Bill Gates is one of the few billionaires and power players who have stood up to the South African-born bully, Elon Musk.
I’ve had my differences with Gates over his disastrous intrusions into “reforming” education. First, he thought that small schools were “the answer,” and small schools sprouted in many cities while beloved high schools with multiple pathways to graduation were closed. He climbed aboard the charter idea, funding many charters and underwriting the propagandistic charter-pushing film “Waiting for Superman,” in which every charter does its own thing.
Then he decided that “the answer” was standardization, and he bought and paid for the Common Core standards and urged alignment with tests, textbooks, and teacher training. Simultaneously, he funded districts to evaluate teachers by the rise or fall of student scores, and Arne Duncan made that practice a key element of his $5 billion Race to the Top. None of those data-based, data-driven policies worked. They were correct on paper but failed in reality.
Happily, he has turned his attention to problems where he can make a real difference: saving lives in impoverished nations.
He was appalled when Musk, his fellow billionaire, peremptorily shut down USAID. And he is not afraid of Musk or Trump.
The UK Financial Times interviewed Gates:
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through what he said were misguided cuts to US development assistance.
Gates, who is announcing a plan to accelerate his philanthropic giving over the next 20 years and close down the Gates Foundation altogether in 2045, said in an interview that the Tesla chief had acted through ignorance.
In February, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, the main conduit for US aid, saying it was “time for it to die”.
The co-founder of Microsoft, and once the world’s richest man himself, said the abruptness of the cuts had left life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses and could cause the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times.
Gates said Musk had cancelled grants to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that prevents women transmitting HIV to their babies, in the mistaken belief that the US was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East. “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” he said.
Gates, 69, on Thursday announced plans to spend virtually his entire fortune over the next 20 years, during which time he estimates his foundation will spend more than $200bn on global health, development and education against $100bn over the previous 25 years. The Gates Foundation will close its doors in 2045, decades earlier than previously envisaged.
Good for you, Bill!
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