In this astonishing post, Mercedes Schneider documents how the Gates Foundation paid for every aspect of the Common Core standards.
Gates paid to develop them; to evaluate them; to promote them. There seems to be no part of the Common Core that was not bought and paid for by Gates.
Does it matter if one very rich man decides to create national standards and call them “state-led”?
Schneider raises the essential questions;
“Can Bill Gates buy a foundational democratic institution? Will America allow it? The fate of CCSS will provide a crucial answer to those looming questions.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a member of a teacher’s union it is depressing to see the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association take so much money from Gates. The money undermines the stance of union leadership when working for their constituents.
A union receives teacher dues, it should not be accepting money from those who seek to damage it.
Gates and the Waltons sponsored the NPR spot called Project Impact (state name). These radio spots seem to favor charter schools. They took away my NPR!!!
Charter Schools are the vehicle whereby CC is implemented. Regular schools have union contracts that won’t allow SBAC teacher evaluations. Union brass is too piggish to look up and see the butcher over them.
The more I read this article and the further down I scrolled, the more furious I became.
And it is even more pernicious for our unions to have accepted this blood money.
Yet, despite the AFT and NEA whoring themselves as usual with Bill Gates as one of their biggest johns, the last line of the article about “having power” despite a lack of vast wealth was empowering. It was a reminder to all of us that if we use our voices articulately to expose the truth – something most reformers will never be able to do – then we can continue to push back against the overclass to protect public education and democracy at large.
Ms. Schneider is to be commended and celebrated for her exposé.
Has democracy finally become a failed experiment?
No, not at all.
But we are definitely in a dark and sinister part of the experiment. Left to its own, it can well become a failure, but there is hope and momentum now. . . look around, read.
I am NO optimist, but objectively speaking, the pushback now is much greater than two years ago.
It’s only too late when you’ve thrown in the towel . . .
The corporate forces behind CCSS seem very, very powerful. How can a grass roots pushback push with enough force against all that money and influence? What can possibly stop them? Is there a way to stop the madness? If so RR how do you envision it happening? the scale of this monstrosity is worrisome.
We are indeed up against very very powerful forces, I agree.
But we still vote, we still consume, and we can continue through social media to organize in many ways to not only hound and hold our elected officials accountable, but we can also boycott placeS like WalMart and other ALEC-driven corporations.
In addition, JUST having a forum and dialogue that promotes awareness is a huge chunk of the battle. The BATS gained about 30,000 members in less than two months. I don’t know what they are up to now.
Then there are people like Monica Ratcliff from the LAPS.
Then there’s MORE, a caucus within the UFT that is gaining public awareness like never before. .. taking off like a snowball on a steep snowy hill. They are trying to reinvent the NY CIty teachers’ union.
Then there’s Karen Lewis of the CTU whose election and strike were a direct result of much needed critical union in-fighting that produced a better, more honest, more transparent union that fights for the true interests of its members and those served by its members.
Then there are Shaun Johnson and Tim Slekar of Schools Matter at the Chalkface, whose education radio show is going into syndication.
Then there are the prolific number of education blogs that have popped up and informing all of us through grass roots, citizen journalism and editorialization, a true response to the crappy corporate media that hardly anyone can rely on any more.
Rome was not built in a day.
David beat Golitah.
The wise turtle beat the rash and hubristic rabbit.
To start with, it is our ability to come to consensus and act upon it that will beat this game.
Remember, NY Teacher, we the 98% to 99% still vastly outnumber the 15 to 2% even if our money does not . . . .
We are motivated because we see the truth, we hold the truth.
We ARE the truth.
The reformers’ biggest achilles heel is their disconnect, and it will serve rightfully as the very own cord that they end up hanging themselves with. In the colorful realm of metaphors, I and the parents and students I serve will be delighted to be among the first to kick the chairs, one by one . . . . .
Correction:
I meant “1% to 2% . . . . ”
Curse wordpress for not allowing edits!
