Mike Simpson is the man behind Big Education Aper, a site that collects many of the important voices supporting public ed. But he occasionally posts work of his own, and in this latest post, provides an overview of what wealthy reformers have wrought.
PART ONE: HOW YOU DEMOLISH A PUBLIC INSTITUTION AND CALL IT “REFORM”
To understand the crime, you need to understand the con. Starting around the year 2000, a small, extraordinarily wealthy cadre of billionaires decided that American public education was, essentially, a failing startup that needed disruption. Never mind that these same individuals largely attended elite private schools, or that a surprising number of them never finished college. That’s fine. You don’t need expertise when you have a checkbook the size of a small nation’s GDP.
The “Big Three” foundations — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation — became the unholy trinity of what historians will one day call Vulture Philanthropy: the art of giving money away in ways that happen to reshape entire public systems to your ideological preferences while generating enormous goodwill press coverage.
Their toolkit was elegant in its destructiveness:
- Charter School Explosion — Pour hundreds of millions into non-unionized Charter Management Organizations like KIPP and Success Academy. Frame it as “choice.” Watch neighborhood schools bleed enrollment and funding until they “fail,” then close them. Repeat.
- High-Stakes Testing & Common Core — The Gates Foundation spent over $280 million single-handedly bankrolling Common Core, then used Obama’s Race to the Top program to force states to adopt it by dangling federal dollars. Nothing says “local control” like a billionaire in Seattle redesigning the curriculum for a kid in rural Mississippi.
- Value-Added Teacher Evaluations — Evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores. Fire the ones whose kids score low. Ignore poverty, trauma, and the fact that over 60% of test score variance is causally linked to out-of-school factors like family income — a finding confirmed by a 2024 peer-reviewed study. But why let science interfere with a good narrative?
- The Urban Portfolio Model — Deploy Broad-trained superintendents to major cities. Run school systems like hedge funds. Close “underperforming” schools. Gentrify the rubble.
The result? By 2013 — seven years before anyone heard of COVID-19 — student achievement stopped growing entirely. Reading scores didn’t just flatten; they turned negative. Math gains evaporated. And the architects of this disaster? They pivoted to their next initiative.