I agree with the content and spirit of this comment — thanks for writing it.
There remains the puzzle of why the Gates Foundation has devoted so many resources toward education efforts, which look to be ineffective from the outside. I have high confidence that they could have found a more effective use of the money.
I have wondered too, and I am much less impressed with the education than health work. It’s possible they are just buying their “help my society” and “help people anywhere.” They also have programs to help the Washington area around Microsoft, so it’s pretty plausible that they feel they want to discharge several kinds of moral obligations to concentric circles of connectedness each of which gets some weight.
My steelman (which I don’t necessarily buy):
Education is a $1.1 trillion sector in the United States alone. Improvements in its productivity will therefore be a big input into economic growth, which affects our ability to do everything else. Moreover, the lifetime impacts of education are significant on worker productivity, and developing and harnessing human capital, which affects the economy, but also public policy and science.
There is very little competition in the sector. Effects of schooling on learning and productivity pay off decades later, and the science of efficacious teaching is ill-developed, so parents are rather imperfectly able to and motivated to improve student outcomes. Moreover, a substantial portion of the establishment in education research has been resistant to the use of randomized trials and the scientific method in education, for a variety of reasons. Powerful interest groups resist experimentation and the adjustment of policies to the current available evidence.
However, the history of philanthropy suggests that wealthy philanthropists can and have had large effects on educational policy and practices. So the opportunity to institute more systematic data collection and conduct a number of major experiments in educational outcomes, and shape policy around the results is one of the more promising ways to increase rich country GDP and virtues, with all the relevant flow-through effects.
The small schools fiasco involved putting too much money into that experiment prematurely, and a real perhaps-statistical blunder, but this was acknowledged and the program dropped in response to poor results.
This is offset by projects like videotaping vast numbers of hours of teacher teaching (correlated with outcomes), the creation of large national databases, causing several jurisdictions to experiment with pay-for-performance (by bankrolling the difference), etc. The chance of a huge win from this extension of science and experimentation is enough to justify things.
The GF also gives a bunch of scholarships to high-ability students (the Gates scholarships at Cambridge modeled after the Rhodes Scholarships, the Gates Millennium Scholars Program for top under-represented minority students in the United States). Again this might not be a utilitarian thing, but such programs provide a way to target talent that might otherwise be lost from key fields, and a huge opportunity for influence by handing out the money to people doing research and work that the GF wants to encourage.
It could be largely symbolic, e.g. the Gates Foundation paying attention to education reaffirms the status of education as an important thing to pay attention to.
I agree with the content and spirit of this comment — thanks for writing it.
There remains the puzzle of why the Gates Foundation has devoted so many resources toward education efforts, which look to be ineffective from the outside. I have high confidence that they could have found a more effective use of the money.
I have wondered too, and I am much less impressed with the education than health work. It’s possible they are just buying their “help my society” and “help people anywhere.” They also have programs to help the Washington area around Microsoft, so it’s pretty plausible that they feel they want to discharge several kinds of moral obligations to concentric circles of connectedness each of which gets some weight.
My steelman (which I don’t necessarily buy):
Education is a $1.1 trillion sector in the United States alone. Improvements in its productivity will therefore be a big input into economic growth, which affects our ability to do everything else. Moreover, the lifetime impacts of education are significant on worker productivity, and developing and harnessing human capital, which affects the economy, but also public policy and science.
There is very little competition in the sector. Effects of schooling on learning and productivity pay off decades later, and the science of efficacious teaching is ill-developed, so parents are rather imperfectly able to and motivated to improve student outcomes. Moreover, a substantial portion of the establishment in education research has been resistant to the use of randomized trials and the scientific method in education, for a variety of reasons. Powerful interest groups resist experimentation and the adjustment of policies to the current available evidence.
However, the history of philanthropy suggests that wealthy philanthropists can and have had large effects on educational policy and practices. So the opportunity to institute more systematic data collection and conduct a number of major experiments in educational outcomes, and shape policy around the results is one of the more promising ways to increase rich country GDP and virtues, with all the relevant flow-through effects.
The small schools fiasco involved putting too much money into that experiment prematurely, and a real perhaps-statistical blunder, but this was acknowledged and the program dropped in response to poor results.
This is offset by projects like videotaping vast numbers of hours of teacher teaching (correlated with outcomes), the creation of large national databases, causing several jurisdictions to experiment with pay-for-performance (by bankrolling the difference), etc. The chance of a huge win from this extension of science and experimentation is enough to justify things.
The GF also gives a bunch of scholarships to high-ability students (the Gates scholarships at Cambridge modeled after the Rhodes Scholarships, the Gates Millennium Scholars Program for top under-represented minority students in the United States). Again this might not be a utilitarian thing, but such programs provide a way to target talent that might otherwise be lost from key fields, and a huge opportunity for influence by handing out the money to people doing research and work that the GF wants to encourage.
It could be largely symbolic, e.g. the Gates Foundation paying attention to education reaffirms the status of education as an important thing to pay attention to.