Why do we look to only the Gates issue as the final straw and not the $17 trillion in federal debt we now have thanks to decades of continuing to vote for politicians who cannot manage our nation’s checkbook?
$17 trillion = 116,000 Gates “purchases” ($17T divided by $147 million)
Why are we not protesting in the streets about THAT?!
Look what a small investment Bill Gates made in CCSS and he controls American education from top to bottom. Maybe another billionaire could outbid him. Or maybe we could just outsource the kids to Singapore.
This is marginally off topic, but as an addendum to the recent discussion re “Are you smarter than a first grader?” — I noticed that the AFT has been selling that exact curriculum for years.
Click to access CommonCore.pdf
I see the book Seven Blind Mice for sale. It should be subtitled: Arne, Michelle, Wendy, Joel, Bill, Dave, Jeb, et alia.
One big reason for the decline of labor has been the selling out of union leadership to corporate management.
BINGO.
Words elude me. Dang! is all I can say to keep it clean. Bravo Mercedes! And thank you.
Can you say bribery?
You ask if we will allow it, let’s look at we already allow to happen. We allow certain political groups to deny the democratic process, we allow warrantless eavesdropping , we allow voter suppression, poverty, gun violence, lobbyists to decide our governing, the decline of unions and the middle class. We have allowed all these things to happen. So what’s one more thing . Will we allow it? What do you think?
As long as the majority of parents blindly trust others to raise their children while the parents who try to speak out are ostracized and negatively labeled, it will continue. As long as it is acceptable to force down the ones with a calm, logical yet dissenting voice so that those unwilling to face the reality of a country that is vastly changed from a generation ago may continue their lives “as usual”, it will continue. As long as financial gain is allowed to be utilized to manipulate political power and vice versa in the educational arena rather than our children being our most cherished and unspoiled resource, it will most certainly continue.
The question is, what will the outcome be?
Awareness of the Gates purchase is increasing. The “if we allow it” is connected to awareness.
Now we know.
What are we going to do about it?
The “Gates purchase” or the “Obama purchase”? Who gave more to the states that approved CCSS, Gates or the Obama administration? The federal money was much more AND it seems it is what lured the states into signing on to CCSS. Perhaps we can say Gates packaged it up and it was “sold” via Obama.
Who do you think wrote Race to the Top regulations?
Don’t forget that Gates is buying our democracy with a significant financial subsidy from all American taxpayers as Foundations are nonprofits and thus exempt from most taxes.
Exactly. Foundations function as tax havens for the wealthy and they deny our country much needed revenue:
“For every $10 given by the Gates Foundation, $4 is lost from the public wealth in taxes.” p. 43 (as cited in Saltman, 2010).
Someone really needs to investigate how billionaires use their non-profit organizations to drive business to their for-profit enterprises. (How could that be legal? Even if so, it’s highly unethical.)
The amount of money Gates contributes to education is often discounted as being very little compared to his actual wealth. And his lack of personal need for increased wealth is sometimes cited as proof of his altruism. However, foundation contributions made towards shaping education policies across the country are unregulated and it’s all about leveraging for billionaire business people, regardless of personal need. In this case though, as it happens, Microsoft is not fairing well today and Gates remains Chairman of the Board as well as the largest individual share holder.
I think Gates’ actions are very curious and worthy of careful scrutiny. He has a history of investing in companies that supposedly aid his charitable projects, such as regarding his purchase of 500,000 shares of stock in Monsanto, the GMO he promotes in his foundation work with farmers in Africa and other 3rd world regions –and despite its questionable benefit to poor farmers.
It appears that Gates has positioned his investments in the Common Core and InBloom to help his floundering MicroSoft increase its profit margins. I have pondered how this might be accomplished.
For example, at virtually every college I’ve ever taught, students are required to use “Word compatible” software and, since they are also often called on to create PowerPoint presentations and use Excel, this has meant that most students purchase MicroSoft Office. I remember reading somewhere about K-12 students using PowerPoint in CCSS aligned curriculum, though I can’t recall where –sound familiar to anyone? That is likely to result in increased purchases of MS Office.
