Isn't It Time Bill Gates Get His Own APPR Evaluation System?

GF Brandenburg has a post demonstrating how the heath initiatives of the Gates Foundation are as failed as their education reform initiatives.

Brandenburg links to this Seattle Times story from a few days ago that suggests it's time Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation get their own data-driven, metric-measuring system to evaluate their "philanthropic" efforts:

When he took the stage this fall to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his signature global health research initiative, Bill Gates used the word “naive” — four times — to describe himself and his charitable foundation.

It was a surprising admission coming from the world’s richest man.

But the Microsoft co-founder seemed humbled that, despite an investment of $1 billion, none of the projects funded under the Gates Foundation’s “Grand Challenges” banner has yet made a significant contribution to saving lives and improving health in the developing world.

“I was pretty naive about how long that process would take,” Gates told a gathering of nearly 1,000 people in Seattle.

Launched with fanfare a decade ago, the original Grand Challenges program mobilized leading scientists to tackle some of the toughest problems in global health. Gates handed out nearly half a billion dollars in grants to 45 “dream teams” of researchers working on everything from tuberculosis drugs and new vaccine strategies to advanced mosquito repellents and bananas genetically engineered to boost nutrition.

But five years in, Gates said he could see that it would be at least another decade before even the most promising of those projects paid off.

Not only did he underestimate some of the scientific hurdles, Gates said. He and his team also failed to adequately consider what it would take to implement new technologies in countries where millions of people lack access to basic necessities such as clean water and medical care.

While continuing to support a handful of the “big science” projects, the foundation in 2008 introduced a program of small, highly focused grants called Grand Challenges Explorations.

With headline-grabbing goals like condoms that feel good and waste-to-energy toilets, the explorations initiative has probably garnered more media attention than anything else the giant philanthropy has undertaken.

But none of those projects has yet borne fruit, either.

At the 10th anniversary meeting, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Harold Varmus urged a foundation known for its obsession with metrics to undertake a critical evaluation of Grand Challenges.

“Was the program actually a success?” asked Varmus, who served on the founding board. “We don’t know.”

I still see laudatory stories about Gates and the Gates Foundation in the media.

Americans in general - and seemingly many elite media people in particular - worship and respect wealth and seem to assume that if a guy could become one of the richest men in the world, he must be one of the smartest too.

But the truth about Gates is, he's no genius.

He's simply a ruthless man who engaged in monopolistic business practices to make Microsoft into the juggernaut it was.

That's not to say that he isn't a smart guy on some things - just to say, he's no visionary with insight into how to fix the world's problems.

The track record of the Gates Foundation bears that out.

Part of the problem is, Gates is a tech guy who thinks tech will fix all.

Another part of the problem is, he's a guy with no social skills and little understanding of the need to bring stakeholders in with his initiatives.

Lastly, he's an authoritarian with an ego the size of Michael Bloomberg's - he thinks he's right on everything and looks to impose his will on others.

These three personal flaws add up to major disaster - we have a billionaire egoist with no social skills who is tunnelvisioned on tech as the only solution to the world's problems.

Bill Gates has been granted a pass for far too long on his "philanthropic" efforts, both in the health field and the education field.

It surely is time that Gates and his merry men and women in philanthropy at the Foundation get some independent measurement of their efforts.

And then, if it's found that they've failed at most (or all) of their philanthropic initiatives, the Foundation can be closed down like a "failing school," and the harm these people are doing can be put to rest.

If measurement of "achievement" is good enough for schools and school districts, as Mr. Gates says it is, than surely it is good enough for his Gates Foundation programs and initiatives too?

Salon Covers Bill Gates' Common Core Obsession

Michael P. Mazenko on Bill Gates and the Common Core at Salon:

It’s hard to envision Bill Gates not getting exactly what he wants, or backing down from anything. However, that was before he became the sugar daddy and primary backer of the Common Core State Standards, which have raised the ire of parents, students and educators in the past year. As Common Core critics began pushing back against adoption of the standards and influencing several state legislatures to cut ties with Common Core, Gates and his foundation found themselves in the unusual position of backpedaling last month.

In a surprising act of damage control, the pro-Core Gates Foundation took to the pages of the New York Times with an open letter calling for a two-year delay in the use of Common Core-linked tests as measures for teacher and student accountability. Gates Foundation director Vickie Philips conceded frustrations with Common Core, writing, “No evaluation system will work unless teachers believe it is fair and reliable. The standards need time to work. Teachers need time to develop lessons, receive more training, get used to the new tests and offer their feedback.”

Of course, educators know those considerations should have been obvious from the beginning, long before states were coerced into adopting the standards, in some cases unseen. For a successful businessman, Gates has been rather negligent in testing, piloting and evaluating an unproven product like Common Core before selling it to an unsuspecting public. Experts in education like Dr. Diane Ravitch know there is a time-honored process to review policies and standards. Bill Gates, however, is far from being an education expert.

He is, instead, a billionaire who believes his wealth and business success qualify him to set education policy.

