Thanks to Leonie Haimson for this item.
By and large, foundations do not make grants to for-profit enterprises. If you are seeking funds to start a for-profit business, please consult the resources below for more information. You might also consult the business section of your local public library, or economic development agencies in your city, county, or state.
Social enterprises
If your for-profit business has a strong social mission, it might be considered a social enterprise. Social enterprise, also known as social entrepreneurship, broadly encompasses ventures of nonprofits, civic-minded individuals, and for-profit businesses that can yield both financial and social returns.
A small but growing number of foundations may provide program-related investments (PRIs) to social enterprises as well as nonprofits. PRIs are low-interest loans that a foundation can give to organizations or projects that match the funder’s giving interests.
Liquid Interactive
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2014/05/OPP1109052
Date: May 2014
Purpose: to fund development of a web-based tool to help improve students’ writing skills
Amount: $200,000
Term: 12
Topic: College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Brisbane
Grantee Website: http://www.liquidinteractive.com.au/
Liquid Interactive creates engagement between businesses and customers using digital technologies. Combining strategy, creative and technology, we connect brands and products with audiences in a multiplatform communications environment to deliver business outcomes.
Marketing and education go hand in hand at Liquid Interactive and this unique value proposition assists us in developing strategies and solutions for behavioural change, consumer engagement, product education and information retention and recall.
,….
Writelike is a platform designed to teach users how to write more effectively—in any style, for any purpose. It is based on a large library of text snippets taken from all manner of sources—novels, children’s stories, newspapers, magazines, instruction manuals. Learners are presented with snippets and asked to rewrite them in different styles, and in so doing they learn differences of form and craft.
Writelike is one of Liquid Interactive’s internal, experimental projects that we are hoping to develop in the near future into something usable in Australian schools.
LightSIDE Labs LLC
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2014/03/OPP1109032
Date: March 2014
Purpose: to develop a system that automatically assesses and gives feedback on student writing, and supports the revision process for students
Amount: $200,000
Term: 13
Topic: College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Grantee Website: http://www.lightsidelabs.com
Automated Support for Student Writing
Educational technology is failing to provide tools for writing in the classroom in a way that benefits actual teachers. The current practices of automated essay scoring are focused heavily on summative, standardized testing. When they do give formative feedback, it emphasizes mechanics and grammar over content and literary awareness of elements like genre, audience awareness, and argumentation. That’s not enough – especially with the upcoming shift to Common Core and the increased workload it represents. LightSide is developing tools that really work in schools, based on conversations with teachers and direct classroom experience. Our mission is to improve writing skills. We’re doing that with our flagship writing platform, the Revision Assistant, and with our automated scoring product, LightBox, which provides truly customizable and open access to the education industry.
April 2012: LightSide’s automated essay scoring engine was proven reliable in a study commisioned by Smarter Balanced and PARCC in a bake-off competition hosted on Kaggle.com. Read more about the competition.
http://gettingsmart.com/2013/10/lightside-essay-scoring-engine-goes-school/
Automated scoring of student essays is fast, accurate, and affordable. That was the conclusion drawn from two prize competitions sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. ASAP began in February of 2012 with a demonstration of capabilities of the eight largest testing vendors. The “bake off” was hosted on the Kaggle platform and, as Mark Shermis and Ben Hamner reported, demonstrated that current scoring engines could match expert graders across eight sets of essays. A case study, “Automated Student Assessment Prize Phase One and Phase Two: A Case Study to Promote Focused Innovation in Student Writing Assessment,” was published in January.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the ASAP competitions was the stunning performance of LightSide, an open scoring engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Grad student Elijah Mayfield and the open source code held their own against testing companies and data scientists from around the world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So we lose the human touch and common-sense in this whole overhaul of education? So sad. It just boggles the mind. So much for humans taming and controlling technology. Looks like we’ve lost.
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It seems clear that the Bill Gates agenda is to make everyone but billionaires irrelevant and slated for extinction. In the end, billions of people will vanish mostly from poverty and the middle class and only a few hundred billionaires will survive with their computers and robots to serve them.
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This “so-called” HIGH TECH ain’t so high tech. There are LIMITS to what High Tech can do. Anyone awake?
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Yvonne,
But they are working on computers that will match the ability of the human brain.
Experts have predicted that this day will arrive probably by 2030, and then humans will start to become irrelevant. In addition, the field of robotics is coming closer to a robot that mimics the ability for the human body right down to fingers and toes.
Already tens of millions of jobs have been lost to automation. For instance, back in the 1990s, I attended a workshop for teachers where it was mentioned that a GM bumper factory in the 1950s that employed 500 workers was still turning out the same number of bumpers but with only two mortal employees servicing the robots.
Merge the two, and there will be no need for mortals. Then the earth can become to playground of the super wealthy after the rest of us have been eliminated.
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The singularity is near.
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Soylent Green is People!
