The Gates Foundation, on its blog-site called “Impatient Optimists,” responds to Anthony Cody’s searing critique of the foundation’s support for market-based reforms.
Please read Anthony’s post, then the Gates’ response.
Also read Anthony’s post about poverty, and Gates’ response.
I think it is shameful that the foundation’s representative begin by questioning whether Anthony believes that poor children can learn. This is the standard reformer tactic to anyone who raises the issue of poverty as an impediment to learning. They would have us believe that being hungry and homeless is just an excuse for bad teachers; that it doesn’t matter if children can’t see the front of the room, can’t hear the teacher, because they have never been screened for vision and hearing. No excuses!
To say this to Anthony Cody, who taught for nearly 20 years in the public schools of Oakland, California, is especially shameful. Do foundation executives who sit in plush headquarters in Seattle have the authority to impugn his bona fides?
Read the exchange. And ask yourself why the Gates Foundation has the moral authority to define the nation’s education agenda. Its two hobby horses right now are teacher evaluation and charter schools. It has spent hundreds of millions to find the magic formula that would identify those “bad” teachers and put a “great” teacher in every classroom. Now school districts across the nation are dancing to Gates’ tune, and no one knows whether the arcane mathematical formula designed by economists and statisticians really do produce “great” teachers, or even identify them. One sure result of this endeavor is that many millions will be–have been–diverted from instruction to testing and building data systems to tie test scores to teachers.
As for charters, study after study shows that they typically get the same results as public schools. Study after study shows that many charters exclude ELLs and special education students. There are some with high test scores, some with low test scores, but on average they don’t get better scores than public schools. The reason that Gates insists that they ARE public schools is because they are not. They are privately managed schools receiving public funds. Getting public dollars does not make them public schools. They are part of a larger movement of privatization, to remove an essential public institution to private control. No wonder the Wall Street crowd loves them so, regardless of results. No wonder the for-profit sector is growing.
Thanks to Anthony Cody for persuading the Gates Foundation to go public. They had nothing to say on the subject of poverty and in this post, they demonstrate that they continue to neglect its effects on students’ ability to succeed in school.
Irving Scott’s response is an amalgam of bromides, slander, and bastardization of MLK and Dewey’s ideas.
“How many effective schools would you have to see to be persuaded of the educability of poor children? If your answer is more than one, then I submit that you have reasons of your own for preferring to believe that basic pupil performance derives from family background instead of school response to family background.” Edmonds
This seems to be a fair summary of the Gates response. Note that I am NOT applying this to you, Diane. I’m saying instead that it’s representative of a certain kind of mindset. This is a pretty famous quote, and I’m curious about how you’d respond to it.
I believe in the educability of all children.
I also believe that poverty creates obstacles to learning and that society has an ethical obligation to remove those obstacles.
Diane Ravitch
It strikes me that “reformers” like Gates, etc. are blind to the kind of basic logic that your average working-class person takes for granted. These “reformers” seem to recognize that a muddied kid needs to be cleaned up, and so they get to work spraying the kid with a bunch of untested cleaning agents with really enticing names as dreamed up by their own marketing teams. And when those don’t work, they ask for more stringent versions of those same cleaning agents. And so on and so on. (Surely, they think, the best cleaning agents are the ones that make them or their buddies lots of money.)
What they miss in their rush to solve the problem is that in order to get the kid clean, you first have to pull him/her out of the mud. Otherwise, you’re just making things even muddier.
Perhaps they just don’t have the practical experience to understand this sort of thing given that they probably pay other people to clean their kids for them.
Or maybe they just don’t care about other people’s kids.
“Or maybe they just don’t care about other people’s kids.”
This.
I have seen all this before, way back in the early days of televised university lectures.
Why have all those 2nd-rate instructors and TAs teaching small batches of students, when all you had to do was pay The Big Bucks to an Elite Corps of Master Race To The Top professors, economically distributing the virtuosity-in-a-can of their eminent virtual presences to mass audiences of students through the magical medium of closed-circuit television?
Some of you will remember how much that stunk …
I do. And I hated it.
Here’s an interesting study from the National Institutes of Health on the effects of stress levels and poverty, and the resulting affects on learning.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/health/stresses-poverty-may-impair-learning-ability-young-children
A Gates funded research project proves that uber teachers can “cure” poverty. Satire from Students Last http://goo.gl/DDkJh
My kids attend a well regarded charter school that has received funding from the Gates Foundation and accolades from Bill Gates. The school is using a history curriculum called Big History that is being developed with funding by Bill Gates (not through the Foundation) and provided to the school for free.
To me, this seems like the next slippery slope in education reform. Will big donors require certain material to be taught in schools as a condition for their donation? I am not an educator so I don’t know if the Big History course is an adequate replacement for World History but I would not be surprised if other wealthy ‘reformers’ give curriculum development a try.
Gates could skip the middle-man and open his own charters with his own curriculum.
Little wonder that Bill Gates has referred to Diane Ravitch as “Public Enemy
#1” of effective education – see e.g.:
Hake, R.R. 2012 “Gates Foundation Dispenses 400 Million/Year to Education,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/Mmc1aB. Post of 18 Jun 2012 10:33:07-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are also being transmitted to several discussion lists and are also on my blog “Hake’sEdStuff” at http://bit.ly/NKPfwR with a provision for comments.