After spending $400 million on forcing schools around the country to adopt Common Core, Bill Gates has finally admitted that the controversial teaching method is a failure, and significantly less effective than traditional teaching methods.

Parents and teachers across the nation have been urging schools to dump the toxic Common Core curriculum, arguing that it deliberately dumbs down children and creates unnecessary and complicated methods for working out relatively simple problems.

The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced a staggering $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards making Common Core the mandatory curriculum across the country. Eight years later, however, and after a huge wave of disapproval, Bill Gates is finally admitting that his and Barack Obama’s baby, Common Core, is a failure.

“Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy,” Gates wrote on his blog as a preface to a speech he gave in Cleveland. He followed this by admitting that U.S. education has essentially made no improvement in the years since he and his foundation — working closely with the Obama administration — began redirecting trillions of public dollars towards programs he now admits failed our children.

The bad news is that Gates is now talking about a new idea for school curricula, a Common Core 2.0, if you will. After the devastating failure of Common Core, should Bill Gates be given the opportunity to have any say in the way our children are educated in the future?

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates said in concluding his speech, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.” If this statement encompasses his Common Core debacle, Gates could have the humility to recall that Common Core had no pilot before he took it national.

But it looks like this is as close to an apology as we’re going to get, folks. Sorry about that $4 trillion of tax payers’ money wasted and sorry about those ruined years of education for American K-12 kids and teachers.

Why is Bill Gates setting our students up to fail?

One of Common Core’s defining characteristics is the way it “dumbs down” many concepts and has students take too many steps to reach conclusions that are obvious to those of us who were schooled the traditional way. Teachers have been pulling their hair out across the country trying to implement the failing system, when they know the traditional teaching methods are far superior.

[RELATED – Florida School Ditches Common Core – Soars To Number One]

But Bill Gates is not suggesting we go back to traditional methods that have been tried and tested over hundreds of years. Gates is now pushing for the implementation of Next Generation Science Standards, a “cousin of Common Core”, (which academic reviewers rate as even lower quality than Common Core).

Experiments in New York and Louisiana, the latter of which Gates cites, have not produced proven improvements for student achievement. Gates is planning to experiment with our children’s education all over again, without any evidence that his bright new idea will reap any benefits.

The most likely outcome is the historically most frequent outcome from big-bucks philanthropy in public education: another disaster, just like Common Core. And another generation of children who don’t receive a quality education.

It’s going to take a lot more than acknowledging Common Core’s failure to make up for the years of classroom chaos that the Gates/Obama curriculum inflicted on many teachers and students without their consent. A direct apology and a promise to stay away from our kids and their education in the future would be a start.