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“Soylent Green”. You’re talking about the film starring Charlton Heston, who in the 1980s, gave strong support to his friend Ronald Reagan during his conservative presidency.
In 1995, Heston established his own political action fund-raising committee, and jumped into the internal politics of the National Rifle Association. He gave numerous culture wars speeches and interviews upholding the conservative position, blaming media and academia for imposing affirmative action, which he saw as unfair reverse discrimination.
How fitting that “Soylent Green” is used to compare the manufactured, corporate war against democratic public education, but Heston is now dead and it seems Bill Gates has taken his place and then some.
There’s even a Charlton Heston Academy that is a member of the National Charter Schools Institute. The National Charter Schools Institute’s mission is to transform public education and power performance, productivity and accountability breakthroughs that help people win for kids. We see the charter schools movement as a way to expand choice and competition and drive the transformation of public education into a more market-based system of schools. We believe this emerging educational marketplace needs transparent and trustworthy academic, fiscal and operational performance measures that parents can use to make informed decisions, and the public can use to ensure accountability.
Having served as co-founder and Chief Academic Officer at Charlton Heston Academy, Jason has walked the walk and lived the school start-up experience, firsthand. Before founding Charlton Heston Academy, Jason dedicated seven years to authorizer leadership roles at the State University of New York and Central Michigan University, where he lead or served on the teams charged with overseeing the charter application, charter renewal and school evaluation processes.
You may find this interesting from Intelligent Medicine:
What do Bill Gates, eggs, and “Soylent Green” have in common?
“Fast-forward from 1973 to 2013 and we now have multi-zillionaire Bill Gates teaming up with Silicon Valley pal Peter Thiel (the PayPal originator) to bankroll “Beyond Eggs,” a project breezily described as follows: “Why would anyone want to make an egg replacement in the first place? Beyond the ethical quandaries of the current food industry, extracting protein from meat and other animal-based products is horribly inefficient. By the time the world’s population reaches 9 billion in 2050, we’ll need better ways of making edible protein. Animal agriculture is also one of the leading contributors to climate change.”
http://drhoffman.com/article/what-do-bill-gates-eggs-and-soylent-green-have-in-common/
Bill Gates is co-funding the real Soylent Green. We may now know his future plans to get rid of poverty.
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http://www.soylent.me/
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Amazon—-if they had seen the film and realized the food source, would they have used that name?
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FLERP,
Resist smiling when you see the headline for this piece. Bill Gates is mentioned in the piece.
http://pando.com/2013/11/12/vice-investigates-soylent-finds-rats-and-mold/
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From the Beyond Meat web site:
“Meat is no mystery. It’s actually pretty simple: amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, trace minerals and water combined to give us that familiar chew, resistance, and variation. What if we are able to take these inputs from plants and apply heating, cooling, and pressure so they combine just like animal meat? And what if you define meat by what it is—amino acids, fats, carbs, minerals, and water—versus where it is from (i.e cows, chickens, pigs)? What you’d have is meat for the future. Meat from plants.”
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Is Bill Gates trying to reform the vegan food industry too, or should we send him back to the public schools starting with kindergarten? I don’t think he learned much about the world from that private school he attended.
There is already a large selection of fake meat products made from plants that vegans and vegetarians eat. Bill Gates is reinventing the wheel.
I’ve been 99.9-percent Vegan for 32 years and the No No Burger is the best vegan burger I’ve ever had. The East Bay Express even voted it the best veggie burger in the SF Bay Area
http://nonoburger.com/
Someone should tell Bill Gates to visit a Whole Foods or even a Trader Joe’s to discover all the vegetable based meat options that have been available for decades.
But then again, it makes sense that the fake-education reformers are going to reinvent fake meat and steal that business away from the originators.
Then there are restaurants like Greens (for more than 20 years) and Herbivores that even Carnivores enjoy eating at.
http://www.greensrestaurant.com/
http://www.herbivorerestaurant.com/index.html
Every Thanksgiving we eat Tofurky, and a Field Roast from the
Grain Meat Company (established in1997 in Seattle, WA). Their Field Roast is more popular with the Carnivores, and I have to admit that it does taste better than Tofurky.
http://www.tofurky.com/
http://fieldroast.com/
Being the richest man in the world must limit his ability to get out an explore the world on his own. The more I learn about Bill Gates, the more I think he is a really ignorant and foolish person.
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The sodium content listed on Soylent site makes canned soup look good.
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Good luck programming “HAL” to understand irony and hyperbole.
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It would be interesting to see how those writing improvement systems perform in lower socioeconomic populations of students.
I will grant that, for some time, there will probably be no system which can equal the effectiveness of a well qualified teacher reviewing the paper submitted.
That granted, there is substantial benefit to the student from writing multiple papers, even if there is little or no talent reviewing those completed papers.