This isn’t the first time Gates has reversed his position on education after realizing he knows less than he thought he did about how to “fix schools.” Gates poured more than $600 million into his “small schools campaign,” only to later concede he was wrong and the idea was virtually fruitless. While that doesn’t seem to bother a man who can literally waste billions of dollars, it’s more disturbing to hear him admit, “We won’t even know if it will work.” Playing so frivolously with institutions like public education should not be so easy. Clearly, whenever scandal is brewing in politics, it’s always a matter of following the money. And with Common Core, there’s little doubt about the money trail.

Read the whole piece and send it along to your friends and family.

The more people who become aware of the Gates machinations on education, the better.

As Mazenko points out in the piece, this is a guy who spent $600 million on his small schools initiative, then said "Whoops! That didn't work! We'll move on to our next great idea - the Common Core!"

Public education and public schools should NOT be playthings for a billionaire who wants to try out his theories.

The More Money These Philanthropists "Give Away," The Richer They Get

In case you missed this news:

NEW YORK: Microsoft founder Bill Gates is the wealthiest living US entrepreneur, with an estimated net worth of $80.2 billion, according to Wealth-X.

The list of 10 billionaires was dominated by "technopreneurs" as six of them made their fortunes from technology or technology-related businesses, including Gates, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The 10 entrepreneurs are collectively worth $407.4 billion, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total ultra-rich wealth in America, according to Wealth-X, the global wealth intelligence and prospecting firm headquartered in Singapore. The combined market capitalisation of these 10 individuals' primary companies is $1.7 trillion, which means they have created wealth that's four times what they themselves are worth.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett, who at 83 is also the oldest person on the list, was ranked second with an estimated wealth of $64.2 billion.

 Buffett was followed by Ellison of Oracle with a net worth of $48.2 billion and businessman and Bloomberg LP founder Michael Bloomberg with $33.7 billion.

Sheldon Adelson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, was ranked fifth with a net worth of $32.8 billion, while Google's Larry Page was placed sixth with a net worth of $31.3 billion.

 Zuckerberg, 30, is the youngest person on the list and was placed seventh with a net worth of $30.9 billion, followed by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com (8th, $30.5 billion); Google's Sergey Brin (9th, $30.1 billion) and Carl Icahn (10th, $25.5 billion).

All the self-made entrepreneurs on the list are active in the world of philanthropy, and six of them have joined the Giving Pledge, a campaign initiated by Gates and Buffet to encourage the world's most affluent individuals to pledge at least half of their fortunes to charity, the Wealth-X report said.

How is it that so many of these "philanthropists" who have taken the "Giving Pledge" to "give away" at least half their fortunes before they die keep getting richer and richer even as they engage in their so-called "philanthropy"?

It seems the more money they give away, the more money they accumulate.

Odd, isn't it?

Bill Gates As Bond Villain

Bill Gates responds to criticism that he's making money off the Common Core:

“This is about giving money away,” he said of his support for the standards. “This is philanthropy. This is trying to make sure students have the kind of opportunity I had . . . and it’s almost outrageous to say otherwise, in my view.

Sure this is about giving money away - and getting an agenda promoted in return

Gates gets a couple things out of his philanthropy:

He gets to call the shots on a whole host of issues - from education policy to global warming response to disease eradication policy.

Gates claimed in today's Post article that he wants "competition" in the R and D efforts around education policy - but it's pretty clear from his past at Microsoft and the present at the Gates Foundation that what Gates likes most is stifling competition and making sure he's the only one strong enough to have any affect on either the computer business or philanthropic efforts.

Which is the second thing Gates gets out of his philanthropy - ego aggrandizement.

This guy's got a messianic complex and he truly believes he's got the answers to the world's problems if people would just let him provide the funding for the R & D to figure out how to make public education better, to mitigate environmental problems, to tackle disease and pestilence around the world.

It never occurs to him that maybe he's wrong about things, never occurs to him that maybe somebody other than him (or one of his funded shill groups) might have a better way to go about things.

In a lot of ways, Gates is like a Bond villain from the 60's - certain of his own brilliance and genius, hell bent on controlling the world and proving his genius and brilliance to us all.

I'll say this for him:

Gates is a genius at one thing - he's a genius at ruthlessly pushing for what he wants, either in the computer software business or the philanthropic world and convincing enough of the public that he's not just another egoist trying to have his way on everything.

But that's been changing, as people on both the right and left start to view Gates's philanthropic monopoly in education policy, environmental causes, disease eradication and other areas with either suspicion or outright hostility because that monopoly pushes out any other solution other than a Gates-funded one.

Jay Greene noted this problem in the Washington Post piece:

Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, says the Gates Foundation’s overall dominance in education policy has subtly muffled dissent.

“Really rich guys can come up with ideas that they think are great, but there is a danger that everyone will tell them they’re great, even if they’re not,” Greene said.

Let's assume that Gates is being honest with us, that he's really not trying to make more dough off the CCSS and its ancillary reforms (a dubious assumption, as he seems to be worth more every year even as he claims he wants to give away all his money before he dies.)

Even if it's true that Gates is spending billions on education policy out of the goodness of his heart and his desire to do some good, the other two things that Gates gets out of his philanthropy - assuaging his own ego and getting to call the shots on nearly everything - are quite problematic.

It is beyond the time to start questioning the so-called "good" that philanthropy does - Gates obviously still thinks it's a decent enough defense because he runs to use it when he's pressed over the CCSS.

