How Bill Gates Lied and Introduced the Defunct Common Core to Falsify an IT Skills Shortage

Executive Summary

• Bill Gates uses his charitable foundation to support items that help him increase his personal wealth.
• One of these illusory charitable actions was to create the defunct common core to highlight an artificial skills shortage.

Introduction

Bill Gates has received enormous amounts of positive media coverage for being his philanthropy. Bill Gates has declared himself a world expert on virtually every topic — ranging from how to feed the world viruses to education — however, he has zero demonstrated domain expertise in any of these areas. Just one example is his Common Core program for education. What you will learn in this article is how little research went into Common Core. The story of Bill Gates’ behavior and advocacy for Common Core is a useful case study that demonstrates how little Bill Gates knows about the areas in which he unleashes his bull in a china shop, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Quotes from Bill Gates on Common Core

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates says in concluding his speech, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.” If this statement encompasses his Common Core debacle, Gates could have at least the humility to recall that Common Core had no pilot before he took it national. There wasn’t even a draft available to the public before the Obama administration hooked states into contracts, many of which were ghostwritten with Gates funds, pledging they’d buy that pig in a poke.

But it looks like this is as close to an apology or admission of failure as we’re going to get, folks. Sorry about that $4 trillion and mangled years of education for American K-12 kids and teachers. Failing with your kids and money for eight years is slowly getting billionaire visionaries to “evolve” and pledge to respect the hoi polloi a little more, though, so be grateful. – The Federalist

Here is a funding proposal on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website for $550,000. This corrupt foundation that has no other purpose than to whitewash Bill Gates and further increase his wealth is trying to provide enticements to develop “Common Core” standards to K-10 education.

The one problem? The Gates Foundation cannot seem to figure out what Common Core actually is.

What is Common Core Again?

Gates’ new investments will focus primarily on developing curricula, the nub of the debate four years ago when the defenders of the Common Core studiously insisted that it was about benchmarking and not content. It was a spurious argument then, because one cannot talk seriously about measures without talking about what is being measured. Even though the original Common Core had no pilot programs, as Gates disingenuously denies, Gates now touts their ability to go “from pilot to wide-scale usage.”

Parents who care about those things have opted out of the school system being leveraged and controlled by persons like Gates. They have decided there is a rich heritage they should pass on to their children, that a life well-lived is more important than economic productivity, and that enriching character matters more than economic wealth. Pity that children in our public schools won’t get the same care; rather, they will be exploited in an “evolving” system that serves entrenched interests but not the students. – Philanthropy Daily

Common Core is a program that Gates cannot articulate, but he is absolutely sure he has the answer to American education.

Reading the documentation on Common Core, it appears to be something that wants to be labeled as “good” but is entirely based upon platitudes.

The word collaboration is used almost synonymously with 21st century skills. This builds nicely on the priority given to communication, because to effectively work with others toward a shared goal or to produce something, students must possess strong communication skills.

The word research appears 80 times in the English Language Arts (ELA) section of the Common Core Standards. Thanks to technology, students have unlimited amounts of information at their fingertips. – What is Common Core

And this type of vacuous talk predominates through the documentation of Common Core. Whatever good education is, it is clear that it was not obtained by those that write Common Core documentation. Note to Common Core authors, first. It is good to have something tangible, before rolling out a program promoting that item.

Does Common Core Do What it Says it Does?

This week the latest in what have been a series of disappointing standardized test reports came out. This time it was ACT scores for high school seniors who graduated in 2018. The average composite score, and scores in all subject areas, fell from 2017, and were the same or lower than in 2014. This follows dropping scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress since 2013 and continued mediocrity on international exams. Which makes one wonder: What good has come from the Common Core curriculum standards, which were apparently so promising that supporters used the federal government to coerce their installation?

The answer is no good, at least discernible through test scores. It is impossible to conclusively lay the blame for testing futility on the Core—myriad variables ranging from student motivation to the national economy can matter—but we certainly haven’t seen major improvements several years after the Core was expected to be implemented. – Forbes

Where is the testing of the Common Core hypothesis? The answer is it does not occur. Billionaires like Bill Gates promote Common Core using money, without providing evidence, and then once instituted the program takes on a life of its own.

My guess is that the Core’s content may indeed be part of the problem. But much more is going on. While our scores languish, emerging research suggests that they may be poor predictors of future success. – Forbes

What are the Specific Outcomes of Bill Gates on Education?

Here is some math education training for teachers funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Does this seem like Bill Gates knows what he is talking about with this math training? 

Wasting Taxpayer Dollars

Bill Gates does not only waste his own money but promotes wasting US taxpayer dollars.

The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a “pivot” to another that is not likely to go any better. – The Federalist

This is not supposed to be how philanthropy works. The idea is to give your own money, not to give 1/10 of the money that the taxpayers give through your political lobbying.

