Anthony Cody just published a book about his efforts to educate Bill Gates. The book is called “The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges Bill Gates.” Please buy it and read it.
Bill Gates has used his billions to impose his ideas, despite his total lack of experience as a teacher or student or parent in the nation’s public schools. He surrounds himself with people who obviously never say no to him, never tell him his ideas are wacky and harmful.
Anthony Cody set himself the mission of explaining to Bill Gates why his ideas were wrong and what he should do instead. Cody even got the Foundation to engage in a dialogue with him.
I was honored to write the preface to my friend Anthony’s book.
This is what I wrote:
Anthony Cody is a teacher. For Cody, teaching is not just a job. It is his profession. It is his way of life. It is the place where his brain, his life experience, and his heart are joined. Having spent eighteen years as a middle-school science teacher in Oakland, California, having achieved National Board Certification while teaching in one of the nation’s toughest urban districts, Cody embraces teaching as his mission in life. He now coaches teachers, mentors teachers, and tries to instill in them the love and spirit that animated his own teaching.
When Cody began blogging on a regular basis in Education Week, he called his blog “Living in Dialogue,” which was an acknowledgement that truth is elusive and that there are usually at least two sides to every argument. Each column ends with pointed questions, inviting readers to agree or disagree with him, not to accept whatever he wrote as authoritative. He writes in the spirit of the science that he taught, with an informed mind, but with a skeptical bent, encouraging readers to question him and to question their own beliefs.
As a regular blogger, one with a particular interest in the teaching profession, it was only a matter of time until he began taking on the myriad of interest groups that are now seeking to undermine and destroy his beloved profession. He developed a large following, as he sharpened his ideas and his aims. In time, he recognized that the most powerful force in opposition to his own ideas about teaching was the Gates Foundation.
With his blog as his platform, he trained his sights on the Gates Foundation. While others feared to criticize the richest foundation in the United States, Cody regularly devoted blogs to questioning its ideas and programs. He questioned its focus on standardized testing. He questioned its belief that teachers should be judged by the test scores of their students. He questioned its support for organizations that are anti-union and anti-teacher. He questioned its decision to create new organizations of young teachers to act as a fifth column within teachers’ unions, ready to testify in legislative hearings against the interests of teachers and unions.
Perhaps because of his persistence, perhaps because of his earnest tone, perhaps because of his experience, Anthony Cody managed to get the attention of the Gates Foundation. The Foundation agreed to engage in a written debate with Cody. At the time, some of his admirers wondered whether the Gates Foundation would find a way to buy off or mollify or silence one of its most outspoken critics. But they underestimated Cody.
He exchanged several blogs with high-level members of the Gates Foundation, and his blogs were incisive, carefully documented, and fearless. The main point that he made—drawing on his own experience in Oakland as a classroom teacher but also on external and unimpeachable data—is that poverty is the greatest handicap to the academic performance of students today, not “bad teachers.” He knew that the Gates Foundation had helped to fund the anti-teacher propaganda film “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” and he saw the hand of the Foundation in almost every effort to reduce the status of the teaching profession and to replace it with scripts, standardized testing, and technology.
This book is a record of Anthony Cody’s valiant struggle to force the nation’s most powerful foundation and richest person to listen to the voice of an experienced teacher. Did Cody succeed? It is hard to know. Even as Cody was debating the Gates Foundation, it was spending billions of dollars to develop and implement the Common Core standards, which was yet another attempt to “teacher-proof” America’s classrooms. Cody knows that past efforts at “teacher-proofing” the schools were never successful. He knows that good schools depend on teachers who are well prepared, devoted to improving their craft, and devoted to their students.
There is no replacement for well-prepared teachers or for a school where collaboration—not competition—is the norm. Cody also understands that teachers alone—no matter how good or great they are—and schools alone—no matter how good or great they are—cannot overcome the handicaps imposed on children, families and communities by inequality, poverty, and segregation. This is his message to the oligarch who runs the Gates Foundation: Will he listen?
Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The Educator and the Oligarch”
Educator and Oligarch
David and Goliath
Latter’s stumbling in the dark
And former doth defyeth
“Courting Bill Gates”
If Gates were made to pay
For every teacher fired
He’d have a lousy day
In court he would be mired
Susan Schwartz sent this comment but WordPress didn’t post it.
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I have been reading Cody’s column for a decade. He knows teachers, but more important he understands LEARNING, and he sees the anti-learning curricula for what it is…the end of the professional teacher-practioner in the schools… Read this book. As Diane says and I agree: “There is no replacement for well-prepared teachers or for a school where collaboration–not competition–is the norm. Cody also understands that teachers alone–no matter how good or great they are–and schools alone–no matter how good or great they are–cannot overcome the handicaps imposed on children, families and communities by inequality, poverty, and segregation. This is his message to the oligarch who runs the Gates Foundation: Will he listen?”
Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse.
How does one communicate the enormity and urgency of learning about the compelling need of the ed reformers to fatally compromise the integrity of American public school education? As progressive educators, we ‘get it’, understand it and are appropriately enraged at the corporate take over of public education. What remains is communication our passion and outrage to the general public, non educators, . People who are not particularly interested or knowledgeable about the issues at hand. I look at Cody’s work, Ravitch’s work, Scneider’s work. How can their work and our knowledge extend beyond the confines of our own community. A’liberal’ friend of mine read Diane’s intro to Hebert’s book. All he could say was he did not see a “conspiracy” or “nefarious plot” on the part of Gates and his foundation. I attempted to draw him away from his inappropriate adjectives and to take a close look at what is going on. I referred to Diane’s and Merecedes Schneider’s works. I think we have to begin having these types of conversations with our non education friends. It will be the only way to extend lay awareness of the dangers of ed reform. My firend has two young kids and lives in Boston. I must ask him what he and his spouse plan to do about their kids education. Quick and dirty: move out of Boston, or enroll their kids in a charter school. Perhaps, just maybe, I can get him to look more deeply, with open eyes at the situation that faces public schools.
We need to get beyond the discussion of whether or not Gates is well intentioned or “nefarious.” There are several key questions I interrogate in my book, including the reform vision the Gates Foundation has brought to our schools, as well as the pivotal role philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation are playing in driving public policy.
So long as we are discussing Gates’ intentions, we are missing the point. Gates and his allies in the Walton and Broad foundations, along with profit-making entrepreneurs, are dismantling public schools brick by brick. I will leave it to St. Peter to decide if they deserve a celestial harp. I am focused on the very earthly consequences of the agenda they have used their billions to bring to the fore.
When we look closely at Gates’ approach, it falls apart as a coherent, effective strategy for advancing equitable outcomes for children. Far more effective strategies are available, and it is time we embraced them.
Anthony. You find no objection from me. You make a fine point re the issue of ‘intent’ and what is occurring in the public schools I have recommend books by your, Diane and Mercedes. If skeptics don’t understand both the objective and subjective conditions at play, perhaps they can’t be educated. Thanks for your response..
Dr.ravitch says there is no replacement for well prepared teachers. I agree. Do the schools of education create well prepared teachers? Do districts hire well prepared teachers? Those are the next questions to ask.
What makes a great teacher…Education, experience, College Degree? Reality is none of those have much of an impact on it. Long before colleges and universities created a monopoly on teaching teachers were appointed by the town. Our nation was developed on the backs on the one room school house. Some of those teacher were great and some should have never been hired. And long before that parent have always and will always serve as teachers and educators during the most important years of a child’s education; and that is backed up by indisputable data.
Things like cooperative learning and guided discovery were used in other industries long before being adopted by our schools. Which would seem to indicate that key processes in education have been created outside the industry by people who “have a total lack of experience as a teachers or students or parents in the nation’s public schools”.
From the international ranking of countries educational success based on student scores show that inequalities in school spending have a marginal impact on those scores. The book also ignores the fact that virtually every school in America is owned by a corporation, over seen, for the most part, by people with no teaching experience. Yes, you read that correctly. So once you cut through the blame game, once you look past the monopoly and once you exam the data there is not much left, if any thing, to the argument which leaves this reader asking, “What is really the issue”?
Calling Oakland one of the “toughest urban school districts” is insulting. I live down the street from Mr. Cody’s school; my friends and neighbors send their children there. What does it mean to call a school “tough?’ Is that because the children aren’t white….or what?
“The House that Bill Built”
Billy an’ errs
And Common Cores
Rickety stairs
And creaky floors
Leaky roofs
And shaky stoops
That’s the house that Bill built
Flooded basements
Cracked foundations
Broken casements
And termite nations
Sagging beams
And cracking seams
That’s the house that Bill built
Failing kids
And firing teachers
Fixing bids
And charter leechers
Uniform sizing
And capitalizing
That’s the house that Bill built
Michelle,
No insult was to Oakland was intended. I lived in Oakland for many years myself. Oakland struggles with poverty and a high level of unemployment. That makes for tough conditions in many of the schools. The schools are underfunded and understaffed, teachers are underpaid, and poverty directly impinges on education. To recognize that is not an insult to the community. It is simply a reality — and one that should be changed.