But as men like Gates and Michael Bloomberg run around the world using their billions to buy the policies they want in their pet issues, it is becoming clearer and clearer that "philanthropy" is no longer a public good.

There's no difference than a Bond villain wanting to own the world and run it his way or Bill Gates wanting to fund solutions to every problem and make sure that whatever gets tried is a Gates-promoted solution.

Behind both the Bond villain and Bill Gates is a fevered ego in need of control - and it's time to dump some water on that fevered ego and cool it just a bit.

Free Stuff Isn't Really Free

A commenter on an article in the Lancaster Eagle Gazette covering Republican criticism of the Common Core implementation in Ohio:

Thank you to the OHIO GOP for finally agreeing to study this important issue. We appreciate it! The National GOP came out against this 6 months or more ago. It is not for the good of the child. It seems to be for the good of Bill Gates, GE, Exxon Mobil and those who make software and sell books. Like Obamacare, it gives the Power to the Federal arm of government while ignoring We the People. It collects data on children Pre K to college to force our youth in the direction of the national desire not the desire of the student. It is beyond me why Catholic schools have agreed to go along with any of this. Probably for the money handed out by Gates Foundation. After all he has tried to buy off the PTA all across the US. FREE STUFF isn't really FREE. It comes with obligations and regulations galore. And maybe even lack of religious freedom. Please give this issue a lot of research. It is too important not to, our children only get one set of school years to make it!

Free stuff isn't really free - it comes with obligations and regulations galore.

That is true of Race to the Top funds, Gates Foundation grants, education reform "philanthropy" in general, Regents "Fellows" paid for by private donatinos so they can "help" the NYSED.

None of this stuff is "free."

It all comes with obligations and regulations and hidden costs.

TIME Magazine: Neither Retirement Nor Death Shall End The Reign Of Bloomberg

 You only think he's going away:

Mike Bloomberg is about to be unemployed for the second time in his professional life. The first was in August of 1981, when Saloman Brothers fired Bloomberg from the only full-time job he had ever known. The second time will be January 1, 2014, when he hands control of New York City over to the next mayor.

The cover story of this week’s TIME magazine is about what Bloomberg will do next, with a clear focus on his enormous wealth and his determination to spend it down changing the world to fit his vision. We live now in a new age of mega-philanthropy, when newly minted billionaires have enormous powers to influence politics and how we live our lives.

Mike Bloomberg, the man with so fragile an ego that he must put his name onto everything he owns, plans on continuing to influence politics and shape how we live our lives long after he leaves office, indeed, long after he shuffles off this mortal coil.

In three or four hundreds years from now, if the human race hasn't destroyed itself through its own arrogance and stupidity, people will look back and say, "Can you believe they let these people with billions of these little pieces of paper with faces on them make all the important decisions around health, education, welfare and the like?"

Democracy - American style, 21st century brand.

Looks an awful lot like plutocracy, doesn't it?

Daily News Wants "Death Penalty" For Schools Too

They applaud Governor Cuomo for saying "failing" schools deserve the death penalty, then point to a Bloomberg Philanthropy- and Gates Foundation-funded research group study that pats the Bloomberg administration on the back for its school closure policies, replacing large schools with smaller ones.

See here for how MDRC works is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropy even as it works in concert with the Bloomberg administration on various free marketeer social programs.

The study the Daily News is pointing to was funded by the Gates Foundation - which of course pushes small schools to replace large schools

Gotta love a Bloomberg-funded research group that pats the Bloomberg administration on the back for its education policies.

Gotta love even more when the Daily News uses this Bloomberg-funded research group's Bloomberg-and Gates Foundation-funded school closure study as proof positive why the Bloomberg closure policies ought to continue without acknowledging where this research group gets its money from - namely Bloomberg Philanthropy and the Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates - No Tech Genius, Just A Ruthless Operator

Barry Ritholtz looks at why Microsoft is in such trouble and decides that it's because their monopoly status no longer holds.

He then looks at how they got their monopoly status in the first place:

Gates’s true genius was not as a tech visionary. It was his business acumen in leveraging a monopoly position in operating systems to become the dominant U.S. tech company. IBM gave the world its first PC in 1980. The mainframe giant looked down on the idea of a personal computer for home or even business use. It thought the PC insignificant — it could never replace the big iron it made. In 1981, it happily outsourced the operating system to Gates’s squad of geeks, who themselves outsourced the OS code writing. By 1982, MS-DOS was released.

Embedded within that original IBM deal was the seed of Microsoft’s vast fortunes. Microsoft’s true genius was in its license agreements of MS-DOS (and, eventually, Windows) with PC manufacturers. They offered a variety of licenses, but the version that charged the least per copy included a clever kicker: Microsoft had to be paid for every machine sold — regardless of whether MS-DOS was the operating system. This brilliant, if evil, agreement with computer makers effectively blocked all OS competition. Microsoft became the standard adopted by corporate America.

Microsoft had its deal with the devil: Its lightning in a bottle was not some awesome technology or brilliant breakthrough – it was a clause in a contract that led to an enormously profitable monopoly. It then pre-installed Office in new PCs, creating a second monopoly and billions more in profits. By then, Office had become the dominant productivity software suite. Eventually, Microsoft’s server and tools division — which includes Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Database — also became a de facto standard.

Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” was a not-so-subtle swipe at how Microsoft had achieved its dominance.

Worked for a while - a long while, in terms of tech companies - but not so much anymore:

Most monopolies, aside from baseball, eventually get broken. Microsoft was no exception. Once the Justice Department and the European Commission found the company in violation of antitrust laws, it was forced to compete fairly. It is no coincidence that as the company lost its vice grip on the desktop, its dominance faded. Revealed as a dinosaur, it was unable to compete with the smaller, more-nimble mammals.

And therein lay its current problems. In a fair and level playing field, the once-feared software giant has been revealed as a middling software writer and a mediocre competitor.

Ballmer oversaw a decade of missed opportunities, and he very well may have hastened Microsoft’s decline. But it might have been inevitable. The truth is that for all its claims of innovation, Microsoft never generated much in the way of profits by innovating. This then is a tale of the long, slow death of an enormous cash cow. 

The next time you hear somebody say or read somebody write that Gates is a genius and an innovator, remember Ritholtz's Washington Post column and this quote:

In a fair and level playing field, the once-feared software giant has been revealed as a middling software writer and a mediocre competitor.

Gates and Microsoft thrived through ruthlessness - that's all.

Nothing innovative about either Gates the man or Microsoft the company.

One might say the same about his education reforms and philanthropy.

Research Group Financed By Bloomberg Philanthropies Hails Bloomberg Education Policy

The Daily News has a story out today about research group MDRC releasing a report that shows how Bloomberg's small schools initiative has improved graduation rates of students compared to other schools in the system.

The group claims the following on their website:

(New York, August 26, 2013) — MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research firm, released new findings today from its multiyear study of small high schools in New York City. Those findings show that the schools, which serve mostly disadvantaged students of color, continue to produce sustained positive effects, raising graduation rates by 9.5 percentage points. This increase translates to nearly 10 more graduates for every 100 entering ninth-grade students.

These graduation gains can be attributed almost entirely to Regents diplomas attained, and the effects are seen in virtually every subgroup in these schools, including male and female students of color, students with below grade level eighth-grade proficiency in math and reading, and low-income students. In addition, the best evidence that currently exists suggests that these small high schools may increase graduation rates for two new subgroups for which findings were not previously available: special education students and English language learners. Finally, more students are graduating ready for college: the schools raise by 6.8 percentage points the proportion of students scoring 75 or more on the English Regents exam, a critical measure of college readiness used by the City University of New York.

“With the nation’s attention focused on turning around failing urban high schools, this study provides convincing evidence that large-scale transformation is possible in an urban public school system,” said Gordon Berlin, President of MDRC. “While more certainly needs to be done if all students are to be prepared for college and careers, the small school strategy as implemented in New York provides a blueprint for future reforms across the nation.”

MDRC doesn't seem to have tracked the students who used to be at the large "failing" schools to see what happened to them (indeed, they say that (" The study does not compare the SSCs to the large, failing high schools they replaced but, rather, to the other public high schools operating in the reform-rich atmosphere in New York City"), but you can be sure the overwhelming majority didn't end up in Bloomberg's small schools.

You can also be sure that the large "failing" schools served high populations of ELL's and support service students.  MDRC notes the following about their study (emphasis added):

The best evidence that exists indicates that SSCs may increase graduation rates for two new subgroups for which findings were not previously available: special education students and English language learners. However, given the still-limited sample sizes for these subgroups, the evidence will not be definitive until more student cohorts can be added to the analysis.

Gee, how does MDRC claim that this study proves the small schools initiative "as implemented in New York provides a blueprint for future reforms across the nation" when the schools they studied had limited sample sizes of ELL's and support service students, unlike, say, the larger schools they replaced?

Given the political atmosphere these days, with the Common Core test score rates plummeting in Bloomberg's last year in office and much of his reform measures under attack, this study has the feel of Bloomberg propaganda.

MDRC is claiming this study proves Bloomberg's reforms work, but even they admit that the students in these schools are different from the students in the larger "failing" schools they replaced and these school populations have fewer ELL's and support service students in the student cohorts than in the system at large.

Both of these caveats call into question the entire value of the study, but of course MDRC isn't going to note that in their p.r. paper.

Also, notice how MDRC opens up their p.r. statement:

MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research firm...

Right from the get-go, they want to make sure that everybody knows they've got no straw in this drink, they're just here to do the independent research and publish the findings, regardless of what those findings are.

But is it true that they're an independent research group?

Well, that depends on what you mean by independent.

You see, they partnered with the Bloomberg administration and the City of New York back in 2007 on another schools initiative called Opportunity NYC:

In March 2007, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his intention to test a set of antipoverty initiatives, called Opportunity NYC, which would use temporary cash payments to poor families to boost their income in the short term, while building their capacity to avoid longer-term and second-generation poverty. Such payments are known internationally as “conditional cash transfers” because the payments are contingent upon family members making certain efforts to build their human capital.

...