Then there’s the potential revenue generated from InBloom’s data-mining and the sharing of student data with vendors.
Curiouser and curiouser…
References
Saltman, K. J. (2010). The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0230615155
It’s a fascinating read…like watching as train wreck in slow motion; it’s horrible to see but you can’t look away. What really got to me was the total that Mercedes comes up with for Gates’ purchase of CCSS: $147 million. The individual sums were amazing enough (or perhaps disgusting would be a better term, especially for the money accepted by AFT and NEA), but to see the actual purchase price laid out in a single figure like that…truly horrifying.
This is what we’re up against, the power and wealth of a man who can throw around $147 million just to have his way, regardless of what anyone else thinks or what any knowledgeable person might consider real evidence or proper process. The only way to counter this is by the unstoppable mass of public opinion being turned against it. We’re seeing signs that Gates and his merry band of “reformers” may have finally pushed too hard and too far with CCSS, but it will need every one of us out shouting from the mountaintops about the who and why behind the “reforms” that are harming our public education system. Diane, Mercedes, and many other brave souls have started the chant, but we all need to join in before the wave of cash can drown them out.
The $147 million is only the total Gates payout to date to the four groups involved in CCSS from inception.
None of this insanity will change unless teachers decide collectively to commit
to direct action i.e., riots like the teachers did in Mexico when presented with this ed
reform BS.
I have been suggesting a national sick out day for starters. my proposal does not seem to generating any interest. Friday, April 4, 2014 – in commemoration of the death of Dr. King and his commitment to non-violent civil disobedience.
There is also a national take your children out of school protest day against common core on November 18th, 2013
Stewart is right, it does read like a smart, strategic train wreck chugging slowly, year-by-year, state-by-state, toward a well-defined destination, the choreographed conclusion of a Free Public School system in the USA.
Rip up the rails, we don’t need them anymore as the passengers are now under our control and will crawl on hands and knees whenever & wherever we tell them to.
But oops! Not quite, the infrastructure is still in place and not everyone has been rendered unconscious by the assaults from money, power and systematic de-skilling.
School teacher, Septima Clark, helped start the Citizenship Schools that swept across the south during the Civil Rights Movement and made literacy+voting a reality. It was an idea that came alive at just the right time. It was their moment and this is ours.
Dr. Schneider,
I found this interview with Dr. Roxy Peck (a member of the CCSS mathematics Feedback Group) to be very interesting and informative and wouldn’t expect anything different!
Here is a quote from the interview:
“When the Common Core standards first came out, I worried that publishers of K-12 mathematics textbooks would not really understand the standards and would attempt to integrate them into their texts in a piecemeal and superficial way. So I put together a team of experienced teachers that I knew could write well (Michael Allwood, Floyd Bullard, Kathy Fritz, Brian Kotz and Chris Olsen) and we approached publishers offering to help them integrate the statistics content into their texts in a way that would reflect the standards and would be coordinated over the six years from grade 6 to grade 11. Of course, I thought this was an offer that they would find immensely appealing—how could they pass it up? But, I was surprised (maybe I was the only one) that most of the publishers were quick to claim that their materials were ―Common Core Compliant‖ and that their algebra, geometry and middle school math authors would just add the statistics bits that were needed. Very disappointing”
Interview with Roxy Peck
Journal of Statistics Education Volume 20, Number 2 (2012),
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v20n2/rossmanint.pdf
Thank you, Tim. Peck’s experience mirrors that of James Milgram and Sandra Stotsky, seasoned teachers who were on the CCSS validation Committee and who were both ignored.
Great job, Mercedes! This article by Alan Singer also follows the money:
http://hnn.us/articles/beware-education%E2%80%93industrial-complex
Thanks for the complement and the links, Robert.
I am always impressed, Mercedes, by your industry and insights. Such thoughtful analysis as one finds on your blog is rare.
