While cleaning out my files, I came across this amazing article written in 2009 by the editorial page editor of the Washington Post. The historian in me finds it difficult to throw anything away, so the best way to save it is to share it.
It is a succinct and worshipful description of the ideas that we now recognize as corporate reform.
What would Bill Gates do to fix the schools? Expand charter chains like KIPP and improve teacher effectiveness.
The article goes on to say:
“In both cases, institutions stand in the way. School boards resist the expansion of charter schools. Teachers unions resist measuring and rewarding effectiveness. In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master’s degree or teacher’s certification, and even, below 10th grade, having deep knowledge of a subject — these all are mostly irrelevant. It follows that some of the money devoted to rewarding teachers who get higher degrees and to pensions accessible only to those who stay 10 or more years should go instead to keeping the best teachers from leaving in their fourth or fifth years.”
“One purpose of measurement would be to deploy the best teachers to the neediest schools, and pay them accordingly; another, to fire the worst teachers. But the main point, Gates said, is that effective teaching can be taught: “The biggest part is taking the people who want to be good — and helping them.”
“President Obama and his education secretary, former Chicago school superintendent Arne Duncan, are on the same wavelength. During an electronic town hall forum at the White House on Thursday, Obama cited as his priorities pre-K education, charter schools and teacher effectiveness.”
This article bears re-reading. It predicts every policy disaster of the last three years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
Well put! Do you mind if I use that?
Sure … not original with me … I think I saw it on Facebook or some other blog …
Is this intended to be a variation of, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” by George Santayana?
Undoubtedly intended as a riff on that …
Who said this quote?
” In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay.”
Really, Bill? And your enormous salary at Microsoft was tied to product “quality”? How then to explain your soaring fortune in spite of Vista, Zune, and all the other crappy, half-baked products you foisted on consumers? And where were your protests when all those ineffective banksters that crashed the economy got ginormous bonuses?
The guy is pathetic.
More than pathetic…EVIL and SELF-SERVING is more like it.
Funny, you can see Bill’s one-size-fits-all presumption that’s readily apparent in the Common Core in Windows 8, which particularly sucks if you don’t have a touch screen like MANY of us with laptops and PCs.
But then there’s a double standard when it comes to how he has gone after teachers. who have a median annual income of $45K in this country and are primarily women, while the super-rich banksters who crashed the economy are men and are permitted to just skate along……
There are options:
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop
Actually, MS Word really works well, as does Excel. He earned his money legitimately on those. It’s called “business.”
If only he would mind his own beeswax, and keep his nose out of business he knows not of.
I certainly can’t disagree with you there.
True Harlan, but did he “create” these programs?
No.
He copied them. The first spreadsheet came out in the late 70s called VisiCalc. Word Processing software came out in the early 70s.
Gates was initially in the computer language business. He bought an operating system for 50k, changed the name, and licensed it to IBM. He gambled on the clone market and won, making him a billionaire.
Gates stole his idea for Windows from Steve Jobs, who stole it from Xerox. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Gates’ idea that education can be improved simply by improving an evaluation instrument is as flawed as his Millenium Edition operating system.
There is a petition that expires on May 18 on Obama’s petition website “We The People” that is calling for the repeal of Common Core and Race To The Top. To date it has almost 1800 signatures out of the required 100,000. Please access We The People and sign the petition before the 18th.
Link, please?
www: petitions.whitehouse.gov
I wouldn’t call their deform ideology philosophy!
At the beginning of Obama’s term, I was extremely disappointed with the appointment of Duncan over Darling-Hammond. However, I gave the President the benefit of the doubt and chalked it up as a political calculation. I assumed with the huge battles lying ahead, most notably health care and immigration, Obama opted to go with a Secretary of Ed that conservatives could support and to avoid what would have surely been a polarizing debate on education. He new that there would be less opposition to Duncan from the left and the pseudo-left (i.e. DFER) than there would have been from the right in opposition to Linda Darling-Hammond. In hindsight, it’s easy to see that putting her on the Transition Team was designed to reassure us that the misguided policies of NCLB would soon be a thing of the past. It was a masterful bait-and-switch.
You are so right.