Opportunity NYC includes three separate demonstration projects, each of which took a somewhat different approach. Family Rewards was a comprehensive, two-generation strategy that focused on children’s education, family preventative health care, and parents’ workforce efforts. Work Rewards targeted the workforce efforts of low-income adults living in subsidized housing. A third project called the Spark program focused solely on children and their school performance. All three projects have been supported by a consortium of private funders.

In collaboration with the Mayor’s Office, a host of City agencies, and Seedco (a private, not-for-profit workforce and economic development organization), MDRC helped design Family Rewards and Work Rewards and is leading random assignment evaluations of the effectiveness of these programs. The operational phase of Family Rewards and the incentives component of Work Rewards have concluded as planned, and the long-term evaluations are still underway.

Oh, so this independent, non-partisan, non-profit MDRC partnered with the Bloomberg administration to try and prove that merit payments (i.e., "conditional cash transfers") to poor people improve social outcomes.

Gee, that doesn't sound so non-partisan or independent to me.

In fact, that sounds like MDRC very much had a stake in the outcome of just how the city tried to improve social outcomes (i.e., with market-based initiatives) and it sounds like MDRC finds itself very close to the Bloomberg administration indeed.

MDRC has also partnered with Bloomberg and NYC before on other initiatives as well, like the Social Impact Bond Project at Riker's Island.

MDRC loses its claims to "non-partisanship" when it partners with the Bloomberg administration on two major initiatives the Bloomberg administration promoted, both of which are "market-based initiatives" out to prove that free market ideas will solve social issues like poverty and prison recidivism.

Lastly, guess which billionaire philanthropist's philanthropy group is a major funder of MDRC?

You guessed it - Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Gee, I can't imagine Bloomberg's writing some of the checks to keep the lights on in the MDRC offices would sway any of the research they do over at MDRC, can you?

This study will be hailed by the usual corporate media cheerleaders like the Daily News (Gotham Schools is shilling the DN story in their morning post as well), but the truth is, the study is compromised by MDRC taking money from Bloomberg and by MDRC having partnered with Bloomberg on other initiatives.

In addition, the study is misleading at best, because while it claims Bloomberg's small schools program is "a blueprint for future reforms across the nation," it fails to note how that blueprint has "still-limited sample sizes" of ELL's and support services students.  Given how the system at large, and the large "failing" schools these small schools replaced have larger "sample sizes" of these populations of students, it stands to reason that if you add a larger subset of ELL's and support service students to the mix, you are going to get different outcomes.

It would be nice if the Daily News would have mentioned the Bloomberg financial connection in their story.

You can bet if the UFT or the AFT were a major funder of a research group releasing an education study, the Daily News would have mentioned that.

Somehow the Bloomberg Philanthropies connection isn't mentioned in the DN story, however.

It also would have been nice if the Daily News would have mentioned the caveat to the study over ELL's and support service students.

Both of those call into question what MDRC is claiming this study proves - that Bloomberg's small schools reforms is "a blueprint for future reforms across the nation."

It's Time For Bill Gates To Get Out Of His Public Education Work And Go Save Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced his retirement on Friday, though it seems he was pushed from the company for his many failures:

The company portrayed the departure as voluntary, but it comes amid rising complaints among investors and a month after a disappointing earnings report sent the company’s share price down by 11 percent.

Among the problems was a $900 million write-off related to poor sales of the Surface tablet computer, praised by reviewers but largely ignored by consumers. Microsoft has struggled as well with the rollout of the Windows Phone and its latest PC operating system, Windows 8.

...

 The product misfires, analysts say, fell into a familiar pattern, with Microsoft moving into markets after other companies already had established loyalty among customers. Its Zune music player lost out to Apple’s iPod. The Windows line of phones has made little dent in a market dominated by the iPhone and several Android devices. Microsoft’s Bing search engine lags far behind Google

Not exactly a track record of accomplishments to be proud of, is it?

No wonder Wall Street cheered Ballmer's retirement announcement by bidding up the stock 7 percent.

Just how did Microsoft get to be in such trouble?

Let's start and end with how the company is set up because therein lies many of their problems.

Microsoft is famous for having its divisions set up as independent fiefdoms at war with each other:

Organizationally, Microsoft has suffered from years of operating as a collection of silo-like divisions — some would say warring fiefdoms. The company has come under fire for failing both to develop fresh, creative products and to successfully follow others into exciting new markets.

Because divisions within the company would try and undercut other divisions in the company to protect their own turf, Microsoft was unable to capitalize on any of these exciting new markets.

For example, Microsoft had actually developed a tablet before Apple brought the iPad to market, but fighting within the company put that tablet work on hold until well after the iPad grabbed a huge part of the market share.  By the time Microsoft released its Surface tablet this year, there was little market left to grab and the move was a failure.

In addition to divisions set up as independent fiefdoms at war with each other, employees within divisions are also at war with each other under the infamous Microsoft rank-and-yank employee evaluation system:

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …

For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …

Will Oremus at Slate notes how other companies have also used rank-and-yank systems to poisonous effect but eventually shelved those systems while Microsoft has stuck with it:

Microsoft wasn’t the first company to adopt this sort of ranking system. It was actually popularized by Jack Welch at GE, where it was known as “rank and yank.” Welch defended the practice to the Wall Street Journal in a January 2012 article, saying, “This is not some mean system—this is the kindest form of management. [Low performers] are given a chance to improve, and if they don't in a year or so, you move them out. "

As the Journal and others have noted, what seemed to work for Welch—for a time, anyway—has produced some ugly results elsewhere. Even GE phased the system out following Welch’s departure. But in an interview with the Seattle Times just last month, Ballmer indicate that he was sticking with it. From the Seattle Times:

Q: A lot of people have slammed Microsoft’s stack ranking review system as contributing to a noncollaborative atmosphere. Is the kind of cultural change you want to effect possible with that stacked ranking system still in place?

