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also “the single-mindedness with which they pursue an agenda.” Gates can “crowd out” other interests with its vast resources and elevate its priorities over those of the public at large, in part by creating echo chambers and by hosting fancy events with big-name attendees to buy favor with public officials.

      Gates knows it. Buying political influence is a deliberate strategy. “Starting with the governors,” one foundation official explained, “we’ve got to build support at the state level, and once we build support at the state level, then when the dynamics are right, which would have been 2008, and we get an administration — more importantly, an education secretary whose school district benefited from our support — then you’ve got the ability to drive forward and push it off-balance at the federal level.”³⁵ (We’ll return to the point about the education secretary later on.)

      The effectiveness of this strategy actually surprised foundation leaders, an insider told Reckhow: “We have this enormous power to sway the public conversations about things like effective teaching or standards and mobilizing lots of resources in their favor without real robust debate. . . . I mean, it’s striking to me, really.”³⁶

      In her book Follow the Money (2012), Reckhow suggests that foundation grants are most effective when they support existing local activity, rather than impose outside agendas. The Gates Foundation has instead worked hand in glove with the U.S. Department of Education to “push down into states and localities the consensus they have already arrived at” on policies entangled with Common Core, said Jay Greene, a libertarian-leaning researcher who runs the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

      Another critic, Kevin Welner, who directs the left-leaning National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, doesn’t mind Gates’s efforts to influence education policy, but he is concerned about balancing its influence. “I’d like others — particularly [in] the communities that are impacted by the most high-profile school policies — to have at least an equal voice to those from the outside,” he said in an email.

      Concern over nonprofit activity in politics is bipartisan and has grown considerably since Common Core became national policy. Of the four most prominent education foundations, Gates has taken the most criticism, according to a study by Michael McShane and Jenn Hatfield for the American Enterprise Institute. They note that criticism of education philanthropy has been coming from the left for many years, but “it was really the Common Core that brought the right flank of journalists and activists into the fight against education philanthropy and helped the pushback swell to its current levels.”³⁷

      McShane and Hatfield also found that news coverage of education philanthropy has remained mostly positive. In this connection, it’s important to point out that the Gates Foundation gives millions of dollars to major news outlets to cover education. Beneficiaries include the industry flagship Education Week ($9,981,027 so far), which has received several grants specifically for reporting on Common Core;³⁸ the Education Writers Association ($5,164,437);³⁹ EdSource, an education blog ($3,647,354);⁴⁰ Chalkbeat, an education news website ($797,444);⁴¹ the Hechinger Report, a prominent education outlet;⁴² and the Atlantic’s education reporting ($307,505 in 2015).⁴³

      Foundations often fund both research and activism, according to Scott Thomas, dean of Claremont Graduate University’s education school. “It’s the way [Gates is] doing it that we think is curious. It’s an intrusion into the public sphere more directly that has not been seen before. They’re jumping into the policy process itself. That’s an interesting position, for a nonprofit to be involved in things that look a lot like lobbying.”

      It is flatly illegal for nonprofit, 501(c)3 organizations, including the Gates Foundation,⁴⁴ to lobby public officials or engage in other direct political activity, such as endorsing candidates. People and organizations that do lobby public officials are subject to heavy federal and state regulations and disclosure rules that nonprofits are not. Nonprofits found or suspected to have violated their tax status may face IRS investigation and prosecution. The Obama IRS has found time to harass smalltime, conservative-minded nonprofit groups — leading to several years of congressional and Justice Department investigation of IRS activity — but apparently it has not had time to check into the Gates Foundation, despite weighty evidence that this massive private organization essentially directed U.S. education policy. Doing so would mean acknowledging that the administration has participated in what could at best be called ethically dubious behavior.

      Reckhow labels big education foundations a “shadow bureaucracy” whose activities in crafting and advocating for education policies cloak the process from ordinary citizens. This is what bothers Alisa Ellis, a Utah mother and grassroots leader known nationally for her criticism of Common Core. Because the standards and tests were incubated in nonprofit organizations, citizens can’t find out who makes decisions, what organizations they’re working with, what information they take into account, or how much anything costs, as they can when state boards of education or legislatures make policy, Ellis said, because open-records laws do not apply to ostensibly private organizations. In Arkansas, Common Core became law only because “private foundations are making decisions that would normally be left up to a public institution that would be accountable to the taxpayers,” said Betty Peters, a member of the state school board.

      “I don’t think many people will quibble the good intentions of these foundations,” said Thomas, “but that they subvert the basic democratic processes designed to help encourage liberty and equality is what we should be concerned about.”

      The Shadow Bureaucracy

      After Gates agreed to pay for Common Core and its gravy train, the political stars aligned for the foundation to become part of a shadow bureaucracy within the federal government when the Obama administration came to office a few months later. One reason for the foundation’s previous resistance to getting involved in federal policy was distaste for the George W. Bush administration. A Gates employee told Reckhow, “Particularly back in the day when people didn’t like the Bush administration . . . all federal politics for people in Seattle looked like doing stuff with the Bush administration.” Another employee described the shift that occurred with the election of Barack Obama: “It was much more legitimate to be involved with policy post-2008 with Obama.”⁴⁵

      This post-2008 posture is directly contrary to Bill Gates’s presentation of himself and his foundation’s work as apolitical. In the Washington Post interview in 2014,

      Gates grew irritated . . . when the political backlash against the standards was mentioned. “These are not political things,” he said. “These are where people are trying to apply expertise to say, ‘Is this a way of making education better?’ At the end of the day, I don’t think wanting education to be better is a right-wing or left-wing thing.”⁴⁶

      If Gates meant what he said — despite contradicting his own employees — he was wrong. It’s impossible to be apolitical regarding public education, which is, after all, established by political institutions known as states and funded politically by taxpayers through state force. (If you don’t pay the taxes that fund public schools, ultimately you get jailed.) The idea of nonpartisan or apolitical decisions in public policy is a progressive notion that goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson, whose ideal government would consist largely of unelected “experts” who managed everyone else’s lives for them, untainted by political concerns — i.e., the will of the people.

      Whether it’s even possible for anyone to make unbiased “expert” decisions in anything is an old debate. But here’s why Gates’s “not political” claim about his education activism is an inherently political statement: Conservatives generally favor local control of education because they believe that people tend to abuse power and that good government therefore disperses power and sets limits on it. Progressives are more likely to believe that power doesn’t necessarily corrupt, so they are more comfortable with government officials amassing and centralizing power, with advice from “experts” of their choosing. Thus, to insist that unfurling Common Core across the nation isn’t a political matter is itself an expression of a progressive political

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