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Chapter 4: Government Overreach

bureaucrats and special interest groups
thousands of miles away in Washington,
virtually eliminating parents’ participation
in their children’s education.”

An early backing of the Common Core proposal
came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that
plans on spending billions of dollars in U.S. public
education and is committed to helping build political
support across the country, persuading state
governments to join the program. The Gates Foundation
spread money across the political spectrum to entities,
including the teacher’s unions, the American Federation
of Teachers and the National Education Association,
and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce. Money has flowed to policy groups on the
right and left, funding research by scholars of varying
political persuasions who promoted the idea of uniform
standards. The Gates Foundation also agreed to pay for
the new textbooks.
Bill Gates and others like him are technocrats;
they may be interested in education, but they are more
interested in the power of technology. They see
technology as a way to influence people’s opinions
about such things as fairness and the
environment—they want to shape the world by their
beliefs. The purpose of present-day education is to
replace cognitive thinking with sociology and ideology
under the name of “social justice.” When the Gates
Foundation hired lobbyists in Washington, politicians
were influenced to overreach into the area of public
education.

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