Governor Andrew Cuomo’s announcement Tuesday that he’s working with billionaire Bill Gates’s foundation to “reimagine education” after in-person schooling has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic worried some education experts, who said they were unhappily reminded of Gates’s prior involvement in public education.

Cuomo said in a statement Tuesday that the state will collaborate with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “to develop a blueprint to reimagine education in the new normal.”

“One of the areas we can really learn from is education because the old model of our education system where everyone sits in a classroom is not going to work in the new normal,” Cuomo’s statement said.

The details of the collaboration were vague but Cuomo said the foundation will “bring together national and international experts, as well as provide expert advice as needed.”

At his briefing Tuesday, Cuomo showed a slide that listed several tech-centric bullet points, including “How can technology reduce educational inequality, including English as a new language students?” and “How can we use technology to meet educational needs of students with disabilities?”

“Bill Gates is a visionary in many ways and his ideas and thoughts on technology and education, he’s spoken about it for years,” Cuomo said at the briefing. “I think we now have a moment in history where we can actually incorporate and advance those ideas.”

Cuomo added, “We all learned a lot about how vulnerable we are and how much we have to do. Let’s start talking about really revolutionizing education and it’s about time.”

The Gates Foundation has already donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various coronavirus-related causes and initiatives, and Bill Gates has pledged that the foundation, and its $40 billion endowment, is completely focussed on the pandemic.

But Bill Gates’s return to public education has sounded some alarms among critics who pointed to his support of standardizing testing, including spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the much-loathed Common Core curriculum, as evidence that his approach is problematic.

“Both the Gates Foundation and Andrew Cuomo have a history of pushing privatization and agendas that have the potential to destroy public schools. This collaboration raises a red flag and real questions about what shape our “reimagined” public schools will take post-pandemic, and whether they will be recognizable as public schools at all,” said Jasmine Gripper, Executive Director, Alliance for Quality Education.

A letter signed by a coalition of the New York State Allies for Public Education, Class Size Matters and Parent Coalition for Student Privacy groups was also highly critical of the collaboration. “Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have promoted one failed educational initiative after another, causing huge disaffection in districts throughout the state,” the letter reads. “Whether that be the high-handed push by the Gates Foundation for the invalid Common Core standards, unreliable teacher evaluation linked to test scores, or privacy-violating data-collection via the corporation known as in Bloom Inc., the education of our children has been repeatedly put at risk by their non-evidence based ‘solutions,’ which were implemented without parent input and despite significant public opposition.”

“Since the schools were shut down in mid-March, our understanding of the profound deficiencies of screen-based instruction has only grown. The use of education tech may have its place, but only as an ancillary to in-person learning, not as its replacement,” the coalition’s letter continued. “Along with many other parents and educators, we strongly oppose the Gates Foundation to influence the direction of education in the state by expanding the use of ed tech.”

Teacher advocates also said remote learning should not eliminate robust school staffing, even outside of a physical classroom.

“If we want to reimagine education, let’s start with addressing the need for social workers, mental health counselors, school nurses, enriching arts courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts across the state. Let’s secure the federal funding and new state revenues through taxes on the ultrawealthy that can go toward addressing these needs. And let’s recognize educators as the experts they are by including them in these discussions about improving our public education system for every student,” said New York State United Teachers President Andy Pallotta in a statement.

Asked about the new collaboration, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spokesperson said it is “committed to work with New York State on its efforts to ensure equitable access to education for its students in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will provide further details as they become available.”

With Jessica Gould / WNYC