Earlier today I posted Anthony Cody’s searing critique of the Gates Foundation’s support for profiteering and privatization. (“When Profits Drive Reform”)
Cody pulled no punches. He went right into the house of the Emperor to tell him that he has no clothes.
His post is now posted on the Gates Foundation’s own blog. They call it “Impatient Optimists.”
Please leave your comments on the Gates’ blog so that the foundation staff is sure to read them.
They need to hear what teachers and principals and school board members think of their efforts to transfer control of public education to private hands and to measure teachers by test scores. They need to hear what you think of handing children over to profit-seeking entrepreneurs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Could we go to his web site and ask for a public debate between Bill Gates and Diane Ravitch?
Yes, you could try. I have asked and gotten no answer. But maybe he will listen to others!
Indiana Superintendent Tony Bennett now wants the legislature to give him the power to take over entire school districts.
http://stateimpact.npr.org/indiana/2012/09/03/bennett-says-legislature-should-look-at-district-takeover-provision-next-session/#more-11697
I wrote a post about that yesterday. Called something like “The Ugly Face of a Tea Party Educator.” But then lots of Tea Party members wrote to disown Tony Bennett. So it is just an old-fashioned power grab.
Parents, community members, and taxpayers ought to comment on the Gates blog. Bring parent resistance and opposition out of the shadows.
Impatient Opportunists
Quick & Dirty all the Way to the Bank
Two things drive Bill Gates: greed and the desire for control.
It’s often forgotten that before the PR coup occasioned by the start of his Foundation, Gates was widely criticized for his avarice and will to dominate.
A 1995 New York Times review of a book that followed a group of Microsoft product designers and developers in the early ’90’s reports the following anecdote:
“During one meeting, Mr. Gates wonders aloud why conventional book publishers have not moved more forcefully into multi-media products that allow publishers to store video clips, graphics, sound and text on a single, silvery disk. Someone mentions that print publishers are skittish about the risks and cost of development in this unproven business.
Gates, suddenly reassured, interrupted, ‘So they have finite greed.’ Finite greed, it seems, is a term of derision in the Gates vernacular.”
As for his drive for control, look no further than where his true genius lies: not in the development of technology, but in its monopolization, and in the use of intellectual property laws embedded in neoliberal trade agreements to own the tollbooths of technology usage.
The Gates Foundation’s work with and investment in Monsanto, which aggressively uses intellectual property law to privatize the agricultural gene pool, is another example of his foundation being an extension of his own interests and imperatives.
Greed and an obsessive will to control may be valid motivators and tactics in the world of business (although the ongoing economic crisis caused by neoliberal economics calls even that into question), but they should not be the governing principles in our schools or over our students.
http//:www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/03/specials/moody=body.html?_r=1