A: We’re doing our performance reviews now. We’re finishing up our year (and there are) no changes to—no—I’ll say minor changes to our system. I think everybody wants to work in a high-performance culture where we reward people who are doing fantastic work, and we help people who are having a hard time find something else to do. Now, whether our existing performance-management system needs to change to meet the goal of fostering collaboration is something that Lisa Brummel [head of human resources] would take up.

This rank-and-yank system, btw, has been brought to public education via teacher evaluation systems promoted by old Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, so it seems that not only is Microsoft going to stick with a poisonous ranking system that has driven the company onto the rocks, the founder of the company is looking to take that system elsewhere and destroy even more with it.

Speaking of Mr. Gates, some are calling for Bill to return to his old company and right the sinking ship:

Jack Gold, a tech analyst at Gold Associates, is among many who believe Microsoft needs the type of jolt that can best be provided by someone outside of the company.

"They need a proven innovator with a track record of turning around big, sometimes unwieldy companies," says Gold, who suggests poaching someone from Google. If that doesn't work out, perhaps Microsoft can reach back into its recent past, he says.

"Maybe it's time," Gold says, "for Bill Gates to come back on a temporary basis."

I concur - it's time for Bill Gates to get out of public education "malanthropy" work, get out of bringing GMO's to the world, get out of cloud whitening to save the environment from global warming and galvanic skin bracelets to measure teacher effectiveness and get back to showing the world what a ruthless genius he is at navigating the technology industry waters.

Even better, since he's been promoting rank-and-yank teacher effectiveness evaluation systems all over the country, he can show us how it's done by continuing to use this poisonous ranking system at Microsoft while trying to right his sinking ship.

If Big Bill can fix Microsoft while continuing to rank employees on a bell curve and having the bottom 10% fired every year, then surely pubic school systems can do the same.

So go back to the old company, Bill, and show us all how it's done.

It's time.

Why Gates, Buffett and So Many Other "Philanthropic Givers" Are Part Of The Problem

From Peter Buffett, son of Warren Buffett:

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

By PETER BUFFETT

I HAD spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his accumulated wealth back to society. In addition to making several large donations, he added generously to the three foundations that my parents had created years earlier, one for each of their children to run. 

Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms. 

Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex. 

But now I think something even more damaging is going on. 

Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising. At the same time, according to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed. 

Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups. 

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. 

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life. 

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast? 

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism. 

Often I hear people say, “if only they had what we have” (clean water, access to health products and free markets, better education, safer living conditions). Yes, these are all important. But no “charitable” (I hate that word) intervention can solve any of these issues. It can only kick the can down the road. 

My wife and I know we don’t have the answers, but we do know how to listen. As we learn, we will continue to support conditions for systemic change.  

It’s time for a new operating system. Not a 2.0 or a 3.0, but something built from the ground up. New code. 

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there. 

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff). 

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine. 

It’s an old story; we really need a new one. 

Peter Buffett is a composer and a chairman of the NoVo Foundation.

I doubt Bill Gates would hear any of this, but he really is one of those people who allegedly is out to "solve" problems he has helped create.

Take poverty in Asia.

His wife, Melinda, did a three part Q & A series for the NY Times with suck up journalist Nick Kristof about alleviating poverty in Asia a few years back.

While hosting the Q & A, not once did Kristof ever ask how Melinda can talk about alleviating poverty in Asia with a straight face when her husband's company employs slave labor to make it's products in Asia, thus helping to cause poverty in Asia.

It's as if this contradiction didn't exist for either Melinda Gates or Nick Kristof as they breathlessly talked about bringing free market solutions to Asia to solve all the problems there.

So it's good to see Peter Buffett put the idea out there into the NY Times that all this philanthropy does not really solve anything.

I doubt the people its aimed at - the oligarchical/philanthropic class - will hear it or understand it.

But it's good to see it there in any case.

Bloomberg Philanthropies: The Post-Mayoral Agenda

The mayor has spent the past two days talking smack about teachers, scolding his potential successors running for mayor that teachers should in no way be given retroactive raises for the years they have gone without a contract.

This two day campaign the mayor has embarked upon, continued on his radio program today on WOR, got me thinking that he's going to use Bloomberg Philanthropies as a propaganda tool against teachers in NYC long after he's gone from office (and perhaps even long after he's gone from this mortal coil...foundations have a longer life than their founders...)

Take a look around the glossy new Bloomberg Philanthropies site and see what you think.

Will Bloomberg continue to hammer NYC teachers long after he leaves City Hall and use Bloomberg Philanthropies to do it?

Will he punish a successor who doesn't follow his wishes on teacher contracts, evaluations, school closures, etc. by using his PAC against her/him the way he has for pols who do not support gun control?

