by Anne Hendershott
Continuing their commitment to controlling global population growth
through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion
initiatives, Microsoft founder and philanthropist, Bill Gates and his
wife, Melinda, a self-described “practicing” Catholic, are now
attempting to control the curriculum of the nation’s public schools. Subsidizing the Common Core State Standards
in English language arts and mathematics, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation has committed more than $76 million to support teachers in
implementing the Common Core—a standardized national curriculum. This,
on top of the tens of millions they have already awarded to the National
Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers
to develop the Common Core in the first place.
Working
collaboratively with the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation
subsidized the creation of a national curriculum for English and
mathematics that has now been adopted by 46 states, and the District of
Columbia—despite the fact that the General Education Provisions Act, the
Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act all protect states against such an intrusion by
the United States Department of Education.
The Common Core
Standards were developed by an organization called Achieve, and the
National Governors Association—both of which were funded by the Gates
Foundation. The standards have been imposed on the states without any
field testing, and little or no input from those involved in
implementing the standards. In a post entitled “Why I Cannot Support the Common Core Standards,” educational policy analyst and New York University Research Professor, Diane Ravitch, wrote that the standards “are
being imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no
one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers or
schools…Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it emanate from
the states."
Ravitch is especially concerned about the content of the curriculum—what she called the “flap over fiction vs. informational text.”
Rather than giving English teachers the freedom to teach literature,
the Common Core mandates that a far greater percentage of classroom time
be spent on “fact-based” learning. Ravitch’s concerns are shared by
others. For example, one teacher claimed that she had to give up having
her students read Shakespeare in favor of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point because it was “fact-based” and Shakespeare was not. Of course, Tipping Point
has a political agenda. Parents may be concerned if they were to learn
that Gladwell suggests such “facts” as the belief that parents should
stop worrying about their children’s “experimentation with drugs,”
including cocaine because “it seldom leads to hardcore use.”
“Fact-based”
books on climate change are also replacing classic works of literature
because they are viewed as offering students an opportunity to learn
“science.” Freakonomics—a book that has already been a favorite
of public school teachers—is preferable to Poe because students will
learn about the positive effects of abortion on reducing crime rates by
reducing the population of those more likely to commit crime.
While
the adoption of the Common Core was “voluntary” by the 46 states that
adopted it, it was well understood by these states that they would not
be eligible for Race to the Top funding ($4.35 billion) unless they
adopted the Common Core standards. The Gates Foundation was very much a
part of this. According to Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post (December 2, 2012), “the
Gates Foundation invested tens of millions of dollars in the effort…The
Obama administration kicked the notion into high gear when it required
states to adopt the common core—or an equivalent—in order to compete for
Race to the Top grant funds.”
Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post
recently reported (February 26, 2013) that there is growing resistance.
Alabama, for example, withdrew from the two consortia that are working
on creating standardized tests aligned with the standards. Indiana,
which adopted the Common Core in 2010 under the state education
superintendent Tony Bennett, is now talking about a “pause” in the
implementation of the curriculum. Bennett was defeated in the November
elections by an educator who opposed Bennett’s support for the Common
Core.
Now, there are concerns that the imposition
of the Common Core within the public schools could threaten the autonomy
of private schools, religious schools and home schools. An op-ed published in the Orange County Register by
Robert Holland, claims that the Common Core could “morph into a
national curriculum that will stifle the family-centered creativity that
has fostered high rates of achievement and growth for home
education…Many private and parochial schools—including those of the 100
Roman Catholic dioceses across the nation, already are adopting the CCSS
prescriptions for math and English classes…Their debatable reasoning is
that the rush of most state governments to embrace the national
standards means publishers of textbooks and tests will fall in line,
thereby leaving private schools with no practical alternatives for
instructional materials. According to October 8, 2012 article in Education Week
by Erik Robelin, it is not just Catholic schools that are adopting the
Common Core, some Lutheran and other denominations of Christian schools
are shifting to the common core, including Grand Rapids Christian in
Michigan and the Christian Academy School System in Louisville, KY.
According to Robelin, parochial school leaders claim that they must
“remain competitive” with public schools and now feel pressured to adopt
the Core. These are real concerns. As Diane Ravitch points out, “Now
that David Coleman, the primary architect of the Common Core standards
has become president of the College Board, we can expect that SAT will
be aligned to the standards. No one will escape their reach, whether
they attend public or private school.”
