A question on a New York Regents test lauds the “stunning” contribution Bill Gates has made to the global fight against disease.

Last week high school students in the state of New York who previously failed their New York Regents exam in June were given a second chance. This test is one of five that students must pass in order to receive their high school diplomas. It was created by State Department of Education with the cooperation of teachers that they choose to help them. Here is one of the questions:

…Millions of children in developing nations die from diseases like pneumonia, measles and diarrhea that claim twice as many lives annually as AIDS. Vaccines prevent these basic illnesses. Bill Gates pledges billions of dollars to vaccinate the world’s children. Problem solved. But it’s not that easy.

Money alone won’t rid dirty water of parasites that can blind and cripple. It won’t fix bad roads that keep people from getting care. It won’t end the political corruption and violent unrest that erase health advances. It won’t stop a population explosion that contributes to poor health. It can’t even prevent a rat from gnawing through the power cord of a refrigerator used to store vaccines in a remote West African clinic.

In late 1998, Gates donated $100 million to create a program dedicated to getting new and underused vaccines to children in the poorest countries. A year later he gave a stunning $750 million to launch a new superstructure for improving childhood vaccinations, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) – a coalition of international public health agencies, philanthropies, therapists and the pharmaceutical industry….

Gates knows vaccines can’t do it all, not when a regional hospital in Nigeria draws its water from an open pit in the ground. Or where a 6-year-old Ivory Coast boy with a leg twisted by polio faces a life of begging because his mother couldn’t afford a trip to a clinic for vaccines. Or where a a broken board on a bridge can halt the shipment of medicine for days….

 Source: Tom Paulson, “Bill Gates’ war on disease, poverty is an uphill battle,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 21, 2001 (original source here.)

The question asked by the test:

5a. According to Tom Paulson, what is one situation that makes it difficult to reduce childhood diseases in developing countries?

Update, Aug. 18, 2014: The second question, forwarded to me today was:

5b. According to Tom Paulson, what is one way money donated by Bill Gates has been used to help reduce childhood diseases in developing countries?

I find this a bit disturbing. First of all, the New York Department of Education  has thoroughly embraced every aspect of Gates-sponsored education reform. This agency promotes charter schools, has mandated the use of test scores for teacher evaluations, and has hurried to give students tests aligned with the Common Core. Now the Department is using one of its required tests to feed students information about the wealthiest man in the world.

The second level of concern has to do with the content of the question. This question is one of basic comprehension, in which students are not asked to make any real inferences or judgments about the information that has been presented.

Other credible sources on the same topic present Bill Gates’ role in African health policy as an area of controversy, in need of critical public examination.  For instance, this passage — also written by Tom Paulson, suggests a more critical answer to the very question posed by the writing prompt.  It quotes Pulitzer Prize winning health and science author Laurie Garrett

“What we think is global health, how we define this mission, is increasingly decided by a relatively small number of Americans living in Seattle, Washington.”

The dominance of the Gates Foundation has led to a bias toward scientific, technological and private-sector solutions, says Garrett. Science and technological improvements are needed, she says, but this focus ends up crowding out all of the other — social, political and economic — changes necessary to defeat the diseases of poverty.

The role of Gates’ GAVI Alliance with the pharmaceutical industry has also been questioned by sources as credible as Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders), winner of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize.  Does a test item like this equip students to take reasoned position on the real world controversies raised by Gates’ strategies?  Consider this possible non-fiction selection:

MSF says it favors expanding access to new vaccines — just not at the expense of basic immunizations.

“Twenty percent of the world’s children aren’t even getting the basic vaccines,” said Kate Elder, MSF vaccine policy adviser. The Gates Foundation is driving much of the global health policy decisions around vaccinations, Elder noted, and “Bill Gates’ priority is new vaccines.” The philanthropy’s influence is distorting the agenda to favor new vaccines over basic improvements, she said.

Daniel Berman, MSF’s deputy director for access, cited a recent initiative to distribute a new $7-per-dose pneumococcal vaccine in DR Congo in the middle of a measles outbreak. Why, Berman asked, are donors and health agencies pushing this new, expensive vaccine in Congo if Congolese children still aren’t getting a 30-cent measles vaccine?

The approach appears aimed more at supporting drug industry desires to promote new products than at finding the most efficient and sustainable means for fighting the diseases of poverty, he said.

A more recent article by the same Tom Paulson raises far more nuanced questions about the international work of the Gates Foundation, such as this one:

Is the Gates Foundation approach to improving agriculture in Africa going to help or hurt poor, smallholder farmers? That’s one example of a very open — and hotly debated — question. There are other examples in global health.

But students are not presented with any such controversies in the test question — that would require real critical thinking on their parts. Just the fact of Gates’ “stunning” contribution to fighting diseases.

Gates has achieved huge influence in several arenas – US education reform, and world health and nutrition. In all areas his philanthropy has promoted market-driven solutions to problems faced by the poor. This approach is undermining the democratic control of public education in the US, and may be causing similar problems overseas. Tests ought not to be used to promote anyone’s agenda, and the appearance of Gates in this test is cause for concern.

What do you think? Does this test question cross a line? Might better questions be asked regarding the work of the Gates Foundation around the world? 

Image by AlbertoGP123, Creative Commons license.