democracy. Additionally, anyone who believes that the plutocracy has more power in America now than ever before is entirely ignorant of even general American history. It wasn't that long ago where there was so little regulation on business, political and police bribes so common, that the wealthy could ignore any law they wanted without any fear of reprisal.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
> the wealthy could ignore any law they wanted without any fear of reprisal. Oh, well. It was nice while it lasted. Guess now they'll just behave and go gently into the night. I love happy endings. So cosy. Sigh.
pessimizer 10y ago
The point of the article is that they didn't convince on the merits, they convinced by completely saturating all forms of media with a single point of view, losing repeatedly (still), until they eventually eked out a win. Then when that win was found to be unconstitutional, they paid politicians directly. If that's the core of democracy, I don't understand what was so bad about Pravda.

blackhole 10y ago

As a washingtonian who has been strongly in support of charter schools for years without any knowledge of Gates' involvement, this story seems to be choosing a very strange case-study for criticizing billionaire philanthropists. Perhaps it has not occurred to the author that many people support charter schools because they're actually a good idea? The fundamental problem with saying that this money should go to the public school system in order to make it better is that we don't know how to make the school system better. It doesn't matter how much money is thrown at anyone in education because everyone is doing it wrong. Throwing more money at the public educational system will simply result in schools that are exceedingly good at cranking out students that excel at taking tests and memorizing useless facts instead of actually being good at something. Every argument against Charter schools that I heard during the debate was focused almost universally on money. It was always about money. Teachers seem convinced that in order to make our school system work, they just need more money, when in fact the entire public educational system has already driven off a cliff. Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids. Nobody can fix the educational system until we find better ways to educate children. Until we can find a way to instill creative problem solving and encourage innovative thinking instead of violently shoving children's brains into boxes, nothing is going to change, no matter how much money is thrown at the problem. In a world where computers are better at following instructions than any human being ever will be, creativity is the one single advantage we have, and the regulations hovering over the public school system are doing their best to utterly destroy any creative spirit our children might have had. Our society is being shaped not by the kind of intelligence that is measured by a test, but by the innovative spirit of people who think outside the box. It's time the educational system started thinking outside the box, too.

pessimizer 10y ago
> Perhaps it has not occurred to the author that many people support charter schools because they're actually a good idea? No more than the opposite point of view, which wins with a fraction of the backing. > Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids. Or, they won't be better than public schools.

Bedon292 10y ago

"A substantial portion of every tax-exempt foundation’s wealth—39.6 percent at the top tax bracket for filing in 2016—is diverted each year from the public treasury, where voters would have determined its use." Is this really true? Did Bill Gates actually have any 'Income' last year at all? Sure he has capital gains, and dividends, but none of that is going to be taxed at 39.6%. Which is a completely different topic. But it seems completely misleading to say that taxpayers are funding the philanthropy. Also, did Bill not fund the foundation with shares, rather than taking a tax break on cash income? Either way, it seems like that money that is funding the philanthropy would not have been entering the public coffers if it were not used for philanthropy.

rlucas 10y ago
The main problem with this bit is that is reveals that the authors (and editors, if they bothered) are completely financially illiterate. We do not tax "wealth" in the US; we tax net income. This fundamental flub -- in an article ostensibly about money (!) -- tells me we can't take any of the numbers or financial mechanics it presents seriously.

bobwaycott 10y ago

This is bad citizenship, plain and simple, and a gross abuse of the political system rooted in the ability to abuse it in proportion to one's ability to pay for that abuse. We cannot hope to have local/state/national government by and for the People, and even hope to have a chance of it being above reproach, if we do not immediately take steps to actually prioritize and protect the People's will. I get that handling this on the national level is a much more difficult problem to find an amicable solution that appeals to everyone's ideological sensibilities. But, at the state and local level, the abuse that money brings to the equation should be--nay, is--much easier to solve. It requires but a few sensible rules that permit the greatest possible latitude for citizens to participate in, guide, and organize their local governments to their notions of what constitutes good government and social policy, while protecting their local and state governments from outside influence. That state legislatures do not enact these rules is, in my opinion, but a reflection of the corrosive and perverting effect of money--and the desire for it--on all political activity. - For all local and state-wide policies--especially coercive public policies--one must be a resident of the local/state entity to participate in any way, be that financial, putting one's boots on the ground, or having any other recognized part in the process. - Make it illegal to hire an out-of-state company who brings in out-of-state workers to collect signatures for your desired proposal. Need to collect signatures? You must only use residents of the state in which the proposed policy will take effect. Require that they must be unpaid volunteers. Interrogate the signature-collection process, and invalidate all signatures collected by anyone who is not a resident of the local/state entity that will be affected by the policy. - No more allowing wealthy citizens, who are not residents of the local/state entity affected by the proposed policy, to donate to the cause. Completely remove the ability for wealth to escape its local boundaries. There is no reason a wealthy resident of Oklahoma should be able to involve themselves in the local and state issues happening in New York. This requires a real, sensible definition of being a resident—not, say, owning a home in a place you do not actually spend your time living. Want to weigh in on a local issue? Better be a resident of the city limits. There are plenty of reasonable ways we could protect states and cities from being overwhelmed by the unbalanced competition for mind- and vote-share that comes from allowing moneyed interests stepping into local/state political and social issues. Perhaps once we tackle protecting government by and for the People at the local and state levels, we could then work together to tackle the same issues at the national level.

bobwaycott 10y ago

I think, in addition to the varied issues this article highlights, it also points out that we perhaps need to rethink what we call philanthropy, and strongly divorce it from being used as an automatic honorific because a wealthy individual starts a non-profit.

trashtoss 10y ago

College dropout has unrealistic ideas to improve education. I kid but only a little. If the man had directly funded a school and gotten unquestionably superior outcomes the conversation would be rather different. Instead, all he has to show are policy successes, often at great expense, but for such an ostensibly data-driven program where are the successful educational outcomes?