With help from Rupert Murdoch's publications, Bill Gates and his minions speak about changing schools agenda "less success[fully] than we had hoped for.”

In particular, the Gates interview confirmed two things about the Foundation’s education efforts: 1) they’ve realized that the focus of their efforts has to be on the political control of schools and 2) they are uninterested in using that political influence to advance market forces in education. Instead, the basic strategy of the Gates Foundation is to use science (or, more accurately, the appearance of science) to identify the “best” educational practices and then use political influence to create a system of national standards, curricular materials, and testing to impose those “best practices” on schools nationwide.

In Part 1 of this post, I described how the Gates Foundation came to recognize the importance of using political influence to reform the education system rather than focusing on reforming one school at a time in the hopes that school systems would see and replicate successful models. No private philanthropist has enough money to buy and sustain widespread adoption of an effective approach and the public school system has little incentive to identify and spread effective approaches on their own.

Faced with the unwillingness of the public school system to reproduce successful models (assuming that Gates could even offer one), the Foundation was left with two solutions to encourage innovation: 1) identify the best practices themselves and impose them from the top down, or 2) encourage choice and competition so that schools would have the proper incentive to identify, imitate, and properly implement effective approaches.