For one anecdotal example, I would refer you to the case of Benjamin Carson, whose illiterate and unwed mother sought to have her two sons master reading, as did the wealthy individuals whose homes she cleaned for a living as a domestic worker in Detroit.
Ms. Carson walked both of her sons to the local branch of the Detroit Public Library each week on her day off from work. Each of her boys returned the two books from the prior week and checked out two new books from the reading list prepared for each by the children’s librarian at the branch library.
Each of the boys was required to prepare a book report for his mother on each book checked out from the library.
Although Ms. Carson was illiterate, a fact not realized initially by her sons, the discipline of writing so many papers improved the critical thinking ability of the boys to the point that they excelled in school and were granted scholarships at outstanding schools based upon their scholastic abilities.
Dr. Benjamin Carson recently retired as Director of the Pediatric Neurosurgery Department of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and is considered the consensus top pediatric neurosurgeon in the field.
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My wife and I did something similar with our daughter (my step daughter). Starting before our daughter was five, her mother drove her to the library each week and this went on for years.
Then, when she reached high school, I started to have her write essays at home, using the SAT essay prompts that I found on-line. I then used a red ink pen as I analyzed her essays in depth with notes on where she could improve. She wrote more than 50 essays and rewrote them until there were no more needs for improvement. Some essays, she revised several times.
We still have them in a folder. We had a deal. When I could find little to nothing that needed improvement in her first draft, she could stop with the parent assigned essays at home.
The College Board publishes these prompts on their site after they have been used each year.
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/testing/sat-reasoning/prep/essay-prompts
Those home assigned essays came to an end in her junior year. She graduated from HS with a 4.65 GPA, was accepted to Standford where she graduated this last June and started her first, full-time, well-paid job in the medical field this August.
She also enjoys reading real books. We used to compete to see who read the Harry Potter books faster. I’d buy a copy from Costco, and she would hijack it when I wasn’t looking, and then I had to wait. The TV was left off in our home except for about two hours when we watched it as a family on the weekend. Her primary entertainment at home was to read books, and she read many by the time she graduated from high school.
A high level of literacy is more important than grit, than self-esteem; then anything the CCSS tests for. A child who graduates from high school with a high level of literacy will always be a life-long learner and learn how to think for themselves. It doesn’t matter what classes they take before the age of 18. And parents can play a part in helping their child select books that will not only entertain but teach.
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Two of the prominent collateral damage victims of No Child Left Behind were a ) the gifted minority students and b ) students learning to develop essays.
I suggest that there are precious few careers in this modern world in which proficiency in filling bubble answer sheets creates either competitive advantage or customer satisfaction.
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Diane, Greetings from Gate’s home state.
Gates is pushing Universal Pre-K that is aligned to 3rd grade. We’re essentially looking at Common Core for PreK students and there are plenty of products to support his. Do you have any information on this?
It is also interesting to note that the city of Seattle is working with Acelero . Acelero is a for- profit organization to reorganize Head Start…moving in the prek-3 alignment. Lieberman is also behind Acelero.
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NY State has Common-Core “aligned” standards for Pre-K.
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continued…..Gates is behind Seattle’s prek-3rd grade alignment.
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This is kind of like saying, you can become a great baseball player by facing pitching machines to hit the ball hard(Wanna see how a 187/mph fastball looks like at the plate?)–instead of real pitchers on the mound.
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call me skeptical, but I need to see better ‘evidence” than claimed results from a ‘bakeoff competition” commissioned by standardized testing companies and the Hewlett foundation (run by the computer magnate). That’s a little like the tobacco companies saying cigarette smoking is great for your health.
Was the supposed “study” peer reviewed? :Published in a legitimate journal? have the results been replicated by others not tied to the testing industry?
the only place I could find that ‘Automated Student Assessment Prize Phase One and Phase Two: A Case Study to Promote Focused Innovation in Student Writing Assessment” “paper” was on the “gettingsmart” site
This smells a lot like marketing hype.
You have to be very careful because some in the computer industry have been using such hype for a very long time (going back to the very earliest claims about artificial intelligence)
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The perfect conveyance of information through language, or like music, is writing something more? How to grade music or art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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For the common core technical writing of argument and evidence and computer grading, why write at all? Just have bullet point lists.
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Call me when they have a computer that can grade a wine, and, buyers are deferring to its judgment.
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What do you think would happen if the teachers at Bill Gates’ kids’ expensive private school no longer graded essays, and instead turned the job over to Gates’ software? Would Bill and Melinda be okay with that?
“No, that’s not for my kids’ education. That’s only for OTHER kids’ education.”
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Bill & Melinda Gates–LEAVE.OUR.KIDS.ALONE. Go fund a vaccine for ebola, and pay for inoculating every man, woman and child in every country on earth. At the same time, fund research for those medical practitioners seeking the cure.
STOP MEDDLING IN U.S. EDUCATION!
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I wonder if ol what’s her name Eva. . . ‘s schools will still grade their own students’ standardized test.
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