Will Bloomberg, one tiny man with an ego so large and fragile that he needs to put his name on everything he owns, continue to have such an undue and enormous influence on education policy, schools, students and teachers simply because he's got more money than almost everybody else?

Quote of the Day

"A sociopath in charge of what is called a charity remains a sociopath." -- From the comments of this article on Bill Gates, "philanthropy," and genetically engineered food.

Philanthropy Is The Enemy Of Justice

From The Guardian:

It's strange that at this week's World Economic Forum the designated voice of the world's poor has been Bill Gates, who has pledged £478m to the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, telling Davos that the world economic crisis was no excuse for cutting aid.

It reminds me of that dark hour when Al Gore, despite being a shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, was the voice of climate change action – because Gates does not speak with the voice of the world's poor, of course, but with the voice of its rich. It's a loud voice, but the model of development it proclaims is the wrong one because philanthropy is the enemy of justice.

Am I saying that philanthropy has never done good? No, it has achieved many wonderful things. Would I rather people didn't have polio vaccines than get them from a plutocrat? No, give them the vaccines. But beware the havoc that power without oversight and democratic control can wreak.

The biotech agriculture that Lord Sainsbury was unable to push through democratically he can now implement unilaterally, through his Gatsby Foundation. We are told that Gatsby's biotech project aims to provide food security for the global south. But if you listen to southern groups such as the Karnataka State Farmers of India, food security is precisely the reason they campaign against GM, because biotech crops are monocrops which are more vulnerable to disease and so need lashings of petrochemical pesticides, insecticides and fungicides – none of them cheap – and whose ruinous costs will rise with the price of oil, bankrupting small family farms first. Crop diseases mutate, meanwhile, and all the chemical inputs in the world can't stop disease wiping out whole harvests of genetically engineered single strands.

Both the Gatsby and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations are keen to get deeper into agriculture, especially in Africa. But top-down nostrums for the rural poor don't end well. The list of autocratic hubris in pseudo-scientific farming is long and spectacularly calamitous. It runs from Tsar Alexander I's model village colonies in 1820s Novgorod to 1920s Hollywood film producer Hickman Price, who, as Simon Schama brilliantly describes in The American Future, "bought 54 square miles of land to show the little people how it was really done, [and] used 25 combines all painted glittery silver". His fleet of tractors were kept working day and night, and the upshot of such sod-busting was the great plains dustbowl. But there's no stopping a plutocratic philanthropist in a hurry.

And then there is the vexed question of whether these billions are really the billionaires' to give away in the first place. When Microsoft was on its board, the American Electronics Association, the AeA, challenged European Union proposals for a ban on toxic components and for the use of a minimum 5% recycled plastic in the manufacture of electronic goods.

AeA took the EU to the World Trade Organisation on a charge of erecting artificial trade barriers. (And according to the American NGO Public Citizen, "made the astounding claim that there is no evidence that heavy metals, like lead, pose a threat to human health or the environment".)

Now, the EU is big enough and ugly enough to have fought and won the case. But many an African country lacks the war chest for such a fight, and so will end up paying for the healthcare of those exposed to leaky old PCs' cadmium, chromium or mercury, instead of embarking on, let's say, a nationwide anti-malaria strategy. Bill Gates himself may not indeed have known about what the AeA was doing on Microsoft's behalf, but the fact remains that if a philanthropist's money comes from externalising corporate costs to taxpayers, and that if Microsoft is listed for its own tax purposes as a partly Puerto Rican and Singaporean company, then the real philanthropists behind these glittering foundations might be a sight more ragged-trousered than Bill and Melinda.

Free marketeers will spring to the defence of billionaire philanthropists with a remark like: "Oh, so you'd rather they spent all their money selfishly on golf courses and mansions, would you?" To which I reply: "Oh, you mean that trickle-down doesn't work, after all?" But the point is that the poor are not begging us for charity, they are demanding justice. And when, on the occasion of his birthday, a sultan or emperor reprieved one thousand prisoners sentenced to death, no one ever called those pardons justice. Nor is it justice when a plutocrat decides to reprieve untold thousands from malaria. Human beings should not have to depend upon a rich man's whim for the right to life.

Or the right to breathe.

Or go to school.

But these days, it;s Bill Gates world and the rest of us just live in it.

Education Deform Comes To Catholic Schools

Vulture philanthropists aren't happy with deforming the public school system - they're taking aim at Roman Catholic schools too:

Private philanthropists have changed the face of public education over the last decade, underwriting the rise of charter schools and promoting remedies that rely heavily on student testing and teacher evaluation.

But with much less fanfare, wealthy donors have begun playing a parallel role in the country’s next-largest educational network: Roman Catholic schools.

In New York — as in Boston, Baltimore and Chicago — shrinking enrollment and rising school deficits in recent years have deepened the church’s dependence on its cadres of longtime benefactors. Donors have responded generously, but many who were once content to write checks and attend student pageants are now asking to see school budgets, student reading scores and principals’ job evaluations.

In the jargon of education reform, they want transparency and accountability; and though the church bureaucracy has resisted similar demands from other constituents in the past, the donors are getting pretty much what they want.

