Hunches Gone Wrong: Time for the Gates Foundation to Reconsider Approach to Education
By John Thompson.
The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof, in “Bill and Melinda Gates’s Pillow Talk,” writes: “It has been 15 years since Bill and Melinda Gates created what is now the largest foundation in the world. This milestone seemed the right moment to ask them what they have learned from giving away $34 billion, what mistakes they have made, and what they disagree about.” Although the Gates Foundation shouldn’t get all of the credit, according to Kristof’s “conservative back-of-envelope calculations,” more than 33 million children’s lives have been saved since the foundation was established.
Of course, mistakes were made in their philanthropy as they “started out too tech-focused.” Now, says Kristof, some of their most effective measures, like promoting breast-feeding, are “distinctly low-tech.”
The Gates’s acknowledge that the foundation’s investments in education in the United States haven’t “paid off as well.” But, Kristof is hopeful regarding “one giant leap” in policy. The foundation plans to “also invest nationwide in early childhood programs.”
I’m not qualified to assess the effectiveness of international aid projects. But, to understand why the Gates Foundation’s efforts at home are not working, we should read the foundation’s (and Kristof’s) descriptions of their programs and ask about the two watch dogs who didn’t bark. The first clue is found in Kristof’s seemingly innocuous statement that the foundation “didn’t appreciate how hard it was to translate scientific breakthroughs into actual progress in remote villages.”
When it first committed to international philanthropy, the foundation may have not grasped the full complexity of the problems it tackled, but at least it built on a foundation of scientific research. In our Hunches Gone Wrong: Time for the Gates Foundation to Reconsider Approach to Education - Living in Dialogue:
