View: https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/1790049411227086949
Not too surprising after the divorce.
View: https://twitter.com/melindagates/status/1790049411227086949
Not too surprising after the divorce.
They dumped close to half a billion in to expanding charter schools and destroying public education.
If you want to shave that $0.5 billion off of the total so you have a nice, clean, even $12 billion, you can send it my way, Melinda.
Was not aware of this ….
I have and continue to work with many students that have benefitted from their foundation.
How is Bill going to afford changing the letterheads and sign on the building. Did you think of that, Melinda? Sheesh
I don't care how good or well intentioned a person is: it's fundamentally fucked up and wrong for one person to have that level of power, influence and control. And we're talking about one of the best billionaires in existence in this case.
I mean compared to the number of people in the public school system that had worse conditions BECAUSE of the impact charter schools had on the funding of their education...
As other people have said, I think it's generally agreed that on net charter schools have been harmful. They didn't have the anticipated broader positive impacts (the original idea was these schools could do new and innovative things that would work better than the bad old education system, and this new pedagogy would spread out to regular schools--this did not happen), and mostly ended up diverting money away from public schools. The foundation also pushed Common Core, which has had a lot of criticism, but I think was mostly just not really helpful in the way they wanted (raising standards at school more generally, encouraging the market to improve materials, etc etc).
In hindsight it feels very obvious that this wouldn't work, but when they kicked it off a lot of people really thought charter schools and common core were going to have a big positive impact. Which of course doesn't mean we can't criticize--even if they were totally well-intentioned it's still a big fuckup, and a very Silicon Valley-brain type of fuckup at that.
Anyway, hopefully the foundation stops trying to do education shit and sticks to global health, where they've actually done a lot of good.
In hindsight it feels very obvious that this wouldn't work, but when they kicked it off a lot of people really thought charter schools and common core were going to have a big positive impact. Which of course doesn't mean we can't criticize--even if they were totally well-intentioned it's still a big fuckup, and a very Silicon Valley-brain type of fuckup at that.
Anyway, hopefully the foundation stops trying to do education shit and sticks to global health, where they've actually done a lot of good.
It just hit me,
Charter schools are the trickle down of education!
No wonder it couldn't work.
"in hindsight" or you know if anyone had actually listened to teachers who said it was a terrible idea instead of listening to the billionaire jerk-offs who don't know the 1st thing about education.
Oh damn. Yeah. This is when people say they are going to set new service standards that other people will meet in order to compete and yeah.
The thing I remember the most about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is how they bought the rights to the Oxford Covid vaccine that the Oxford researchers wanted to make available to everyone.
Then it became the Ox-ford AstraZeneca vaccine, and was sold just like the other vaccines, for a lot of money.
Bill Gates and his wife significantly hampered the diffusion of vaccines to third world countries. No one will ever know how many deaths they are responsible for.
Then it became the Ox-ford AstraZeneca vaccine, and was sold just like the other vaccines, for a lot of money.
Bill Gates and his wife significantly hampered the diffusion of vaccines to third world countries. No one will ever know how many deaths they are responsible for.
Counterfactual: Without a huge company to back the vaccine, the resources for evaluation/approvals and scaling production for it would not exist in the super urgent/compressed timeframe that was 2020. I think it's underestimated how much societies were disintegrating in real time during 2020. We will live with the downstream consequences of that disintegration for decades.
A statement about the inequity of vaccine distribution is not unreasonable but must include the context of why events proceeded in the fashion that they did.
The same unhinged defense is used for the horribly inhumane decision to withhold medicine from the third world to line the foundation's pockets with even more money via that ruinous astrazeneca decision.
Somehow, billionaires always know best, only choices allowed are ones that benefit them. It's really magical, one hopes the money eventually trickles down and does *some* good and doesn't just undermine public institution after public institution as if that was totally an accident and nobody could have known that, despite it happening again and again and again and again and experts always warning of it every single time.