"To advance its agenda, the Gates foundation increased its spending on advocacy. From 2005 to 2009, the foundation quadrupled its annual spending on advocacy to $78 million. Accord to Sam Dillon in the New York Times, the foundation will pump an addition $100 million into advocacy over the next five to six years. That kind of money buys a lot of advocacy and support. Gates funded the groups that wrote the Common Core standards, the groups that evaluated them, and the groups that advocated for them. Gates funded liberal groups such as Education Trust, centrist groups such as the Center for American Progress and the Center on Education Policy, and groups on the Right such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Jeb Bush's Foundation of Educational Excellence, and the Media Bullpen. It funded groups that advocated for charter schools, such as the Education Equality project, and groups that argued against seniority and tenure, such as TeachFirst, TeachPlus, and the New Teacher Project. Kenneth Libby, then a graduate student known for poring through tax filings of foundations and advocacy groups, commented, 'It's easier to name which groups Gates doesn't support than to list all of those they do, because it's just so overwhelming.' [...]
Writing in Dissent, Joanne Barkan described the challenge that the aggressive venture philanthropists pose for American society:
'Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they're making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they'll say, 'Oops, that didn't work' and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of 'teaching to the test,' demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?'"
If you want to read about what happened the last time billionaires got involved with the school system, John Taylor Gatto does a pretty decent job documenting it in his Underground History book.