Too bad you don’t live around the corner. We could get together and talk confounding variables and the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient! : )
The CCSSO lists its “Level I, II, and II” corporate sponsors here:
http://www.ccsso.org/Who_We_Are/Business_and_Industry_Partnerships/Corporate_Partners.html
The NGA receives foundation grants, and it lists its “Corporate Fellows” here:
http://www.nga.org/cms/cflist
I believe that Mr. Gates thinks that he is following in the footsteps of the elder Andrew Carnegie and spending his charitable billions selflessly for the benefit of the country. But this top-down, one-size-fits-all standards and testing regime is going to have disastrous consequences.
KIDS DIFFER. That should be our starting point for thinking about how we should educate them. Assessment should serve mostly diagnostic and formative purposes. Such summative assessments that are created should be extraordinarily varied in content and form and scoring procedure, and they should also be narrowly focused on providing opportunities for students to demonstrate specific competencies instead of broad, vague, impossible-to-define-operationally swaths of achievement like “reading ability” and “writing ability.” The time will come when there will be a national consensus on rooting out of our educational system all those who have this pathological obsession with one-size-fits-all summative testing. But that time will not come until a great deal of damage has been done.
KIDS DIFFER. Our current education policies are being formulated by people who can’t think about education in any manner except unidimensionally. When it comes to their ideas about education, the reformers are a bunch of 2-D Flatlanders in a 3-D world. They see a single path forward and want to put us all on it.
There is precedent for this kind of “reform.” How well I remember when the whole education establishment in the United States was obsessed by behavioral objectives, when the reformers were CERTAIN that implementing Behaviorist practices in classrooms was going to bring about some sort of renaissance in American education. Now, we look back on the folks who talked the Behaviorist babble as a bunch of benighted fools.
Mark my word, the same will be true when in the future we look back on those who are implementing one-size-fits-all standards and testing, as if that were the way to prepare kids who differ for lives in a highly diverse, pluralistic society that needs not identically trained do-bots but people whose extraordinarily diverse potentials were realized by their schooling.
I was most horrified, but not at all surprised by the revelation that American Federation of Teachers received $5,400,000 from Gates. I would very much like to see an accounting by AFT leadership of exactly where every dime of that money went.
Randi Weingarten’s “we support the Core but just need more time to implement it” blather makes sense now. I wonder what her price was?
Asked and answered.
Washington won’t stop him. Our local politicians won’t stop him. They apparently need the money. The only ones who can stop him are parents who will finally wake up when Arne Flunk’em Duncan tells 70% of parents that Bill Gates tests say their kids are ” failures.” Maybe in the face of national pissed off moms the political flunkies will tell Bill to go buy something other than public education policy.
Mercedes, we owe you big time. Thank you.
My pleasure.
It is the supreme irony that when Gates was floundering in high school his mother placed him in a private school which at that time had a computer. Here he learned to excel at programming. He even had opportunities to use the University of Washington’s computers and work for them. That’s partly what led to his success, certainly not Standards like the Common Core. I guess there are rules for Bill Gates and different rules for the rest of us.
Precisely, Julie. Gates had the opportunity to follow his bliss, to build upon his particular interests and proclivities and not to follow a standardized regimen. Who know, perhaps he has convinced himself now that that works only for truly exceptional people like, well, Bill Gates. But I have news for him. That’s what works for EVERYONE, at every level of ability.
Standardization strangles innovation in curricula and pedagogy, and it makes customization of education to suit the differences among students extraordinarily difficult to do.
Students are not machine parts to be identically milled in test prep factories that once were schools.
I wonder if Gates’ “floundering in high school” is related to his apparent resentment of public education and teachers…
If Gates really cared about American children, his efforts would have centered around trying to make public education a lot more like his progressive private school education.
People always take a look at the Koch brothers as examples of dangerous rich people at work, but I argue people like Bill Gates and Peter J. Peterson are vastly more dangerous because they both have the attention and support of a so-called “Democratic” administration.
