By Anthony Cody.

This weekend a select group of philanthropists will gather at Stanford University for an “Innovation Summit,” where they will hear from Melinda Gates and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, and other experts in giving money away. The event is hosted by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, but no civilians will be present — it is by invitation only. Only those wealthy enough to give away millions may attend.

Over the past decade, philanthropic organizations have played an increasing role in public schools. Now is a good time to take stock on the impact philanthropies are having. Will this weekend include time for some sober reflection? If so, I would offer some food for thought, with a focus on the Gates Foundation. (For an in-depth look at the Gates Foundation’s work in education, please see my book, The Educator and the Oligarch, a Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation.)

Our public schools cannot take much more billionaire-sponsored “innovation.”

Just this week we learned that the Gates Foundation is cutting short its funding of the Hillsborough schools, where they pledged an investment of $100 million to support an aggressive program that rewarded teachers for higher test scores. After providing the district with $80 million for the project over the past six years, the Gates Foundation has announced the end to their funding, suspending the last $20 million of their grant. They have discovered what many educators and researchers knew all along. Pay for raising test scores does not work, even for that narrow purpose. The district was also supposed to identify and fire the “bottom five percent” of its teachers, which proved to be far more difficult than expected.

Now the Hillsborough school district is forced to pay the full cost of this experiment going forward. The project will cost a total of $271 million, of which the Gates Foundation has paid $80 million. The balance, of $191 million, will be borne by the district. Mercedes Schneider points out that the district’s reserves, which were a healthy $360 million, were spent down to $152 million over the past five years – without the knowledge of the school board. This was only discovered after the school board fired Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia (recently hired to be New York’s state commissioner of education.) And the district’s bond rating is now in jeopardy. (See Mercedes Schneider’s analysis for details.)

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the project inspired the state of Florida to pass Senate Bill 736, which eliminated teacher tenure and tied teacher pay to evaluations and test scores.

Beyond Florida, the Gates Foundation’s well-financed advocacy and influence has made the pursuit of test scores pivotal in teacher evaluations. The Gates Foundation influenced the Federal Department of Education when they designed the Race to the Top grant competition, so that states had to include test scores in teacher evaluations in order to qualify.

This is not the first Gates-inspired “innovation” gone awry.

In the early 2000s, the Gates Foundation decided that the key to good results was making small schools out of big ones. Millions of dollars were started to “incubate” small schools, often creating two or three sub-schools on a large campus. Oakland, where I worked for 24 years, went from fewer than 100 schools to more than 140 over several years. But lo and behold, after about six years the Gates Foundation decided that size was not the critical variable after all, and in 2009 announced they were pulling the plug on the small schools initiative. But school districts like Oakland, who had taken Gates funding to reshape their facilities, were left holding the bag. Not surprisingly, it is a good deal more expensive to house three school administrations under a single roof instead of one. Now, more than a decade after the experiment began, Oakland is struggling to consolidate many of these schools back together. And Oakland teacher pay remains close to the bottom for the region.

There are some valuable lessons here, if philanthropists are willing to reflect.

First of all, the lure of “innovation” is irresistible, but often catastrophic. The Gates Foundation has taken an approach that places themselves outside and above democratic processes. It is not a coincidence that the Hillsborough school board was kept in the dark about the expenditure of district reserves. Elected school boards have been seen as the enemy of the Gates Foundation and allied reformers. Recall what Bill Gates said in 2008:

There’s a lot of issues about governance, whether its school boards or unions where you want to allow for experimentation, in terms of pay procedures and management procedures, to really prove out new things. As those things start working on behalf of the students, then I believe that the majority of teachers and voters will be open-minded to these new approaches. And so we have to take it a step at a time – they have to give us the opportunity for this experimentation – the unions, the voters. The cities where our foundation has put the most money in is where there’s a single person responsible. In New York, Chicago and Washington, DC, the mayor has responsibility for the school system. So instead of having a committee of people, you have that one person. And that’s where we’ve seen the willingness to take on some of the older practices and try new things, and we’ve seen very good results in all three of those cities. So there are some lessons that have already been learned. We need to make more investments, and I do think the teachers will come along, because, after all, they’re there because they believe in helping the students as well.

Apparently the Gates Foundation felt they had that single person responsible in Hillsborough, and the school board was left in the dark.

Gates is not alone in his hostility to elected school boards. Much of the philanthropic enthusiasm for charter schools comes from a similar place. Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings stated last year his goal of getting rid of school boards.

Hastings said,

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…The most important thing is that they constantly get better every year they’re getting better because they have stable governance — they don’t have an elected school board. And that’s a real tough issue. Now if we go to the general public and we say, “Here’s an argument why you should get rid of school boards” of course no one’s going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90%, so we have a lot of catchup to do…So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow… It’s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90% of charter kids….And if we succeed over the next 20 or 30 years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system, it’s hard. [applause]

Just last month we learned that California billionaire Eli Broad has set in motion a plan to turn 50% of Los Angeles schools into charters.

There are two huge problems with these “innovations.” Firstly, not content with a political system that clearly gives the wealthy outsized influence over elected officials, there is a brazen desire to eliminate any sort of democratic control over public schools. School boards provide a place where the public can hold the system accountable. In the absence of such democratic processes, we get mayors like Rahm Emanuel closing fifty schools in African American and Latino neighborhoods.

Second, we are seeing a capriciousness on the part of the Gates Foundation. Their focus on small schools lacked a deep understanding of what makes schools work. Rather than dig in and learn from that experience, the Foundation jumped to focusing on another variable, “teacher effectiveness,” as defined by the ability to raise test scores. There was plenty of evidence that this was misguided. In my own dialogue with the Gates Foundation back in 2012 I provided them with a boatload, which was dismissed out of hand.

Philanthropies do not have a corner on “innovations,” and the command and control structures that have allowed businesses like Microsoft and Netflix to succeed are not appropriate for public institutions. Taking a look at the failed experiment with pay for test scores, there is a further lesson to be learned. It was assumed that teachers would be motivated to work harder, and teach better, if they were incentivized to raise test scores. This was based on competitive models prevalent in some business settings. Even the Gates Foundation has now realized this doesn’t work in education – but will they stop to understand why?

Bill Gates recently wrote about the value of learning from mistakes. Will there be a thorough investigation into the mistakes that have left the Hillsborough school district in a huge fiscal hole?

But more importantly, we need a fundamental reappraisal of the role philanthropists are playing in education. There ought to be a much higher wall between the influence of philanthropies and our public institutions. School boards and other elected bodies exist to guard the common good, and even in times when money is scarce, ought to be vigilant, and not allow policy to be set by philanthropists with deep pockets and big ideas. We are seeing policy disasters set in motion by the biggest philanthropy in the world. How can citizens of this nation hold such wealthy organizations accountable? How can we limit their influence so that we are not jumping from one policy bandwagon to the next?