To the delight of some educators and the discomfort of others, major contributors have won a voice in decision-making at every level, from the staffing of the schools to the frank financial self-examination that has nudged the Archdiocese of New York toward the most severe school consolidation in its history. Church officials announced last month that falling enrollments and rising deficits would force them to close 27 schools, one-tenth of their total, by the end of this academic year.

“The relationship between the church and its contributors used to be basically, ‘Pray, pay and obey — give us money, we’ll take it from there,’ ” said Francis J. Butler, president of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, a national network of Catholic philanthropies. “But donors are much more proactive today. They are concerned about the quality of the schools, the leadership; they’re drilling down into these problems.”

At Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem, a Wall Street financier, Charles B. Durkin Jr., and a small group of fellow benefactors have donated a total of roughly $100,000 a year for about 15 years. Until about five years ago, the extent of their involvement was to visit several times each year and shake hands with grateful children, as Mr. Durkin, 72, did one recent morning.

Yet the next day, Mr. Durkin followed up with a long working meeting, poring over test scores and talking with the principal about the progress she was making with the students. When they were done, the two agreed that teachers might need some coaching in math instruction — and Mr. Durkin agreed to pay for it.

...

Historically, parochial schools have fared slightly better in standardized tests than public schools, partly because as private institutions they are not bound by law to take all comers, as public schools are.

But the effort to bring charter-school standards of accountability to a system once dominated by parish priests and their staffs has created some tensions between patrons and school administrators. At one school in the Bronx, a principal wanted to spend a donor’s money on a gym, which he considered crucial to attracting new students, while the donor wanted to stock a new library. The school got the library, but closed soon afterward because of declining enrollment.

Standardized testing, Common Core, benchmarks, data points, SMART goals and all the other jive ass corporate stuff brought to the public schools now coming to the Catholic schools.

I wonder what George Carlin would say about this?

Goldman, Morgan Stanley Rob Clients, Make Huge Profits

The Times reports this morning that financial firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and others created mortgage-backed securities made up of bad debt, sold it to clients, and made huge profits while their clients lost billions on securities they were led to believe were solid investments.

The SEC is looking into the matter, especially to see if Goldman and the other firms purposely helped clients select securities that would lose money

But many of the financial wizards and hedge fund managers who made a killing on these toxic collateralized debt obligations are laughing all the way to the bank with their ill-gotten gains.

And of course the firms themselves are Masters of the Universe with so many of the others - like Lehman and Bear Sterns - out of the picture.

With cronies in both the Bush administration and now the Obama administration looking out for them, these predators and vultures at Goldman and Morgan and the other connected financial firms have gamed the system and turned the "free market" into one huge rigged casino - and its investors and the American taxpayer who continue to lose (the stock market had the worst decade ever from 1999-2009.)

But until people start to go to jail for this, nothing will change on Wall Street - the rigged casino will continue.

And now, as has been noted before on this blog and elsewhere, the very boys who created the rigged casino and have stolen billions want to turn their attention and efforts to public education.

And the Obama administration is cheering them on.

What more evidence do we need that taking Wall Street management style and business ethics and transferring them to any other area of life is a bad idea than the piss-poor record of the overall stock market this past decade and the financial collapse that was created by the financial geniuses on Wall Street to enrich themselves and bilk everybody else?

Bringing Financial Industry Innovation To Public Education

So many education "reformers" these days come straight from the financial world - billionaire media tycoons like Mayor Moneybags, billionaire monopolists like Bill Gates, billionaire philanthropists like Eli Broad, and all those hedge fund managers/education reformers we met in last week's Style section of the Times.

They like to talk about how important it is we bring MBA management techniques, business innovation, deregulation and of course competition to public education.

You see, collaboration is Communist and the old way of managing schools is so 19th century and what we need to do is bring some of that brash thinking and knack for innovation the boys in finance have brought to the financial markets and the banks.

It sounds great, of course, until you realize that the brash thinking and knack for innovation the boys in finance have brought to the financial markets and the banks also brought us the Tech Bubble, the Enron scandal, the Housing Bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, the bailouts, and crooks like Bernie Madoff.

I'm a public school educator, so I know I'm suspect when I make snide and probably Marxist remarks about the disasters the financial geniuses have caused in the past twenty years.

But what about when Paul Volker, former head of the Federal Reserve and the man widely credited with bringing the U.S. out of the 70's/80's stagflation mess, says it:

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance Initiative yesterday, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker looked to finance's recent past and saw little to like, noting that he has yet to see any evidence that financial market innovations have provided any benefit to the economy.

Apparently, Volcker thinks the industry reached a peak when it invented the ATM and, given what's happened over the last year or two, it's hard to disagree with that view.

Yeah, the list of innovations emanating from the financial industry that Volker likes has one item on it - the ATM machine.

All the other innovations he says not only did not provide any benefit to the economy, they "took us right to the brink of disaster."

If the best thinking of the MBA class and the financial industry types brought us the Tech Bubble, the Enron scandal, the Housing Bubble, the 2008 financial collapse, the bailouts, Bernie Madoff, and "right to the brink of disaster," maybe, just maybe, we want to take the innovations they offer for public education with a healthy shaker of salt too.