I always knew Gates was the mastermind behind this nonsense, but now the proof is there for all to see.
This is the opening salvo in the attempt to turn ALL public school systems into online academies and abolishing teaching as a profession–indeed, abolition of needing teachers at all for the masses.
Very informative and well written article! I am sharing it with everyone I can, even reading it aloud to people who are at my house tonight. THANK YOU, Dr. Schneider!
The Teachers Union Sold out to people like Gates and Bloomberg, who exemplify everything that’s wrong with the system
Diane Ravitch is doing a great service by having this blog so teachers can offer their opinions on education related issues.
Although not a teacher I follow this blog to keep up to date on Common Core which I think should be trashed.
But, I probably reject CC for a reason most teacher will not appreciate, the taking over the education of our children by the Federal govt., the largest takeover in our country.
I would guess the teachers who are critical of CC think only how it affects them, not yet another loss of state sovereignty that should be paramount of all Americans.
I would guess the critics of Gates…voted for President Obama…who fully supports CC and what the Gates Foundation is doing.
I find it odd the one profession, our educators, are not smart enough to see what is occurring in our country. While teachers argue to retain tenure ( the trees) they do not see the total control (the forest) the Federal govt seeks,
You are right to fighting to reject Common Core….but understand this national standard is one more nail in the coffin….and the death of state sovereignty
It is worse and more insidious than an attack on state sovereignty. It is a bypassing of government by legislature or bureaucracy.
It is government by cloaked lobby.
In Common Core in the present (Bill) Gatesean era private interests entirely evade public institutional channels altogether and function parallel to the manner in which policy has traditionally developed. The veneer of public collaboration is tagged on as a selling point to affix a gloss of representation.
Politicians voting for bad policy can be voted out. Bureaucracies creating bad policy can create backlash against the executive (president or governor). Yet, in the present situation, a private individual, Bill Gates, has bought a government policy.
This is all spelt out here: http://nyceye.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-common-core-and-gates-education.html
This is a very sinister and ugly chapter in our democracy.
It is very disappointing that the Ed Secretary, the state commissioners, the media, the local supervisors keep mouthing the same lie that this came from the states or that teachers wrote this.
This was created in a closed process where all participants had to sign confidentiality agreements.
By contrast, NCLB and the Affordable Care Act, for whatever their faults, were created in a public process, with opportunities for public deliberation. Discussions were in the public record. Unlike other major domestic social policy, hitherto, in the modern era, I can think of no other example of private organizations hatching entirely outside of government procedures.
This alone should strike the indignation of anyone pledging allegiance to a flag that stands for a republic.
If you really want to follow the money trail, where do you think Gates and his foundation got most of their money in the first place?
Raise your hand if you have ever bought a Windows PC, Microsoft software, an XBOX or have used websites or databases running on Microsoft web servers (maybe even this blog’s Internet servers). Now that everyone reading this article has raised their hands, you can see who is paying for the development and marketing of Common Core.
Yet, if you really want to go deeper, much of the money that lured states into CCSS is not coming from Gates. It is coming from the Obama administration and federal taxpayer money. It will likely be coming in the form of state taxpayer money in the subsequent years to pay for all the “re-education” of teachers, new books, etc. It seems we can thank the Obama administration and your state governments (in ~45 states) for this. Just look into the seemingly back-room political deals during summer recess in 2010. Look into the details of how CCSS got “approved” in each state… it really seems to boil down to the federal money, especially during state budget crunches in 2010. All while the public did not really see any of this coming and had little say. Now they do.
Who is paying for all this? WE are paying for Common Core. Perhaps our kids and future generations will be paying for Common Core (along with trillions in federal, state and local debt). Potentially BILLIONS being spent for this program really came from all of us. Gates and his foundation and our federal government are merely the stewards of this money.
In the end, it is sad that our kids may suffer as a result. Still, we must educate parents, teachers and schools about Common Core and continue to turn the tide against it and for a better, local and state, parent and teacher control.