How Bill Gates' Common Core fuels today's "woke" school controversies

The seemingly-random proliferation of progressive ideology in public schools is a decade in the making

(A follow-up to my Tablet Magazine article on Social-Emotional Learning, a recent therapeutic initiative in public schools.)

In recent years, parents across the country have clashed with school boards on the presence of race and gender ideology in the classroom. These heated battles over public school curriculum are often seen as conflicts between teacher and parental rights over what a child is taught. But neglected is a far more powerful and lucrative force than individual teachers: the expansive administrative and non-profit entities that form what’s often called the social services industrial complex. Take any curriculum conflict and you are likely to find an educational “non-profit” profiting off of division behind the scenes. 

For example, controversy broke out last April when a New Jersey curriculum proposal included a document that told first graders they could have “boy parts” but “feel like a girl.” This incident fueled fervor surrounding transgender issues and the Florida Bill for "Parental Rights in Education,” or what Democratic opponents called the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. But scant attention was paid to the document’s actual author: not a woke teacher gone rogue, but the non-profit Advocates for Youth.

Advocates for Youth is a large non-profit headquartered in DC dedicated to youth sexuality education. Like many similar educational non-profits, it is not local or even national but global in reach, with branches on four continents. (In another example, the DEI non-profit Facing History and Ourselves, a branch of AllState’s nonprofit offshoot, partners with Colombia, France, Mexico, Northern Ireland, and South Africa to “develop curriculum reforms" on race and civic democracy.) It is bolstered by lobbying organizations like GLSEN— which is probably how its curriculum found its way into New Jersey’s proposal.

How did public schools become guinea pigs in these experiments, which seem intensely coordinated yet eerily lacking in human motive? An answer lies in more than a decade’s worth of bureaucratization in public education. 

The 2010 Common Core, a total overhaul of public education, was far from the first instance of federal intervention advancing bureaucracy. What was unprecedented was the Core’s extensive private involvement and funding, including Bill Gates’ spearheading contribution of $200 million. The Core coincided with an Obama-era technocratic vision of social change through private and public collaboration: by subjecting the public sector to market competition, the government could more effectively remedy inequality. Federal initiatives like the 2009 Social Innovation Fund further contributed to the expansion of non-profit social services. Nonprofit growth skyrocketed as for-profits set up non-profit branches and spin-offs. 

For the record, I don’t believe in the Gates Foundation New World Order conspiracy theories. I think Bill is just a true autistic technocrat.

Common Core standards, intended to “equalize gaps in achievement,” instead created an expansive industry bent only on promoting and perpetuating the Common Core. With new standards came new classroom materials, textbooks, tests, and professional development programs, each ripe for “disruption” by vested interests. A focus borrowed from the corporate sector on quantitative measurements also spawned a data collection and assessment industry. Language of “metrics,” “alignment,” “integration,” and “management” jockeyed for room in the classroom, obscuring profiteering with a detached aura of scientific objectivity.

Core materials, drummed up by think tanks and advocacy groups rather than working educators, smuggled in under egalitarian justifications of “digital proficiency” and “accessibility,” were often low-quality and difficult to implement. The much-derided Common Core mathematics standard verbalized math through “number sentences,” while the humanities were in turn quantified via emphasis of non-fiction informational texts. Many teachers alongside students were left baffled by the non-intuitive, highly technical new curricula.

No matter, as this produced a secondary industry of “specialized” consultants in Common Core expertise. In a portent of today’s culture wars, opponents were characterized as “conservative Tea Party Republicans” and “white suburban moms,” provincials fighting against the tide of progress. (Reformers now claim that standardized testing is a “racist weapon…devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds” and conveniently elide the Common Core’s progressive origins.)

Results of this “expertise” was overwhelmingly disappointing: more than a decade after the Common Core’s release, no significant positive impact on achievement has been observed. The Core has been repealed or is in the process of repeal by sixteen states. But its vast machinery of specialized academic and credentialing services remains entrenched. Administrative growth from 2011 on has skyrocketed while the rise in teachers and students remains constant. By 2014, even many private schools had adopted Core standards, as it became increasingly hard to find classroom materials and professional development services that were not Core-related. 

The Core’s failures have only expanded this bureaucracy, as the Gates Foundation poured millions more into “assessment and professional development” — translation: more specialized consultants, credentialing, and assessment services. 