On February 14, 2013,
Missouri legislator Kurt Bahr filed HB616 that prohibits the State
Board of Education from implementing the Common Core for public schools
developed by the Common Core Initiative or any other statewide education
standards without the approval of the General Assembly. An increasing
number of parents are voicing their concerns. For example, Tiffany
Mouritsen, a Utah mother, blogged that the American Institutes for Research (AIR), the primary source for Common Core testing is a major concern for her: “AIR markets its values which includes promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual agenda for teens, and publicizes its client list (including George Soros and Bill and Melinda Gates).” In a column published in January, political commentator Michelle Malkin calls the Common Core a “stealthy federal takeover of school curriculum and standards across the country.” And, she maintains that the Common Core’s “dubious
college and career read standards undermine local control of education,
usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested,
mediocre and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s
schoolchildren."
The Gates Foundation: Buying Control
The
promise of federal funds to states in order to “encourage” them to
adopt the Common Core is nothing new. Our government has been doing
this both nationally and internationally for decades. In a 2008 book
entitled Fatal Misconception, author Matthew Connelly writes
that in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson leveraged food aid for
family planning during crop failures in India, thus creating an
incentive for the sterilization program. India’s Ministry of Health and
Family Planning admitted that, “The large number of sterilizations and IUD insertions during 1967-68 was due to drought conditions.”
Eventually, more sophisticated incentives such as bicycles and radios
were used to encourage women to accept sterilization. Connelly writes
that under Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s sterilization became a
condition not just for land allotments, but for irrigation water,
electricity, ration cards, rickshaw licenses, medical care, pay raises
and promotions. There were sterilization quotas—especially for the
Dalits (the untouchable caste) who were targeted for family planning.
While
the Gates Foundation has not been involved in anything this coercive,
they have indeed been very much involved in giving aid to those
countries willing to participate in family planning initiatives. For
nearly two decades, the Gates Foundation has been generous in providing
aid to more than 100 countries—often coupled with family planning
opportunities. Such aid is often framed as a way to foster economic
growth. In an article in American Thinker, Andressen Blom and
James Bell wrote that Melinda Gates made that connection explicit in a
speech at a population gathering that “government leaders are now
beginning to understand that providing access to contraceptives is a
cost effective way to foster economic growth.”
Bill
Gates revealed his own population goals in February, 2010, at the
invitation-only Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference in Long
Beach, California, when he gave his keynote speech on global warming:
“Innovating to Zero!” In a youtube video available here,
Gates stated that CO2 emissions must be reduced to zero by 2050 and
advised those in attendance that population had much to do with the
increase in CO2. Claiming that each individual on the planet puts out
an average of about five tons of CO2 per year, Gates stated that
“Somehow we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero…It
has been constantly going up. It’s only various economic changes that
have even flattened it at all.” To illustrate, Gates presented the
following equation: CO2 (total population emitted CO2 per year) = P
(people) x S (services per person) x E (average energy per service) x C
(average CO2 emitted per unit of energy). Gates told the audience that
“probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to
zero. That’s a fact from high school algebra.” For Gates, the P
(population) portion of the equation is the most important: “If we
do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health
services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
Gates
maintains that improvements in health care—including an expansion of
the administration of vaccinations—will encourage families to reduce the
number of children they desire to have. And, in an ongoing attempt to
expand the types of birth control, Gates has spent millions of dollars
on research and development. According to Christian Voice, a
few years ago the Gates Foundation awarded a grant of $100,000 to
researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to develop
a new type of ultrasound described as a “non-invasive form of birth
control for men” which would make a man infertile for up to six months.
Such
strategies have been effective. In fact, the Gates Foundation has
been so successful in their family planning initiatives that the United
Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) awarded their annual Population Award in
2010 to the Foundation. According to a June 15, 2010 article in
Mercator.net, at the awards ceremony, UNFPA executive director Thoraya
Obaid cited the Gates Foundation as a “leader in the fields of
global health and global development, particularly in promoting
excellence in population assistance, including through the design of
innovative, integrated solutions in the areas of reproductive health,
family planning, and maternal and neonatal health.” The International Planned Parenthood Federation is a previous winner of the United Nations Population Fund’s Annual Award.
It
is easy to understand why the United Nations Population Fund—a fund
which Steven Mosher, the President of the Population Research Institute
has exposed as being a direct participant in China’s coercive one-child
policy—honored Gates with their prestigious Population Fund award since
the Gates Foundation has donated more than one billion dollars to
“family-planning” groups including the United Nations Population Fund
itself; CARE International—an organization which is lobbying for
legalized abortion in several African nations; Save the Children—a major
promoter of the population control agenda, the World Health Organization—an organization that forcibly sterilized thousands of women in the 1990s
under the pretence of providing tetanus vaccination services in
Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines; and of course, the major abortion
provider, International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Bill
and Melinda Gates truly believe that population control is key to the
future. Plans are already in place to track births and vaccinations
through cell phone technology to register every birth on the planet.