Wow, what a great historical find, that column. Yes, it’s all there, what they said they’d do to privatize pub schls and push merit pay and testing, they have done and are doing. The authorities in govt and business profiting from this rampage through the schools are constantly in session, meeting and conferencing all the time, planning what to do next, raising the funds and assembling the tools to make things happen. They are able to move so fast and furiously in disrupting schools, kids, and communities, because they are well-organized and well-funded. Their opposition is not. The only organized form teachers have to defend them are two unions deep in the pockets of the corporate forces, leaving teachers nakedly vulnerable to whatever Gates, Rhee, Bloomberg, Koch, Walton, Kopp, and Broad conspire to throw at them. This is why Diane’s blog and NPE are such important starting points to build organized opposition to the corporate rampage. NPE has begun endorsing schl bd candidates, good next step. We need to gather as do the billionaires did arriving on their corp jets in Carolina for an island confab on what to do next to American and its schools. They are always in session, planning, executing, financing, coordinating, promoting. Our turn can’t come soon enough.
irashor: I hope your comments are read by every single person visiting this blog.
Just to pick up on one point. Very occasionally someone [and I understand the frustration] will post a comment online to the effect that there’s too much time and effort being spent on ed blogs trying to convince the education establishment [e.g., in dialogues with the Gates Foundation or with TFAers by two bloggers I well respect, Anthony Cody and Gary Rubinstein].
IMHO, they are missing the point. The charterites/privatizers have made and can make their views crystal clear in a great number of forums. They have giant megaphones, numerous opportunities to talk with each other, encourage each other, fund and promote and protect each other.
They dominate the public sphere where most people get their information, using all the “win at any costs” strategies. For example, the one mentioned by Mark Twain: “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable” [remember Michelle Rhee, taking her students from the 13th to the 90th percentile? remember Bill Gates, 98% of teacher evals consist of just one word, “Satisfactory”?]
This blog—and others, like those of Anthony Cody and Gary Rubinstein—are not “dancing with the [self-proclaimed] stars” of the educational status quo and its defenders. They give the rest of us, the vast majority, a chance to talk to each other, inform each other, encourage each other, and to organize and promote activities that will help win the battle to secure a “better education for all.”
That’s why Diane has to face the occasional [but thankfully pathetic] kerfuffles that have arisen. Simply breaking the stranglehold they have on education discourse is enough to turn the edubullies and their accountabully underlings apoplectic.
Now that the tide is beginning to turn a bit, expect more of the same. Let’s just take a good example from the owner of this blog, well articulated by someone who had a way with words:
“Always do right. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” [Mark Twain]
Let’s keeping gratifying and astonishing, together. It’s making a difference.
🙂
Also, the premise they offer for fixing schools is based on drop-outs (or not graduating). What are the reasons students drop out? Is it really because of bad schools? Or is it because they have to work? I would love to know more about why students drop out and focus on that.
Having thought about it for a long time now, I think this best name for this tendency is —
Repressive Education
Yes, REPRESSION and FASCISM are well and alive in this country’s public schools.
Why don’t they experiment on their own children? Then get back to us with the data.
Oh and let some 3rd party sell it.
This reform movement is only about other people’s children!
I know Robert. That is what makes this so sick!! I can’t think of a better word at the moment. I’ve been trying to explain the situation to people in Europe. I gave up and sent them links to many blogs. Including your wonderful cartoon blog:)
Funny how the article was immediately followed by an ad titled, ” 3 Early Warning Signs of Dementia”. Was it placed there strategically? 🙂
Rheepressive Ed is all about turning Mentors into Dementors.
“In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master’s degree or teacher’s certification, and even, below 10th grade, having deep knowledge of a subject — these all are mostly irrelevant. It follows that some of the money devoted to rewarding teachers who get higher degrees and to pensions accessible only to those who stay 10 or more years should go instead to keeping the best teachers from leaving in their fourth or fifth years.”
Really knowing what you’re doing and what you’re talking about isn’t as valuable to us as doing what you’re told and being able to get kids to do what they’re told.
We can define “best teachers” as the ones the produce the most productive widgets in the machine we have designed for our own benefit.
If teachers and the widgets they stamp out serve the machine well, they may be kept until such time as they can be replaced more cheaply. Otherwise, they may not be kept at all-teachers removed and students sent to “choices”.
Too much time at the job and too much experience carries the risk of having you and what you think carry more weight attract more respect and job security than we want you to have.
When you have the head of the Teachers’ Union stabbing teachers in the back and helping Obama set teachers and children up for failure, then it’s time for the teachers to throw out the leadership and start taking control back from those who’ve sold them out:
http://neatoday.org/2013/05/10/six-ways-the-common-core-is-good-for-students/?utm_source=nea_today_express&utm_medium=email&utm_content=core&utm_campaign=130515neatodayexpress