I proceeded to your linked article, and while I see that the author's opinion is "Gates' Foundation did far more harm than good in education," I don't actually see the examples put forward supporting their (/your) position on that.
The only examples are "The Gates Foundation tried something, found it didn't work, and so stopped doing that thing [smaller schools.]" They're then criticized for attempting teacher metrics, and a couple paragraphs later, "they've since backed off on this, but the damage of their influence has already been suffered!" Which, to me, reads again as "they thought teacher metrics would work. They found it didn't, so they stopped doing that."
Actually, a lot of that article basically reads as "no one should ever make calculated experiments to discover what the most effective interventions are. How dare the Gates Foundation not be all-knowing! And if they're not going to be all-knowing, they have no right to admit to a mistake and back off on a failed intervention!"
I- what?? What?!
Presumably, then, the author (or the people the author is echoing) can put forward a better alternative, rather than just criticize the organization for recognizing failure and re-allocating resources. "Assuming that poverty is not going to be solved overnight, what other, more immediate steps might be taken to address these problems? How might Gates spend its money more wisely? McGoey offers little guidance on this. She seems to have visited few schools and talked to few teachers or parents. Nor does she give much space to the perspective of the Gates Foundation itself."
She then slams the Gates Foundation for doing "considerable good" in public health. What's their flaw, then? The author's unsubstantiated assertion that they ignored opportunity cost. Not even that. She sort of /implies/ that other health interventions would have had greater public health ROI (by pointing out that chronic disease is very expensive, she leads us to conclude "why, then we could save a lot of money by intervening there", ignoring whether that larger cost correlates to more lives saved per dollar spent), and that the Gates Foundation ignores them, but doesn't actually provide any stats on that being the case. Which makes sense, of course, because there aren't any good stats to support that argument: the Gates Foundation particularly staked out their interests in extremely high ROI illnesses. It's shit-tons cheaper to save a man-year from malaria than to save one from type 2 diabetes.
This is not a great article. The author, Michael Massing, appears to have written it with far more bias than critical attention, and you should reconsider letting it inform your opinions.