Gates claims that the GPS technology would enable officials to track and
“remind” parents who do not bring their children in for vaccines.
Maintaining that vaccination is key to reducing population growth,
Gates predicts that if child mortality can be reduced, parents will have
fewer children, following the example of the urbanized West where birth
rates have dropped to below replacement levels: “The fact is that within a decade of improving health outcomes, parents decide to have fewer children.” For Gates, “there
is no such thing as a healthy, high population growth country. If
you’re healthy, you’re low-population growth… As the world grows from 6
billion to 9 billion, all of that population growth is in urban
slums…It’s a very interesting problem.”
More than a decade ago, on May 17, 2002, the Wall Street Journal
reported that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had purchased
shares in nine of the largest pharmaceutical companies valued at nearly
$205 million. Acquiring shares in Merck, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson
Wyeth, Abbott Labs, and others, the Gates Foundation continues a
financial interest in common with the makers of AIDS drugs, diagnostic
tools, vaccines, and contraceptives. But, the commitment to global
population control goes well beyond financial interests. It is likely
that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will continue its commitment
to global population control, and now, curriculum creation in the
nation’s schools because they truly believe that they know better than
anyone else how we all should live.
A Product of Poor Catholic Education
It
is difficult to believe the claims of Bill and Melinda Gates that they
are not involved in the abortion industry when you look at the
relationships they have with organizations like the International
Planned Parenthood Federation—the largest abortion provider in the
world. According to the National Catholic Register, Melinda
Gates represents herself in the media as a practicing Catholic who has a
great uncle who was a Jesuit priest and a great aunt who was an
Ursuline nun who taught her to read. She graduated from Ursuline
Academy in Dallas, where she claims to have learned “incredible social
justice.” And, this may indeed be where the problem begins. For so
many Catholics, social justice has been so broadly defined that it now
includes giving women access to reproductive rights—including the right
to abortion—so that they can play an equal role in contributing to the
workplace and the economy. In an article entitled “Why Birth Control is Still a Big Idea” published in Foreign Policy in December, 2012, Melinda Gates writes:
Contraceptives
unlock one of the most dormant but potentially powerful assets in
development: women as decision makers. When women have the power to
make choices about their families, they tend to decide precisely what
demographers, economists, and development experts recommend.
Most recently, in a January 2, 2013 article published on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website entitled “Profiles in Courage: Philippines Passes Reproductive Health Bill,”
the article congratulates all of those who helped bring expanded access
to “reproductive health” through the Responsible Parenthood and
Reproductive Health Act of 2012—recently signed by President Aquino.
This bill states that women and men—living in the most Catholic of
Catholic countries—can now “decide freely and responsibly the number and
spacing of their children.” What the Gates Foundation website omits
is information about the provision within the bill involving “population
management” through mandatory counseling of couples seeking marriage
licenses. In this case, social justice involves a demand that couples
learn about the government’s views on an ideal family size of two
children—coming one step closer to China in its government’s one-child
policy.
This commitment to a distorted definition of
social justice by Melinda and Bill Gates will likely continue because
they have been lead to believe that such control is what is best for
people. The Core Curriculum is really just another component of
population control—it is used to help teach children the “facts” about
climate change and problems of over-population. Indeed, the population
agenda is a trap that many wealthy, highly intelligent people have
fallen into in the past. From the wealthy eugenics supporters of Planned
Parenthood’s Founder Margaret Sanger, to the Rockefeller family and
their population control initiatives, this work continues today through
their heirs—heirs like David Rockefeller—an ally of Bill and Melinda
Gates. And some influential Catholics have been complicit in this. At
one time, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of the University
of Notre Dame served as a trustee, and later, Chairman of the Board of
the Rockefeller Foundation, a funder of population causes counter to the
teachings of the Church.
The population control
initiatives promoted by the Gates Foundation will continue to grow
nationally and internationally because they have convinced others and
themselves that they are saving lives. On their website, they ask: “what is more life affirming than saving one third of mothers from dying in childbirth?” What they do not seem to acknowledge is how many unborn children have died from their initiatives.
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Anne
Hendershott is Professor of Sociology at Franciscan University in
Steubenville. Previously, she taught for fifteen years as a tenured
faculty member at the University of San Diego. She is the author of
Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education and The Politics
of Abortion.