The federal 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, intended to loosen the grip of standardized testing, allowed schools to use one non-academic measurement alongside standardized testing for accountability. (If the oxymoronic quality of “non-academic standardized measurement” confuses you, it usually means a barrage of inane assessments like surveys, so politicians and administrators can keep up their games of statistics fraud.)

ESSA’s inherent fuzziness, meant to give states flexibility, became an open door for progressive lobbyists and non-profits to promote their own causes. It has been leveraged to correct racial disparities, or to advance LGBTQ+ equity and “gender-affirming policies.” Social-Emotional Learning, restorative justice, and other progressive initiatives developed to fill the non-academic “flexibility” ESSA offers. All these initiatives have little in common. Nor do they attempt to address the true problems of the Common Core, which failed because of its hollow utilitarianism, rather than a lack of mindfulness booths or gender affirming policies.

Primed by the hysterical tenor of the Trump years and the anti-racist fervor of 2020, activist language has become the new jargon for profiteers to infiltrate old structures while instating an even more expansive and ineffective bureaucracy. Administrators, padding their resumes with desperate bids for relevance, scramble to link their specializations with the latest woke trend. Education schools now openly define teaching not as imparting a coherent body of knowledge but by vague commitments to social justice and anti-racism, and offer new specialists credentials in equity, SEL, and restorative justice. New industries of progressive educational consultants are correspondingly ballooning. Whereas the Gates Foundation once touted the Common Core’s quantitative STEM focus, a selling point to bipartisan legislators, it now donates to a non-profit that asserts that math is white supremacist. (Of course, math’s inherent racism can only be fixed through soliciting the specialized services of more “experts.”)

Thanks to a well-entrenched administrative structure, the most tenuous progressive concepts, like restorative justice, don’t remain ivory tower idealisms, but become implemented in real classrooms. Gauzy ideals of empathy and equity conceal the true conflict between a top-down bureaucracy and hapless locals. 

Loudoun County, Virginia proves a case study. Its heated school board meetings provided fodder for culture war debates on gender and race, and paved the way for Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory on an anti-Critical Race Theory platform. But the ongoing discourse around CRT has overlooked salient context: Loudoun County, a wealthy county, has staffing rules that drive administrative bloat. Its schools boast extensive staffs of specialists, “leadership teams,” and interventionists with Ed.Ds and Ph.Ds, each one plugged into specialized industries and educators’ workshops, and eager to introduce the newest progressive fad. This in fact is what precipitated its clash: administration hired the consultant group Equity Collaborative, which instituted “culturally sensitive programming” so clumsy that many teachers raised objections alongside parents. 

Conflicts have been stoked by the Biden administration’s recent disbursement of stimulus funds, including a whopping $122 billion from the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, the largest one-time federal investment in public education. Federal funding is often tied to stipulations like specific assessment measures, specialized services, or a three-year time cap. This means that it can’t be applied to permanent improvements like salary increases for teachers or smaller classroom sizes. It instead can and has been spent on outside consultants and administrative positions, one-time purchases of education technology, and programs focusing on diversity education, Social Emotional Learning, restorative justice, and other fads. Parents who have not observed any progressive politics intruding on their kids’ classrooms are still likely to have noticed the outsized presence of shoddy new technological initiatives and e-learning software. (This game, for example, has recently been made a mandatory part of the math curriculum at my local middle school, and features monetized microtransactions encouraging kids to pay to “level up.” )

Perhaps the worst consequence of these bloated bureaucracies is the damaging impact on teaching. With each subsequent culture clash, conservative commentators have cautioned against the dangers of teachers overstepping their roles to become activists. But that is not quite accurate: what teachers are really doing is auditioning to become administrators and specialists. In the face of stagnating teaching salaries and punishing classroom sizes, flush new bureaucratic positions offer teachers a path to upward mobility. When they espouse jargon and trendy hashtags like #DisruptTexts and #RestorativeSEL, teachers are incentivized by an entire educational superstructure that destroys their profession, turning teaching into “classroom management.”

The last decade should be a lesson in humility for those on the left who are enchanted by utopian ideals, but leave a dubious expert class to enact them. Each failed wave of reform, founded upon deliberately ill-defined and unsolvable problems, has only expanded the reach of bureaucrats and padded the pockets of private profiteers. As the trend towards bureaucratic bloat continues, expect to see more curricular clashes make headlines.