Just a quick note to say that I have updated my list of all education-related grants by the Gates Foundation – issued through June 2018, that is. By my calculations, the foundation has made some $62 million in grants so far in 2018, which strikes me as quite low compared to previous years.

My calculations could be wrong because it’s become quite a bit more difficult to pull this data from the Gates Foundation website. Its search filters no longer seem to work; and even when they do, it appears that many of the education-related topics now fall into other categories. “Transparency.”

(My favorite grant from June 2018: to the University of Chicago for $52,000 for “TBD.”)

The Gates Foundation has announced that it’s changing how it handles its education investments. And it’s partnering with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for some of this work, a company that is even less transparent – it’s not a foundation, so it needn’t be. I’ll still try to maintain this project because I think it’s important to be able to look and see how influential these billionaire-philanthropists are in shaping education policy and education narratives.