Faking Grassroots Support for Common Core

Bill Gates was able to get so much taxpayer money to be wasted on Common Core through intensive lobbying, and the entire time with Common Core being presented not as some billionaire’s scheme with zero education background, but instead as a grassroots program with broad support. This is explained in the following quotation. This is called astroturfing and is a common tactic of sliver spooned lobbyists who need to cover up that various programs are actually the brainchild and funded by billionaires.

Common Core commercials have been airing ad nauseam in a desperate attempt to persuade American families to support the beleaguered federal education standards/testing/technology racket. Who’s funding these public relations pushes? D.C. lobbyists, entrenched politicians and Big Business interests. The foundational myth of Common Core is that it’s a “state-led” initiative with grassroots support that was crafted by local educators for the good of all of our children. But the cash and power behind the new ad campaign tell you all you need to know.

In December, you should know, the state of New York determined that Pearson’s nonprofit foundation had abused the law by siphoning charitable assets to benefit its for-profit arm in order to curry favor with the Common Core-peddling Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Pearson paid a $7.7 million settlement after the attorney general concluded that the company’s charitable arm was marketing Common Core course material it believed could be sold by the for-profit side for “tens of millions of dollars.” After being smoked out, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to its corporate sibling for $15.1 million.

Two D.C. trade associations, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, continue to rubber-stamp Common Core propaganda. They are both recipients of tens of millions of dollars in Gates Foundation money.

Direct public input was nil. Of the 25 people in the NGA and CCSSO’s two Common Core standards-writing “working groups,” EdWeek blogger Anthony Cody reported in 2009, six were associated with the test-makers from the College Board, five were with fellow test-publishers ACT, and four were with Achieve Inc. Several had zero experience in standards writing. – Creators

The more billionaires that are involved in setting policy, the worse that policy. Billionaires contribute primary self-interest to policy debates. 

Bill Gates’ Fake Philanthropy

Bill Gates, like nearly all millionaires, is a fake philanthropist. They set up organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that are just covers for funding activities that are a combination of tax write-offs or self-interested projects. The example provided above — Common Core, sounds like it is philanthropic, but it actually isn’t.

The only evidence we have the billionaire like Bill Gates support philanthropy is they and their public relations firms say they are.

The big repeaters of these philanthropic claims are major media that often depend upon the powerful for revenues. So they don’t fact check. Here is one example. Time put zero effort into checking the claim about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and simply presumed it must be virtuous because the foundation claims that it is. Time Magazine was since acquired by David Benioff — the founder of Salesforce, who has zero interest in journalism and purchased Time to buy influence. Time was a cheap purchase for the wealthy David Benioff, as Big Tech has degraded media’s income stream, as the Internet has wiped out its subscriber revenues by in large.

Furthermore, this acquisition of media assets by non-journalist billionaire is set to accelerate as the following quotation explains.

The Economist, Condé Nast, Quartz, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Protocol, to name a few. There will be thousands more. These losses come on top of years of retrenchment and consolidation, including the sales of once-vaunted and now-distressed publications to legacy-burnishing billionaires, and the bankruptcies and mergers of giant newspaper groups such as McClatchy, Gannett, and GateHouse (emphasis added) — a crushing blow to local news in particular. – Hamish McKenzie

Increasingly, the media will be just PR for billionaires. We can expect more uncritical acceptance of the charitable orientations of some billionaire and, that..

• ..without the creation of more billionaires, the economy will falter,
• the more billionaires the better it is for society,
• how the political system that we have, that is controlled by billionaires is actually not elitist but is supported by “democratic” elections.

This is exactly the type of content Jeff Bezos, Mark Benioff and Larry Ellison want to be published.

It is also exactly what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wants.

New Dog..Old Trick

Using charity to refurbish one’s image of atrocious behavior is an old trick. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Leland Stanford, and an uncountable number of robber barons and other disreputable characters have used and continue to use charity in this way, as the following quotation explains.

Gates’s foundation was originally cooked up as a feel-good gloss to cover up his shredded reputation during Microsoft’s antitrust trial, putting him in the long tradition of obscenely rich people using the occasional generous gift to try justifying their enormous wealth and power.

The business press has observed how “Twenty years ago, people associated the name Gates with ‘ruthless, predatory’ monopolistic conduct.” However, “after taking a public relations beating during [the Microsoft antitrust] trial’s early going in late 1998, the company started what was described at the time as a ‘charm offensive’ aimed at improving its image . . . Mr. Gates contributed $20.3 billion, or 71 percent of his total contributions to the foundation . . . during the 18 months between the start of the trial and the verdict.” A wealth manager frankly states, “his philanthropy has helped ‘rebrand’ his name.”

Indeed, philanthropy by the very richest men and women globally is one of the main arguments their defenders have — sure, Gates and other billionaires make a lot of money, but then they use it to help us. So generous! And look, he’s smarter than our racist TV president! But often it’s a fig leaf for ruling-class dominance. – JacobMag

The big elites know they can release pretty much any information, and it will be dutifully repeated by all the major media outlets. If you write the type of article you see here for a major media entity — it is unlikely to get through the editorial review.

