Why I Broke Up with Bill Gates

Back in the 1990’s we all routed for the young dot-comers whose ideas were revolutionary and seemed badass and exciting. What was not to love about an Ivy League dropout who changed the world from his garage? Entrepreneur reports that, “In just 25 years, he built a two-man operation into a multibillion-dollar colossus and made himself the richest man in the world somewhere along the way. Yet he accomplished this feat not by inventing new technology, but by taking existing technology, adapting it to a specific market, and then dominating that market through innovative promotion and cunning business savvy.” And when Gates brought that cunning business approach to education, well, that is where my disillusion began.

The dangerous thing about being a tech expert is the possibility of crossing the line of your area of expertise. I imagine Bill Gates means well, but can he really improve education (Nope, read this, this, and this)? Business Insider reports that Gates and his foundation failed at the following:

• A seven-year education initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation centered on improving teacher effectiveness didn't work, according to a new report from RAND.
• The initiative, called the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching, didn't improve student graduation rates or schools' ability to retain effective teachers.

And The Washington Post adds:

·       …In the fall of 2014, he gave a nearly hour-long interview at Harvard University in which he said, “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.” They wouldn’t know for a decade? The foundation was essentially using its vast resources to experiment in education — and when it found that one experiment didn’t work, it went on to another.

• (The Gates Foundation) … keeps jumping into education projects and driving education policy — whether or not it makes sense to educators — simply because it seems like it makes sense to the foundation. Inevitably, it doesn’t work out as planned, and we hear somebody from the foundation confessing the work was harder than they thought.

This Washington Post article, “Gates Foundation failures show philanthropists shouldn’t be setting America’s public school agenda”, makes some powerful points:

The Gates foundation has actually been at the “oops” stage before. It entered the education reform world nearly 20 years ago with what the foundation has said was a $650 million investment to break up large failing high schools into small schools, on the theory that small schools worked better than large ones. The foundation, however, did not approach the task in a way that some educators said was important, and after nine years of pushing the project, Bill Gates, in his 2009 annual foundation letter, said it hadn’t worked and it was time to move on to new K-12 education issues.

Then the foundation poured several hundred million dollars to develop, implement and promote the Common Core State Standards, as well as hundreds of millions more in creating and implementing educator assessment systems that incorporated student standardized test scores into individual teacher’s evaluations. That assessment experts said using student test scores as part of a teacher’s evaluation wasn’t reliable or valid wasn’t an issue for the foundation — until, apparently, it was. In 2013, Gates, after bankrolling a rush to evaluate teachers by standardized test scores, decided that it wasn’t going as he had planned.

So what is an innovative ed tech developer to do? It is time to go #EthicalEdTech. As a teacher, my concerns may be different from what non-teachers imagine. Not only do I want my students to enjoy learning, but I want to ensure that the learning is high-level, and does not use or share my students data at the expense of student privacy.

It seems to me that up to this point, schools and ed tech companies have been relying on parents being unaware of student data collection/sales and the low-level learning of common core alignment. Getting rich off the ignorant bliss of parents is unethical and parents are catching on. Consider this from The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy:

 As parents, educators, and advocates, we believe that the expansion of digital technologies in schools, especially those that collect data directly from children, serve neither their instructional needs nor their emotional and social well-being.
We also believe that these practices seriously risk children’s privacy, given the increased number of breaches reported by schools and districts throughout the country. Since COPPA was passed in 1998, the use of technology has expanded in schools with insufficient oversight and inadequate security protections. The number of breaches and attacks by criminal hackers has increased, so that now schools are the second-largest victims of ransomware. ^[1] We are also concerned about the potential monetization of this personal data for marketing and advertising purposes.

Can #EthicalEdTech re-imagine technology in schools? Here are some ideas for my ed tech friends to ponder as you dream up your next big ideas:

1. Dump the Common Core State Standards as the low-level learning data tags that they are.
2. Design technology that requires students to engage in face-to-face interactions with classmates as they interact with technology. Make it fun and embrace that children are wired for human interaction. Reduce isolated screen time.
3. Look to developmental psychology for age-appropriateness of topics and activities. Honor the humanity in each child and create open-ended experiences with no right or wrong answer. Make kids think, dream, and imagine!
4. Earn the trust of teachers and parents by protecting student privacy and data. If data is the new gold, what can you create that is #EthicalEdTech and will go platinum?
5. Learn more about the many questionable ways student data is being collected and used by the industry and the government. This well-researched blog explains the matrix they want our kids in, and it must be stopped. Want to really understand the big picture? Learn here. Read through the blog at your own pace, but read it.

As we look to the next big thing in ed tech we must do better. It will not be the misleading and cunning marketers who make the world a better place. It is up to the new generation of ed tech dreamers to make the much needed course correction in the field. Don’t go for the money made by manipulation and data mining of the world’s children. I am dumping Gates and replacing him with the lessons of my first children’s hero, Mr. Rogers; 


“It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.” 

Mr. Rogers would be be fighting for #EthicalEdTech, no doubt about it.