This type of video laying out the charity scam is extremely rare. The vast majority of the coverage charities funded by billionaires are mindlessly accepting of all of the claims. This also serves to undermine or deemphasize the actual providers of the public good, which is the government. The position of billionaires is they would like to defund the government, and reduce social services, and then offer pretend charity as a substitute. 

Using Fake Terms

The US political system is “democratic,” when, in fact, there is zero correlation between what people want to be put in as policy and what actually becomes policy, as the following video explains.

Billionaires are “philanthropists” (who happen to cheat on their taxes aggressively). If these billionaires are so philanthropic, why are they cheating on their taxes?  Paying taxes is the baseline thing they do to support society.

If you constantly evade taxes and have an entire industry of advisors like KPMG and PwC and others that help you do it, one can be forgiven for being skeptical when that same entity or individual says they have an interest in charity.

None of it adds up.

The Importance of Distracting the Masses

This is all to distract from the fact that we have returned to a monarchial type system. Our income inequality is now higher than the 1930s and similar to that of the Middle Ages. The underhanded tactics by companies like Microsoft to crush the competition and to bring in foreign labor to compete with US domestic labor are examples of things that increase income inequality. Bill Gates, his policies at Microsoft, and now at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has served to increase income inequality and to worsen the condition of the population.

And that, in most cases, is how you become a billionaire.

Bill Gates, seen repeatedly lying under oath in this Department of Justice deposition in 1998 — is supposedly a person with the credibility that we should be listening to on a wide variety of topics. This rapacious and unethical businessman — has been whitewashed through PR spending and fake charity. This illustrates that the establishment media will help rehabilitate anyone’s image — if they have enough money. 

Conclusion

Bill Gates’ promotion of Common Core is just one example of a fake philanthropic program. While Bill Gates has wasted not only his money but also taxpayers’ money, it is sure not to stain his record when major media entities report on Bill Gates’ next “philanthropic” boondoggle. This means that the Gates Foundation is misdirecting not only its resources but taxpayer resources. And Bill and Melinda have no idea what they are doing. They are not experts in any of the areas where their charity functions. And media entities are increasingly legitimizing the views of a fake charity without domain expertise and with massive undeclared conflicts of interest. The concept is that Bill and Melinda can hire “smart people”; however, that does not seem to be working out either. And furthermore, who are these experts and “smart people” that the foundation hires? Well, people as corrupt as Bill and Melinda Gates naturally.

The Foundation itself has employed numerous former Big Pharma figures, leading to accusations of industry bias. Many campaigners see loosening intellectual property laws as a better way of increasing access to medicines, both in lowering prices through generic competition and in enabling innovation outside patent-hoarding companies. – NewInt

The model is to have two people with zero educational background in any of the topics they are funding, hiring the most financially conflicted individuals to “solve our problems.”

And because Bill and Melinda are naturally thugs, they bring their standard Gates intimidation approach to everything they do.

‘Through its funding it also operates through an interconnected network of organizations and individuals across academia and the NGO and business sectors. This allows it to leverage influence through a kind of “group-think” in international health.’

In 2008 the WHO’s head of malaria research, Aarata Kochi, accused a Gates Foundation ‘cartel’ of suppressing diversity of scientific opinion,(emphasis added) claiming the organization was ‘accountable to no-one other than itself’. – NewInt

Furthermore, Common Core is not only an educational boondoggle but is part of a strategy by Bill Gates to propose that education is insufficient in the US, and is why more foreign workers need to be imported to fill the “gap.” Naturally, Microsoft is a major employer of these foreign workers, and these workers will work at a significant discount to US citizens. Bill Gates has been for decades referencing Indians and elite Indian interests as we cover in the article How Microsoft Pushes the Forward the Indian Interests Over Us Interests.

This is important so that more money can be shoveled up to Bill and Melinda Gates and executives that Bill and Melina Gates are friends with. Every billionaire seems to agree that these programs need to be extended and expanded, as we cover in the article Why Do So Many Billionaires Love the H1-B Worker Visa?

Isn’t it curious that Eric Schmidt, another billionaire, this time from Google, as we cover in the article Google’s Eric Schmidt Lied About Skill Shortages to Support H1-B, has the exact same view on the H1-B worker program as Bill Gates?

Of course, the broad support of foreign worker visas among billionaires is only because these billionaires are concerned about the country overall. At least that is what the billionaires and their compliant media would have all of us believe.

Finally, the US does not need to guess what educational designs work. Finland, as we cover in the article The US Continues to Ignore World Leading Finland Educational System, is far more successful than the US in primary and secondary education, with a diverse population and without using any Common Core, and in fact using techniques that are the opposite of Common Core.